“He had a kind of caveman instinct”: Was David Bowie a good guitar player? Adrian Belew, Peter Frampton and more weigh in

As a songwriter, David Bowie’s legendary status is undisputed. But what was he like as a guitar player?

The chameleonic rock icon produced 26 solo albums during his lifetime, with one posthumous album following in 2021. Over the course of his prolific career, he partnered with a number of incredible guitar players, who often took on the lion's share of six-string duties.

Bowie could play guitar, and wasn’t opposed to strumming an acoustic or electric guitar on stage – especially early into his career – so what did the stars he worked with make of his playing?

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“This is an interesting thing,” Adrian Belew – who featured on Lodger, the live album Stage, and later served as his musical director on the 1990 Sound+Vision tour – tells Guitar World when asked exactly that. “All the time I worked with David, I actually never saw him play much of anything. Not piano, not guitar. He must have done it privately.”

Thankfully, come the early 2000s, Bowie was a little less cloak-and-dagger with his playing, as Gerry Leonard recalls.

“David wasn’t virtuosic or anything like that. He didn’t have any aspirations in those ways,” he notes. “He had a kind of caveman instinct with the guitar of what he wanted to do in a broad sense.

“For instance, when we did The Next Day [2013], he’d say, almost apologetically, ‘Do you mind playing this part?’ And he’d play me a part from the demo, which was a stabbing chord or something like that. It was great, so raw and punk rock. He’d say, ‘Take it and do what you want with it,’ so sometimes I would modify it, but I would always be very careful to try and keep the intention.”

Bowie, then, perhaps knew his craft – it was raw and emotive rather than technical and virtuosic – and so he entrusted his foils to bring some nuance to his parts.

“He had good instincts,” Leonard says. “He could write on the guitar, and he could play a mean riff, too.”

Speaking of riffs, Peter Frampton, who played on 1987’s Never Let Me Down, had an interesting story to tell.

“David played the riff on Rebel Rebel, so we know he was a great guitarist,” he nods. “But I think he used guitar and keyboard to write.”

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Mark Plati worked with Bowie in the 1990s and believes once his band pivoted to having two guitar players “he became more of a frontperson”, but he had chops to embolden his creative process.

Expanding on that, Carlos Alomar, who was Bowie’s most-used guitarist in the studio, said: “Bowie, like John Lennon, was a great rhythm, acoustic guitar player. Basically, they played triads, and they could play chords, but they couldn’t play chords and bass lines together in opposition. It’s what we call metronome playing. They could keep the rhythm down for the whole song.”

As Frampton says, the guitar, for Bowie, became a vehicle to create, and he could lead his cavalry with real class, but when he needed a little, he knew he wasn’t the man for the job.

The full interview with Bowie’s rich lineage of guitarists is the cover story in the latest issue of Guitar World. Copies can be ordered from Magazines Direct.