Most truly great rock or pop songs have a killer hook – and the best guitar riffs of all time have fuelled many of them.
A guitar riff is essentially a repeated sequence of notes or chords, but a really great one can elevate a good song into something that transcends time. It’s not always about virtuosity, either; a great riff can be very simple, but if it’s catchy and accessible enough it can speak volumes and truly stir the soul. So, in tribute to the six-string heroes who have changed the course of rock and pop music, we throw some shapes to the 20 best guitar riffs of all time.
, was chock-full of radio-friendly punk-pop anthems, and frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s neat guitar riffs played a major role in the record’s success. One of its numerous highlights, When I Come Around, followed the group’s previous US No.1s, Longview and Basket Case, to the top of the US charts, and it arguably featured Armstrong’s sharpest, hookiest riff of all. Indeed, the idea that the song is powered by one of rock’s best guitar riffs is further reinforced when you discover that When I Come Around remained Green Day’s highest-charting radio single until Boulevard Of Broken Dreams finally swiped its crown a whole decade later.
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Remarkably, Eddie Van Halen wrote Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love as a pastiche. Indeed, he didn’t even consider it good enough to show his bandmates until a year after the wrote it, and confessed that it was supposed to be a punk-rock parody – “a stupid thing to us, just two chords. It didn’t end up sounding punk, but that was the intention.”
Appearing on Van Halen’s debut album, the song’s famous riff inspired wannabe guitar shredders the world over, as it had a harder, punkier edge than anything most other mainstream rock acts were making at the time. The fact that hip-hop artists such as Tone Lōc and 2 Live Crew have since sampled it, while bands as diverse as The Minutemen and Mighty Mighty Bosstones have covered the song, reinforces the fact Eddie Van Halen did something truly revolutionary with Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love – even if it was more by accident than design.
Arguably Cream’s signature hit, Sunshine Of Your Love provided the brilliant but short-lived rock supergroup with a significant breakthrough in the US when it climbed to No.5 on the
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Hot 100. The band discovered the inspiration for the song’s famously sinewy lead line much closer to home, however, as it derived from a bass riff Jack Bruce worked up after being blown away by a Jimi Hendrix Experience show at London’s Saville Theatre in January 1967. Ginger Baker then came up with his distinctive tom-tom rhythm and Eric Clapton added the song’s legendary riff, which uses a pentatonic scale with an added flattened fifth note – or a common blues scale, in layman’s terms.
Though written by Joy Division and featuring lyrics penned by Ian Curtis, Ceremony wasn’t recorded properly until the band had morphed into New Order following Curtis’ death, in May 1980. Musically, this melancholic anthem was something of a tour de force, with Stephen Morris’ spinning drums and a classic Peter Hook bassline underpinning Bernard Sumner’s strident chording as the track kicked into gear. However, it’s the majestic guitar figure Sumner pulls out during the song’s dropdown, and then returns to during its fade ,which sounds right at home among the best guitar riffs of all time.
Harnessing the power of repetition a good decade or so before it became Mark E Smith’s musical manifesto, The Stooges’ self-titled debut album and its visceral follow-up,
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, were liberally stuffed with brilliantly bludgeoning rock songs, most of which zoned in on caning a single riff to within millimetres of its life for the duration of four minutes. Effectively drawing up the template for punk, The Stooges’ apogee, I Wanna Be Your Dog, was fashioned around guitarist Ron Asheton’s three-chord riff (G, F#, E – repeat ad infinitum), and its primal power still startles today.
– enshrined their legend at home in the UK, but they achieved more significant success in the US when they pursued a harder, alt-rock sound on their self-titled fifth album. One of its landmark tracks, Song 2, was intended as an exercise in disposability, yet ironically it’s endured as one of the best Blur songs of the era, and still sounds fresh today. One of the reasons for that is guitarist Graham Coxon’s contribution, with his monster riffing proving essential to the track’s success. “The original chant was actually a wolf whistle, ” Coxon told Record Collector in 2012. “But obviously we made such a fucking row you couldn’t hear it, so we ‘wah-hooed’ it instead. We thrashed it out and I put loads of [guitar] pedals on it.”
, helped establish post-punk even while punk itself was still in the ascendency. Though angular and otherworldly, it flaunted a virtuosity that went against the grain of the times, with twin lead guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd playing off each other with spectacular results. As the likes of See No Evil, Friction and Prove It revealed, Television were also riff-masters par excellence, with See No Evil’s churning, cyclical figure enthusiastically nominating itself for a spot among rock’s best guitar riffs.
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In effect the riff that launched a generation, Kurt Cobain’s famous intro to Nirvana’s signature hit reflected his love of influential US alt-rock outfit Pixies and their use of dynamics. “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song, ” Cobain told
’s David Fricke. “I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band – or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”
In the same February 1994 interview, Cobain also noted that the song’s main riff resembled that of Boston’s 1976 hit, More Than A Feeling, though it wasn’t identical – or intentional. Cobain said: “It was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie.”
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If there’s one hard-rock band that’s specialised in classic riffs for half a century, surely it’s AC/DC, who have been named “the riffiest of the lot” by Classic Rock magazine. However, if we have to choose just one monolithic moment to stand among the best guitar riffs of all time, then it simply has to be the one powering their 1980 hit Back In Black. Magnificent in its sheer simplicity, it’s become part of the very fabric of rock music and, as Louder said in 2020, “It’s a metal song that appeals to everybody, from dads to dudes, to little old ladies beating noisy kids over the heads with their sticks – and it all hangs on that monumental, no-nonsense, three-chord monster of a riff.”
Rather like AC/DC, Black Sabbath demand inclusion in any self-respecting list of the best guitar riffs. In the same way that AC/DC’s Young brothers devised countless classic-rock standouts, Black Sabbath guitarist Tommy Iommi is responsible for numerous metal motifs, among them War Pigs,
Originally named so because Ozzy Osbourne thought it sounded like “a big iron bloke walking around”, Iommi’s riff emerged when he began playing off a beat that Sabbath drummer Bill Ward hit upon in rehearsals.
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“Most of the riffs I’ve done I’ve come up with on the spot, and that was one of them – it just came up, ” Iommi later told
Magazine. “It went with the drum, what Bill was playing. I just saw this thing in my mind of someone creeping up on you, and it just sounded like the riff. In my head I could hear it as a monster, so I came up with that riff there and then.”
John Lennon based Day Tripper’s nagging guitar riff on US R&B artist Bobby Parker’s snappy 1961 single Watch Your Step, which had already provided the inspiration for The Beatles’ 1964 hit, I Feel Fine. A two-bar, single-chord affair, Lennon’s cyclical riff was crucial to Day Tripper’s overall shape, as its catchy motif opens and closes the song, and forms the basis of the verses. Day Tripper was written during the initial sessions for The Beatles’ sixth album,
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, but while it came out bearing the usual Lennon-McCartney credit, Lennon later told writer David Sheff, “That’s mine. Including the lick, the guitar break and the whole bit.”
Arguably Chic’s signature song, Good Times is a landmark track for a whole host of reasons. A US chart-topping sensation at the height of disco mania, it was named as
’s No.1 soul single of 1979 and, with sales of over five million copies, is believed to be the biggest-selling single in Atlantic Records’ history. Nile Rodgers’ super-cool, funky riff is one of the key elements of this sophisticated and irresistibly positive dancefloor anthem which has since enjoyed a remarkable afterlife by becoming one of the most-sampled tunes in
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