Watch Cara Delevingne play Sweet Home Alabama behind her head on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

You might recognise Cara Delevingne from being in movies such as Suicide Squad and TV shows such as Carnival Row, or, indeed, her face being emblazoned on pretty much any billboard fashion advert between 2012 and 2015.

But even though Delevingne enjoys a nigh-on ubiquitous presence in pop-culture, she never gets that many props for her skills as a musician – despite singing, playing the drums and the guitar. 

Maybe after playing Sweet Home Alabama on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, all this will change. 

Fallon pulled a 1962 Epiphone Crestwood Custom (thought it could be an Outfit reissue, let's be real) up from behind his desk and exposed her six-string skills to the world. Not only was she going to play Lynyrd Skynyrd classic Sweet Home Alabama, she was to play it behind her head, Hendrix-style.

"I like to show off, apparently!" laughed Delevingne. "I am into musical instruments. It is always fun to them the way other people don’t, because you get taught how to do things and I like to do them unconventionally. But that’s something that I had seen before, and thought, ‘Oh, I want to try that.’ And it’s actually not that hard. It is hard, but I learnt when I was young.”

This is not the first time she has performed this trick on TV. In 2016, she guested on Spanish talk show El hormiguero to talk about her bigscreen debut, Paper Towns, and performed Sweet Home Alabama, behind her head on an acoustic. 

Jonathan Horsley

Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars and guitar culture since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to MusicRadar, Total Guitar and Guitar World. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.

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