BOWIE WEEK: Diamond Dogs

"And in the death,
as the last few corpses lay rotting
on the slimy thoroughfare
The shutters lifted in inches
In temperance building, high on poacher's hill,
And red mutant eyes gaze down on hunger city..."

These are the quite frankly spooky words used to introduce David Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs, spoken over a backdrop of ghoulish screaming and science fiction-horror soundtrack. It's a perfect way to introduce a record which was conceived as the glam rock musical version of George Orwell's futuristic nightmare, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Bowie had been writing the stage play until Orwell's widow refused him permission to do so, which in turn forced the singer to adapt his production into an entirely new fantasy, set in Hunger City. Bowie's alternative vision of a totalitarian future loosely concerns a teenage gang living on the top of a decayed skyscraper, led by 'Halloween Jack'. The elevators are broke so they "slide down the ropes" to the city below, where rival gangs include the Diamond Dogs - stooges of the totalitarian government, who are described spookily as "Mannequins with kill appeal".



In a 1981 interview with Charles Shaar Murray, Bowie likened the kids of Hunger City to the punk movement; they were "roller-skating, vicious hoods, with Bowie knives and furs on, and they were all skinny because they hadn't eaten enough, and they all had funny-coloured hair."

Whether or not Diamond Dogs foretold the future, it's clear that Nineteen Eighty Four wasn't the only influence it took from the past. William Burroughs met the singer in 1974 for a duel interview for Rolling Stone in early 1974, during which Bowie wore a knitted Clockwork Orange t-shirt.

What's more, during the interview the conversation briefly turned to Burroughs' novel The Wild Boys - in which a gang of teenage boys use guerrilla warfare against the agents of a totalitarian government. It's inevitable that elements of Burroughs' fiction found their way into Bowie's new fantasy, although the one thing we can say with certainty is that Burroughs' experimental working practice of cutting words from magazines then randomly re-arranging them (the 'cut-up' technique) was adopted by Bowie for large sections of the lyrics.

Musically, Diamond Dogs continues the glam rock of the Ziggy Stardust era, albeit with a stronger whiff of gloom and more ambitious compositions. Three songs in the center of the record can count amongst his finest ever work: 'Sweet Thing', 'Candidate' and 'Sweet Thing Reprise' flow together as a single piece, a darkly dramatic but exhilarating movement of rock theatre. Elsewhere we get the single 'Rebel Rebel' - soon to be a favourite at Rodney's English Disco - and the awesome finale 'Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family', a self-repeating voodoo hymn which hints at Bowie's occult interests.

Despite having officially 'killed off' the Ziggy Stardust character the year before, it would be the Diamond Dogs tour which would sign off Bowie's glam years, as the album's songs became unfortunately moulded into funk numbers, signaling the singer's ch-ch-change into the plastic soul era.

BOWIE WEEK CONTINUES
TOMORROW: FILM FESTIVAL + NEW ALBUM & TOPICAL ARTICLES