There was no way for fans to know that the ostensibly suicidal Starman was on the cusp of a remarkably stable four-decade career. There was no guarantee that Bowie wouldn’t enter the ‘80s increasingly aged and jowly, still vainly squeezing into Lurex catsuits to play his greatest hits, like so many other glam performers.
Diamond Dogs is a sprawling, asymmetrical album that makes The Wall look compact by comparison. Combining the funk and “plastic” soul sounds that would flower in Young Americans with stray pages from an aborted stage adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, Diamond Dogs has Bowie stepping out of Ziggy Stardust’s platform heels and into the unknown.
As anyone over age 13 can affirm, growth and transformation are awkward for everyone involved. Critics in 1974 were not charmed by Bowie’s ch-ch-changing sound: Rolling Stone dismissed the album as a collection of “obscure tangles of perversion, degradation, fear and self-pity” and wondered if Bowie’s career hadn’t been irreparably damaged.
Tangled? Certainly. Diamond Dogs is a hybrid creation, striding out of the glam scene, one foot on either side of the boundary. At one extreme is ‘Rebel Rebel’, Bowie’s most covered track, recorded in classically strident, angular Ziggy Stardust style. This is unmixed glitter, and could fit neatly between ‘Queen Bitch’ and ‘Suffragette City’ on a mixtape. On the far side is ‘We Are the Dead’, a wandering, bombastic elegy adapted from Orwell and selected for particular scorn by contemporary reviewers.
Bowie appears on the cover of Diamond Dogs in an illustration by Guy Peellaert, wearing Ziggy Stardust’s teased-out red space-mullet and with the lower body of a dog – literally, as a hybrid being. Bowie’s doggie reproductive parts were airbrushed out of most releases, and anatomically correct editions of the album currently float around eBay at premium prices.
Bowie’s 1984 has to join Jodorowsky’s Dune and Kubrick’s Napoleon as one of the most tantalising adaptations never made. The sheer illogicality of expressing Orwell’s grey hell through sax solos and slinky rhythm guitar is self-evident. The track ‘1984’, in particular, sounds like a lost tune from the soundtrack of Blacula, and it’s not difficult to imagine why Sonia Brownell, Orwell’s widow, withheld the rights to a stage adaptation.
Along with ‘We are the Dead’, ‘Sweet Thing/Candidate’ is a standout on the Orwellian side of the album. Taking the raw constituents of funk, Bowie builds a plaintive, meandering tune out of saxes and supple guitar riffs. Opener ‘Future Legend’ is an indelibly memorable, playlist-unfriendly spoken word piece describing a hellish city populated by monstrous beasts and bestial humans. The lush, warm sonics of ‘Big Brother’, the penultimate track, offer a comfortable break from the preceding apocalyptic tone. It’s not difficult to find yourself loving ‘Big Brother’, which is probably the point.
As well as his first moment of public skin-shedding, Diamond Dogs is perhaps Bowie’s most recognisably literary album. Big Brother and Winston Smith are familiar to many but, elsewhere in Bowie’s discography, bookish influences remain mostly submerged. Non-specialists can’t be faulted for failing to discern the fingerprints of Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or that, when Bowie sings that children are “the start of a coming race,” he’s not speaking generically, but is referring to an 1871 novel about a master race of lizard people living at the centre of the Earth. On Diamond Dogs, for a moment, the literary fragments were allowed to rise to the surface.
Today, critics have mostly revised their opinions of Diamond Dogs, though Rolling Stone bucked peer pressure by awarding the 2004 reissue two stars out of five. This record is a butterfly half out of its chrysalis – not as balanced, sleek or self-unified as the caterpillar, but caught in a moment of rebirth necessary to evade stagnation decay. In hindsight, Diamond Dogs snapshots the moment David Bowie ceased to be a future has-been.
