FEATURE:
Second Spin
David Bowie – Diamond Dogs
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THERE are a couple of reasons…
IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie in 1974/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O’Neill
why I am spotlighting David Bowie’s eighth studio album, Diamond Dogs. It is one of his more underrated releases. Prior to his Berlin Trilogy and the introduction of the remarkable Station to Station in 1976, there was this run of albums that had mixed reviews and were vastly different to one another. 1975’s Young Americans is a great album, though it is another not considered among his best. I have seen some mixed reception to it. A year prior to Diamond Dogs, Bowie released the covers album, Pin Ups. It is interesting in places but not essential. Bowie also released the hugely acclaimed and iconic Aladdin Sane in 1973. Wanted to ditch that persona and reinvent himself Diamond Dogs isn’t necessarily a moment of identity crisis. It was another evolution and revolution from Bowie, though it is not an album one can compare alongside, say, Hunky Dory or even Low. I think that Diamond Dogs is more worthy and impressive than many critics have given it credit for. Also, on 24th May, Diamond Dogs turns fifty. It is always important to recognise Bowie’s albums on big anniversaries. I want to spend some time with Diamond Dogs. I would suggest Bowie fans grab a copy of Diamond Dogs:
“After George Orwell's widow refused Bowie the right to use 1984 as the title of his forthcoming album, he instead used the novel as a conceptual blueprint for what became Diamond Dogs. Accompanied only by keyboardist Mike Garson, bassist Herbie Flowers, and drummers Aynsley Dunbar and Tony Newman, Bowie played guitar, sax, moog, and mellotron, in addition to his contributions as vocalist, composer, arranger, and producer of the album. With the Orwellian themes as a loose backdrop, Diamond Dogs has much of the apocalyptic sense of future shock that informed Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. While the album doesn't have the musical punch or the songwriting strengths of Ziggy, its gems make it more than worthwhile. the lush strings and dominant wah-wah guitar of 1984 seem like a nod to Isaac Hayes, while Bowie's howls and snarling sax on the title track make it instantly memorable. The glam rock classic Rebel Rebel, with its edgy guitar riff and strutting 4/4 beat, is the disc's highlight, and one of Bowie's all-time great songs. amidst the imagery of a gray, totalitarian future, Bowie injected some optimism by including the nostalgic Rock 'n' Roll With Me, a good time, rootsy number that presaged his next transformation into the blue-eyed soul singer of Young Americans”.
It is lucky we are in a position to knowingly celebrate fifty years of Diamond Dogs. For years, the exact release date of the album was debated. Some claimed it was 24th April, 1974; others 31st May 1974. David Bowie’s own website set the date as 24th May, 1974 in 2014. Diamond Dogs was given a $400,000 promotional campaign in America. This included huge billboards in Times Square and Sunset Boulevard, subway posters, adverts in the press, and a made-for-television promo clip. It was a huge event. So much expectation around the album. Diamond Dogs, whilst not as critically acclaimed as some of his album, was a big commercial success. It topped the album charts in the U.K. and reached five in the U.S. It was Bowie’s highest placing in the U.S. at that point. I am going to finish with two positive reviews for Diamond Dogs. I am going to get to a couple of features in a minute. Before that, as the album has divided opinion, this Wikipedia article about retrospective acclaim is interesting. How it still does not unite critics:
“Retrospective appraisals have been mixed. AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine said that, because Bowie did not completely retire the character of Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs suffers from him being unsure how to move forward. Although he praised "Rebel Rebel", he further criticised the exclusion of Ronson and ultimately concluded "it is the first record since Space Oddity where Bowie's reach exceeds his grasp". Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune gave the album a mixed review, calling it "an overproduced concept album inspired by Orwell's 1984". Eduardo Rivadavia was also mixed in Ultimate Classic Rock, questioning the presence of Ziggy, whom Bowie supposedly retired the year before. Despite the album's commercial success, Rivadavia concluded: "with decades of hindsight, Diamond Dogs now seems more like the gateway from the Ziggy Stardust era to his Thin White Duke blue-eyed soul period, and beyond".
The record has attracted positive reviews. Pitchfork's Barry Walters described the album as "a bummer, a bad trip, 'No Fun' – a sustained work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration". He also believed it foreshadowed Bowie's Thin White Duke persona. For punknews.org, C. M. Crockford wrote that Diamonds Dogs is Bowie's "utterly most distinctive work: melodramatic, raw, challenging, and ambitious even when crammed with catchy songs". Crockford ultimately called it one of Bowie's essential releases and argued that he would "never make an album that was so obviously his own again". In a 2013 readers' poll for Rolling Stone, Diamond Dogs was voted Bowie's fifth-greatest album.
In subsequent decades, Bowie biographers have described Diamond Dogs as one of Bowie's greatest works. Cann writes: "Diamond Dogs is arguably [Bowie's] most significant album, a pivotal work and the most 'solo' album he has ever made." Although Spitz calls it "no fun", he states it was Bowie's "best-sounding, most complex record to date, and it still pulls you into its romantic and doomed world three and a half decades on". Trynka calls it "a beautiful mess", while Buckley says the album proved that Bowie could still produce work of "real quality" without Scott or the Spiders. Doggett writes it anticipated the "sonic audacity" of Low and "Heroes", while it simultaneously "capsized the vessel of classic rock". Perone argues that "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" predated Talking Heads' exploration of African rhythms and experimentation in the late 1970s. Pegg writes that with tracks like "We Are the Dead", "Big Brother" and the "Sweet Thing" suite, the album contains "some of the most sublime and remarkable sounds in the annals of rock music". He further states that Bowie's new voice on the record, a "basso profundo", particularly evident on "Sweet Thing" and "Big Brother", was a major influence on gothic rock bands in the 1980s. It ranked number 447 in NME's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
In fact, I am going to concentrate on one feature rather than two. I would also recommend people check out this feature from The Quietus. Their 2016 feature is fascinating and makes some really interesting observations. I have edited sections out of this one. Louder’s 2022 feature is remarkable in its detail. They talk about how Diamond Dogs is when David Bowie shed his Glam Rock skin. He then embarked on this expensive and dangerous tour. It was a turbulent time for him:
“Released in the summer of 1974, Diamond Dogs found David Bowie navigating the dog days of the glam-rock era – a hot and sultry period before the cultural weather broke. Having surfed and defined the pop zeitgeist about as well as any individual star since Elvis Presley, he was now cresting the last stretch of a wave as it came crashing into shore.
Diamond Dogs was a resounding commercial success – No.1 in the UK, No.5 in the US. But the album was marked down at the time. “A rather grandiose mood piece… It’s okay, you know, but is it really necessary?” was the NME’s verdict. And, retrospectively, it tends to get brushed aside in the grand sweep of things as a transitional album, marking the point in Bowie’s artistic timeline at which he was shedding his glam-rock skin and stepping into his role as the ‘plastic soul’ man of his next studio album Young Americans. (NME later revised its opinion and, in 2013, rated Diamond Dogs one of “The 500 Greatest Albums of all Time” – albeit ranked at No.447, a long way behind many of his other albums.)
Bowie himself was quick to recognise the record’s limitations. “It was not a concept album,” he told Robert Hilburn in September 1974. “It was a collection of things. And I didn’t have a band. So that’s where the tension came in. I couldn’t believe I had finished it when I did. I had done so much of it myself. I never want to be in that position again. It was frightening trying to make an album with no support behind you. I was very much on my own. It was my most difficult album. It was a relief that it did so well.”
Whatever the sense of “tension”, both musically and personally, which overshadowed the making of Diamond Dogs, the album is nevertheless a remarkably pure distillation of Bowie’s genius. Indeed, if you are looking for a collection of recordings that stands as a monument to Bowie’s across-the-board prowess as a songwriter, singer, guitarist, saxophonist, keyboard player, producer and allround media maven, there is no other album in his entire catalogue that compares to Diamond Dogs. Transitional or not, it remains as true an expression of his artistry on every front as anything he ever released.
The album was recorded in London, mostly at Olympic Studios, and Hilversum in the Netherlands, between December 1973 and February 1974. Having famously disbanded the Spiders From Mars live on stage at Hammersmith Odeon the previous July, Bowie’s first challenge was to fill the guitar genius-shaped hole left in his musical life by the departure of Mick Ronson. In a defiant display of ambition and bravado, Bowie resolved to do the job himself.
“I knew that the guitar playing had to be more than okay,” he said, looking back in 1997. “That couple of months I spent putting [Diamond Dogs] together before I went into the studio was probably the only time in my life where I really buckled down to learn the stuff I needed to have on the album. I’d actually practise two hours a day.”
Having also dispensed with the services of longstanding producer Ken Scott, Bowie’s initial plan was not only to produce the album but also to play every instrument himself – perhaps reaching the point at which ambition gave way to hubris.
Wiser counsel prevailed and he found a new rhythm section comprising session bass player Herbie Flowers (the man responsible for the swooping bass line on Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side) and drummer Tony Newman (best known for his stint in the Jeff Beck Group). Pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who had both contributed to Pin Ups, the album of cover versions which Bowie had somehow slotted into his schedule and released in October 1973, were also brought in.
All sorts of grand ideas were floated in the build up to Diamond Dogs. Bowie had spoken of his intention to mount a “full-scale rock musical” re-telling the story of Ziggy Stardust. He’d also let it be known that he was planning to write and direct a musical production for TV of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of his favourite novels.
IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie captured in the studio during the recording of Diamond Dogs/PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Ochs Archives
“I’d failed to obtain the theatrical rights from George Orwell’s widow,” Bowie told the Mail On Sunday in 2008. “And having written three or more songs for it already, I did a fast about-face and recobbled the idea into Diamond Dogs: teen punks on rusty skates living on the roofs of the dystopian Hunger City; a post-apocalyptic landscape.”
And if the general fraternising that went on during the course of the sessions wasn’t enough to reinforce the connection, Bowie and his then-wife Angie (Angela Barnett) had recently moved into a grand terraced house in Chelsea where they were now near neighbours of Mick and Bianca Jagger, with whom they socialised. Indeed, according to the American singer and model Ava Cherry, who stayed in the house for a time with David and Angie, there was a lot more than socialising going on.
“Mick Jagger knew David, and I was friends with both of them,” Cherry told Bowie biographer Dylan Jones. “So all three of us used to hang out a lot, and yes we did have some fun together.”
According to Cherry, at the end of one party in New York, everyone had left apart from her, Bowie and Jagger. “So it just ended up with the three of us sleeping together. That was it. And we had a wonderful time and we had a lot of fun.”
Diamond Dogs performed disappointingly when released as a single in June 1974 (after the album was released) in the UK, where it peaked at No.21. Far more resonant and enduring as a flagship track for the album was Rebel Rebel – the song that most clearly marked both the end of an era for Bowie and the jumping off point for Diamond Dogs.
Recorded on December 27, 1973, Rebel Rebel was the first song of the sessions and the last song that Bowie recorded at Trident Studios in Soho where he had recorded the majority of his work since 1968. Released as a single in the UK in February 1974, ahead of the album, Rebel Rebel reached No.5 and remains one of Bowie’s touchstone songs.
The lyric is as pertinent today – maybe even more so – as it was almost 50 years ago: ‘You’ve got your mother in a whirl, cos she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.’ And the riff is a masterpiece: simple, original and instantly recognisable in the way that only a handful of pop-rock riffs – Sweet Jane, Jumping Jack Flash, You Really Got Me – could ever truly claim to be. Did Bowie really come up with that and play it completely off his own bat?
PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images
“He had the riff about seventy-five per cent sorted out,” recalled Alan Parker, a session guitarist credited for his contribution to one track (1984) on the album. “He wanted it a bit like a Stones riff and he played it to me as such, and I then tinkered around with it. I said: ‘Well, what if we did this and that and made it sound more clangy and put some bends in it?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, I love that, that’s fine.’”
Whatever Parker’s contribution to the sculpting and performing of the song behind the scenes, Bowie is the sole writer and guitarist listed on the credits. While Rebel Rebel and the title track echoed the triumphs of Bowie’s glam-rock past, the rest of the album offered a tantalising glimpse of the future-Bowie that was yet to fully materialise.
At the heart of Side 1 is the three-piece song suite Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise), which was originally intended to be the centrepiece for the would-be stage production of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a yearning yet chilling sequence, with lyrics rendered as a collage of bittersweet images and ideas. ‘I guess we could cruise down one more time, with you by my side it should be fine/We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band, then jump in the river holding hands.’
The sequence is notable for its intensely detailed arrangement – brought to life not least by Bowie’s contributions on saxophone and guitar. The end of the Reprise section (which runs into Rebel Rebel) has him conjuring a screeching, crunching, overdriven guitar noise that prefigured the industrial sounds that Earl Slick would later develop on Station To Station and Reeves Gabrels would take to another level on the Tin Machine albums. Bowie wrote the lyrics for these and other songs on Diamond Dogs using the ‘cut-up’ method popularised by the ‘beat’ writer and literary figurehead William Burroughs.
The comparatively jaunty music on tracks such as Rock’N’Roll With Me and Big Brother sounds like it should be part of a stage musical – as indeed it was originally intended to be. The Rocky Horror Show, which opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1973, was on the way to becoming a cult phenomenon at the time Bowie was writing the album and there was a lot of musical theatricality in the air.
IN THIS PHOTO: David Bowie and William Burroughs/PHOTO CREDIT: Terry O’Neill/Iconic Images
There was also evidence of the looming switch of musical pace and persona that Bowie would effect on his next album, Young Americans – most obviously represented in the track 1984, which took its inspiration from the wah-wah guitar and string arrangements of Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to the 1971 film Shaft.
“When we worked on the song 1984 he was already referencing Barry White,” said Ken Scott, who had produced an earlier recording of the song as part of the Aladdin Sane sessions in January 1973. “He wanted the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they would be on a Barry White album. He was already anticipating the sound of Young Americans.”
The faintly shocking, sci-fi cover artwork by the Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, featuring a picture of Bowie with his lower body transformed into that of a dog complete with genitalia (airbrushed from most versions at the time) became instantly iconic. Bowie got the idea after Mick Jagger told him that Peellaert was designing the sleeve of the forthcoming Stones album It’s Only Rock’N’Roll.
“I immediately rushed out and got Guy Peellaert to do my cover too,” Bowie admitted later. When It’s Only Rock’N’Roll was released several months after Diamond Dogs, everyone assumed the Stones had copied Bowie. “He [Jagger] never forgave me for that!” Bowie said.
“Diamond Dogs scared me because I was mutating into something I just didn’t believe in any more, and the dreadful thing was, it was so easy,” Bowie said, looking back in 2008. “The Diamond Dogs period was just an extension of Aladdin Sane, which in itself was just an extrapolation of Ziggy Stardust.
“But by the time of Diamond Dogs that persona had started to feel claustrophobic, and I needed a change… Diamond Dogs was making me sick, both physically and creatively, and I was shifting into melodrama."
I am going to conclude with a couple of reviews. Punk News shared their opinions about one of David Bowie’s most divisive albums. He was clearly at an awkward moment in his career. One where he was looking to shift his past and move on. There is something chaotic, dark and often unfocused in Diamond Dogs…yet it is an album that has many highlights and is a lot stronger than people say it is:
“Diamond Dogs is famously one of the Bowie albums that's really for fans, and it's probably his most utterly distinctive work (even Low sounds like other art-rock albums of the time): melodramatic, raw, challenging, and ambitious even when crammed with catchy songs. And as he later noted it was extremely influential on the British punk scene in sound and scope. Bowie's violent, amateruishly scraping guitar playing here would be echoed in the late-70's post-punk bands and Diamond Dogs' concept of street gangs roaming London was echoed in the gleeful nihilism of the Sex Pistols. Notably Bowie made much of the album itself, including guitar and sax, and the musicianship here is unconventional, playful, a little off-kilter (one suspects Bowie was listening to Here Come The Warm Jets closely). Diamond Dogs is the goofy, abrasive place where punk and art-rock meet, dance a little, and depart.
It was never well-recieved by critics, probably because it was such a radical departure from Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust, but Diamond Dogs took the rock-theater approach of "Rock n' Roll Suicide" and "Lady Grinning Soul" and ran with it. One of the important aspects of Bowie and the glam school was de-heteroizing rock n' roll and making it more dramatic, combining Elvis Presley with Judy Garland standards, and that's evident on the centerpiece "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)", a song cycle of vulnerability, sneering sex, curdling violence, and at the close effeminate, passionate need. It's one of Bowie's greatest works as a singer and he morphs from a crooning Sinatra to Lotte Lenya then a heartbroken Sandie Shaw. The music and lyrics here are a startling mix of dreaming piano, guitar, and mourning saxophone: "We'll buy some drugs and watch a band/Then jump in a river holding hands." Then "Rebel Rebel" follows and is there anything to say that hasn't been said? The best riff Bowie ever wrote on his own and a joyful coda to the glam rock world that would fade then emerge as the punk scene in 76/77.
The rest of the album by turns is changing constantly, veering from cheeky blues-stomp ("Diamond Dogs") to haunted showstopper ("We Are The Dead)" - more than his other work, Diamond Dogs is a reflection of Bowie's mercurial musical nature, never quite satisfied with one sound or idea, though the Curtis Mayfield-esque "1984" absolutely foreshadows the Philly sounds of Young Americans and would probably be more of a hit if it was't so gloomy and apocalyptic. "Big Brother" and the extremely fucked up "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family" sum up Diamond Dogs perfectly, poppy and dyspeptic than deeply unsettling.
As a Bowie fan I'd give this 5/5, but the music writer in me might knock off half a star- the music is not always as strong as the aspirations behind it and "Rock n' Roll With Me" is a pretty tedious soul song. But Diamond Dogs is essential for those who want to go deeper into Bowie and for amateur music historians eager to find early sources of punk. Bowie would do better albums in the future, including the masterpiece Low and the glorious Station to Station, but he'd never make an album that was so obviously his own again (Bowie is notably one of the great collaborators of pop music). When you listen to Diamond Dogs, you're immersed in a cruel, romantic, and feral world, one that at it's worst you still don't want to leave”.
The final review I am referencing is from Pitchfork. They reviewed the album in 2016. In spite of the fact they note it has dread and a bummer vibe, Diamond Dogs is also an album that is a “work of decadence and dread that transforms corrosion into celebration”:
“The last glam gasp of Bowie's English years, Dogs also sprawls toward Bowie’s forthcoming Thin White Duke persona, embracing Blaxploitation funk and soul, rock opera, European art song, and Broadway. The album cracked FM radio with "Rebel Rebel," an Iggy Pop-like blast aimed at America’s teenage wasteland. Recapitulating his earlier achievements while raising their stakes, it stomped on whatever good vibes remained in British rock, and cleared the stage for punk and goth. As Bowie noted decades later, the tribal "peoploids" that rummage through the album’s fantastically bleak Hunger City like the orphaned pickpockets of Oliver Twist presaged a generation of Johnny Rottens and Sid Viciouses. Dogs envisioned a no-future future just before the next breed of pop stars lived it.
As befitting a post-apocalyptic work, Dogs was born from the frustration of failed opportunities. Bowie initially endeavored to create a TV musical adaptation of George Orwell’s totalitarian milestone 1984—until the social critic’s widow refused permission. Around the same time, Rolling Stone’s London bureau arranged for Bowie and William S. Burroughs to interview each other, which introduced the singer to the author’s Nova Express. Immediately thereafter, Bowie began penning lyrical non sequiturs via that novel’s cut-up technique, and planned a Ziggy musical to be similarly shuffled each night. This, too, faltered, although it inspired new tunes. These two projects, sharing dystopian themes, fused together to form the mutant Dogs.
While all this was happening, Bowie shed the Spiders from Mars, who enabled his transformation from folky space oddity to eclectic, hard-rocking freak. The biggest break was with guitarist Mick Ronson, whose biting, formally schooled style and arrangements had redefined Bowie. Rather than replacing his sidekick, the singer handles most guitar parts himself, as well as contributing sax and electronic keyboards while solely producing this emphatically solo project. Tony Visconti—who oversaw 1970’s metallic The Man Who Sold the World while providing bass guitar—returns only to assist the final mix and fulfill the singer’s request for "Barry White strings" on "1984"; he’d later co-produce much of Bowie’s output. If you measure his albums by how much he calls the shots and actually plays, Diamond Dogs is the Bowie-est one of all.
He sets the scene with "Future Legend," a spoken-word intro soundtracked by synths evoking dripping Dalí clocks, buzzing bee guitars quoting "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," and other experimental studio scuzz. This slides into the bonking backward cowbell of the title track, which filters the Stones’ slam-bam boogie through a woozy mix. "As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent/ You asked for the latest party," it begins—a line Bowie later admitted as self-descriptive. Set in forthcoming years yet capturing the squalor of then-contemporary London, New York, and the Eastern Bloc nations through which Bowie recently passed, the lurid lyrics flash with gang violence: "The Diamond Dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees/ Hunt you to the ground they will/ Mannequins with kill appeal." The vibe is celebratory despite the menace, if unstable—right down to the track’s note-bending central riff. Contemporary critics mourned Ronson’s absence, but Bowie’s guitar here and throughout the album is thrillingly off-kilter with unconventional chord fragments that the Edge, Sonic Youth, shoegazers, and dream-poppers alike would draw from for decades to come.
Because Bowie so convincingly portrayed decay, it went often unacknowledged how far he advanced his compositional and arrangement skills in just a few post-"Space Oddity" years. Their showcase, "Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)" begins with Bowie growling at the bottom of his register, but even before the chorus hits, he’s wailing near the top of his tenor while Mike Garson’s tinkling jazz keys supply the sophistication Bowie’s squawking guitars deny. Topically shifting from a hustler turning tricks to a politician spewing empty promises to cocaine’s brain-freezing bliss, the suite’s interconnected segments assert that all three demand submission to all-conquering power—this concept album’s central theme. The tempo accelerates as his poetry gains density, then subsides again as the melody soars before surrendering to guitars that grind with metronomic precision until sputtering out on the root note of the opening chord on the album’s masterstroke.
As melodically constricted as that suite was expansive, "Rebel Rebel" is Bowie’s answer to all those deliciously dumb Sweet, Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, and T. Rex hits he indirectly enabled during glam’s peak. Androgyny is subtext to these acts, but the main man, per usual, pushes it to the forefront: "You’ve got yer mother in a whirl/ She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl," goes the opening line, but he never definitively assigns gender: Bowie’s dissident has torn [their] dress, but wants to "be there when they count up the dudes." Yet there’s nothing ambiguous about that glorious guitar groove, the track’s stomping beat, the "hot tramp" pause between both, and their return. If Bowie often drifted above listeners’ heads, here he shoots straight at their solar plexus and scores with what ranks among the greatest, most insistent riffs of the '70s. Rockers who’d dismissed Bowie as a dandy now gave the dude a pass.
Aside from a stray super-Bowie line about lizards crying in the heat, side 2's opening track, "Rock ‘N Roll With Me," is even more forthright—a ballad of appreciation for his fans that provides reprieve from the sleaze and offers further proof that Bowie could belt. It’s stagey to be sure, but so is it sincere. "I’ve found the door that lets me out," he positively roars; performance sets him free.
The album is queasy soul music signifying soullessness; on the Shaft-like tableau "1984," he rewrites Orwell’s authoritarian state as a worldwide ghetto populated by junkies overseen by surgeon thugs who manipulate thoughts and misguide identities, all set to wah-wah guitars. The album culminates perversely, joyfully, as "Big Brother" segues into "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family," a fuzzed-out danse macabre where irregular time signatures alternate every few measures and the percussion keeps changing accents; there’s no center, just brief, blissful release before a stuttering loop of Bowie yelping in distress fades as if to black.
All this hopelessness and annihilation would be suffocating if it weren’t for Bowie’s exuberance. He throws himself into Orwell’s draconian hell as if strutting around in Kansai Yamamoto’s Aladdin Sane-era bodysuit; it fits his skeletal contours. Determined to reaffirm his relevance in spite of his setbacks, the singer sparkled so brightly that he offset the darkness of his material. Just as Watergate was coming to a boil, singer-songwriters and prog-rockers were glutting the charts, and '60s resistance was morphing into '70s complacency, this sweet rebel (rebel) made revolution strangely sexy again. Glaring at you from Dogs’ cover with canine hindquarters and emaciated features like the circus sideshow Freaks he footnotes in the title cut, he served notice that rock’s outsiders remained more compelling than the softies who increasingly occupied its center, even as his ever-growing popularity chipped away at it. You can bet Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Television sat up and took notes”.
On 24th May, Diamond Dogs turns fifty. I have a lot of time and respect for it. It is very important in terms of Bowie’s career and legacy. The 1970s was his most successful decade. Whilst Diamond Dogs was not his most acclaimed of the 1970s, I think it is important in terms of where he came from and where he would head. In 2016, Ultimate Classic Rock ranked the album as his fourteenth-best. SPIN placed it in fifth when they ranked the albums in 2022. The A.V. Club ranked it fourteenth in their feature. Rough Trade placed Diamond Dogs fourth earlier this year. In 2013, Rolling Stone placed it in fifth. As you can see, through the years, there has been a division of opinion. Good to see that some people consider Diamond Dogs to be a great work that is underrated. Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary, I wanted to dive into it. You may have never heard the album or might not have listened for a while. It is clear that 1974’s Diamond Dogs is…
WORTHY of fresh assessment.