A weird, gluey wolf howl gives way to a synthesised cityscape. The apocalypse has happened and the broken streets are alive with mutants. Bowie's cold voice narrates. A Burroughs-like description of loose animals and panic-stricken peoploids eking what life they can. Any day now, he says, the year of the Diamond Dogs.
This sci-fi horror scene is swept aside by the sound of a crowd at a rock gig and a voice through a PA says: "This ain't rock and roll, this is genocide!" Before we can quite work out what he said (I first thought it was "... this is David Bowie" pronounced like bow bow wow) a stretchy riff raunches up which turns into a laidback Stonesy groove. And here we meet the likes of Halloween Jack who lives in a scraper and takes the sliding rope when the lift's out. It might be the ashes after Armageddon but that's no reason to stop partying. At some point it occurs that you could hear Lou Reed singing this.
Once that settled, something occurred to me for the first time since I started listening to this record that has never been far from me since the '70s: the first of its two self-estranging sides is not so much a tribute as a mossy ruin of Bowie's use of the Velvet Underground influence. It had been there from Hunky Dory but that had been more or less open and detectable. This is like finding someone's fan scrapbook waterlogged in a forest. The stories of the characters are suggested and the Dalek call and response chorus packs a lot of Reed's mannerisms but the music is stadium rock and the tension between the two never lets the song quite rest into its groove. Even as the big multi-tracked guitars of the chorus grind, it never quite gels. This is intentional, though. The world being described sounds like this when it's music, snatches of definition here and there but mostly wobbly, warped phantasms. The song plays out with a clear quote of the fade of Brown Sugar (even Bowie's sax is lifting Bobby Keys's lick).
But when it ends it flows without pause into the long Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing suite. A brooding bed of mellotron, synthesis and distorted guitar rises and floats as Bowie's uncharacteristically deep voiced opening lines speak of sex of opportunity. An aging bad boy roams the streets, gets struck by guilt and trashes his room as Bowie's vocal soars and plummets. A piano appears from the shadow to sound discordantly before leaving abruptly and big flutes out of range coo like air con generators. Moments that approach glory where Bowie breaks into a kind of torchy ecstasy break up and fall.
The next phase, Candidate, is entered without a break. It starts with the line "I'll make you a deal like any other candidate". This candidate is not running for office, he's being cruised. Bowie assumes a singspiel position, talking here, singing there and the world weary ghost of Lou Reed rises again. I'm not making a shallow comparison, here, this song doesn't sound like Reed but Reed is haunting it through a distant mentorship. Lines like "having so much fun" "one makes you wish that you'd never been seen" actually do have a Reed-like manner but they're thrown bones, this is much more of a spooky homage to a spirit, one that feels like it haunts him.
Candidate picks up the rock pace as the dirty decadence runs on and through it there is the suggestion that the fragile dusty old-before-his-time roue has found love, or something very like it. In the final rushing confession at the end of the scene he wants them to go out together (as in jumping into the river holding hands, not partying). Whatever actually happens there the reprise of the Sweet Thing chorus seems to call the exhausted flesh parade to an end and the narrator tries again for an escalating moment of passion but this time it doesn't fail. "It's got claws, it's got me, it's got yoooooooooou." That last word becomes a lofty falsetto note lifted high into the light. Perhaps, he really has found love, in however grimy a setting. But then the mood shifts again as the languidly moving flutes and guitar noise find a beat with a piano bass, thumping to a mass of swells and feedback until the abrupt stop.
At this point, I need to spend some words on a major detail of this record. Bowie played guitar. Not the usual glittering twelve string acoustic of all the albums from Space Oddity on but an electric through an amp getting overdriven to teetering levels. With the Spiders disbanded and Mick Ronson off on a solo project, Bowie went into doing it himself. Characteristically, he prepared with a lot of playing and practice and acquaintance with the kind of sounds he had loved from Ronson, to Hendrix to Townshend and anyone else drifting by. His playing on side one of this record has often been described as amateurish but I find it compelling, atmospheric, and deliciously uncontrolled. The noise and slash performance under the outro of Sweet Thing feels like someone taming a runaway factory machine and rejigging it on the run for another purpose. The whole of side one up to that point has been a showcase of this, part show off but much more exploratory. By the end of this experience Bowie not only could play avant-guitar himself but knew first hand how to teach others to play it for him.
This doesn't just reflect on what we've just heard, it kicks it into the next room. Without a break Sweet Thing gives up for Rebel Rebel, the most famous song on the album and one of the most famous guitar riffs in history. The riff, played on a fuzz tone guitar using near dissonance as it plays an E over a D chord before running down to the B of the E chord, the melody borrowing notes from the scales of each chord just before time. It gives the initial run a bittersweet 9th harmony and the final trio's fall to the next chord a 7th. It never quite feels like that's going on, though as the expanded scale its working with (two adjacent major keys almost at once) as the effect is so arresting. Often missed is how guest Alan Parker is playing the chords beneath, supporting the openness of the harmonic structure.
Parker finished the riff. Bowie played the figure he sings and left a gap before starting again. Parker added the three note fall A-G#-D that perfects the end of the loop and drives it seamlessly into the next iteration and when you hear it you want it to go forever. In 1977 the song was only three years old but if you were fourteen those three years felt like a generation. None of us had heard it before but that guitar sound, the snakey way it curled into your ears and got a room in your brain. Someone id-ed it as Bowie but no one had a title. You just wanted it to go for the rest of the day. A month later I bought the changesonebowie compilation album (which is a corker) and failed to hear the song, track after track. Then I turned it over and hoped Diamond Dogs was it but no. Then, finally, using the kind of seamless link the original album does with Sweet Thing and Rebel, they did it with Diamond Dogs, straight into it and the riff ground up, shiny, juicy, tangy and endless. I got up and danced around the rumpus room.
And that's just the riff. The vocal line also had an ache to it. It's a teen love song with androgyny and liberty and youth. One verse two iterations plenty of choruses and an extended fadeout with vocals improvised around the theme. It's an idea that doesn't need depth or too many new lines, those few do it all and when they all come back in a jumble and then seem to reconstitute into a new declaration it takes the stuttering mod or My Generation into apotheosis: "you're a juvenile success because your face is a mess." Whether Bowie wrote all that out or he just went for it doesn't matter, that's what came out. You're young and turning into anyone you want for as long as you want as long as you're out there and everything's working your way. It might be really happening, it might be the refulgent fantasy of a kid staring at the wall on a Friday night, as long as the thoughts are there like that.
Rebel Rebel doesn't fit in with the rest of the album until you start using your imagination and that's a big part of its strength on this record. We've just been through some adults-only times, in and out of cars and clubs and shadows. When we break back into the teens we see a star among them so completely themselves that none shall define them. It's a flash of purity in the gloom. It's much needed, considering what is to come. Rebel Rebel, which seemed built for a long fade comes to an abrupt halt with a big clunking low piano note. Silence. The world is about to change.
Side two starts with big soul chords on the piano. The gap between this progression and its next iteration is filled with the kind of noisy distorted guitar bolus that Bowie had perfected on Sweet Thing. After that the blue-eyed soul of Rock and Roll With Me rolls out, broad and easy, with a vocal that tells of a love. The love may be the Rebel of the end of side one but there are images of fame and commerce mixed in. After a torchy transition, the chorus lifts us away and aloft from all these mean and earthly thoughts as the title phrase which might as well be about music as sex but is more a general abandon to the love and drugginess of the love. He's out of breath but holding on and with a lunge he goes through an escape hatch to be forever in the entwining realm of the chorus. This and Rebel Rebel are often picked out as anomalies on the record, songs that hark back to the Ziggyverse. But they could, without too much stretching, be the last hurrah for the kind of decadent indulgence before the foggy curtain to follow falls.
We Are The Dead comes next. It's a direct quote from George Orwell and it's time to mention the ill-fated origins of this album. It was 1974 and Bowie was interested in doing a take on 1984, Orwell's influential dystopia whose title served as a kid of editorial curse at perceived government control or a culture encroaching on individual freedoms. This heated up to a furnace in the '80s until 1984 happened and was kind of fun. But in the mid '70s, looking around the blocs and the state of things a persistent fear swelled around notions of the future. Bowie had a large salad of ideas for theatrical musicals, sometimes one on Ziggy, sometimes one based on Burroughs, and then there was the big one, 1984. Orwell's widow nixed the idea of any adaptation of her husbands works while she walked the earth (which she left in 1980). This explains the Michael Radford film of it released in the year itself but it didn't help David B. in 1974.
He had the material of the decadent prequel and then some songs for the Orwell story proper. That's (some stretching, here) effectively what Diamond Dogs is. Big sloppy rock and gloom on the first side and the hard Orwellian world on the second. All of the songs are tighter here, machined to perfect interlocking parts and function without need of too much supervision. After the last gasp of human ardour has ended in a fading distorted spike, we all go down together.
We Are The Dead starts with a Rhodes piano playing the chords through slap back echo, a cold and concrete sound. At first it's a skittish figure, music on tip toes and looking over its shoulder. Then the depressing circular figure of the verse sounds. A long and pained sigh joins up to the next as though in answer to the feisty electric patch of the song before. The vocal is delivered a breath short of weeping and chilled with fear as Winston Smith at first wonders about Julia who just might feel the same as him. This work afternoon fantasy expands but not with a big note like the ones in Sweet Thing. Bowie breaks out but to a whisper as though the thought crime itself must be imagined as inaudible. A series of Burroughsian images of torment and mayhem, hinting also at Jacques Brel, in the kind of moment that Winston feels like yelling obscenities at the top of his lungs. The second verse sees him together with Julia and their doomed affair, hoping against experience that their love will mean something after them. This gives way to another nightmarish tapestry of images before the last words they say to each other before getting hauled off to the Ministry of Love (i.e. torture) "we are the dead" repeat in ever colder reiteration. Finally, the whimper, the verse progression plays out one final time and finishes in a sigh of exhaustion.
An urgent piano figure is joined by Theme from Shaft guitar (thank, Alan Parker) but the sex is absent. It feels like someone is being chased. The vocals are pressing and morph into an epic scale chorus. It sounds like a perfect opening number for a Broadway show about its title, 1984. You can see the frantic dance number under blue-grey lights. "Bewaaaare the savage jaw of nineteen eighty foooooour!" Images of helplessness and paranoia. The song ends with the year repeated with increasing exasperation until nothing is left but an insistent dissonant two note figure to the fade.
Choirs and a distant trumpet herald the arrival of Big Brother. Both on the mellotron, they are played initially for authenticity but soon take on intentionally artificial performance, as though the fakery of them will only serve the package. The package is Big Brother, introduced with a swollen opening speech before tightening to a military stridency. Then it's the chorus about how we want someone to save, to shame us, a brave Apollo, we want Big Brother. Bowie sings the song of the demagogue but one schooled in the eternal self-producing hype of the totalitarian. There is a brief, gentle and doomed moment of protest in falsetto with acoustic guitar but it is swamped like a tidal wave with a return to the chorus because now that's all that matters.
But even this is subject to its own constriction. The character Syme in the novel speaks with self-accusing vigour about the delight he takes in reducing language as he edits the Newspeak dictionary. Good now is opposed by ungood. Better and best become plus good and double plus good. After the final affirmation "we want you, Big Brother," we fall into a rock groove (more solid electric playing from Bowie) which becomes a chant simply of "brother" elongated "Broth-er" and hurried by busy encouragement. This goes until it can go no more and finally ends in an echoed truncation to a fade: "brah brah brah brah brah..."
I bought my copy in 1977 at a time when anyone else like me was really just waiting until the Sex Pistols finally came out with their record. It's three year gap between release and my hearing it was enormous in the Bowie universe. We'd had the odd-bod soul of Young Americans and the chilly funk of Station to Station and then the strange landscapes of Low and stranger ones of Heroes. It was these last two that Diamond Dogs bore the closest resemblance. Low did the opposite with the sides and started with short pop numbers and when to the great beyond on side two. Ziggy had started with an impending apocalypse and formed up to a rock star tightness. Diamond Dogs began outside of the book it had started out emulating; Halloween Jack's dissolute waste city formed up for the crisp dictatorship of the second side. If I'm honest, I preferred it to Low but mainly because I didn't think much of the side one songs (Warszawa onward sounded beautiful and cinematic). Side one of Dogs was grown up and darkly alluring. The demagogue side was familiar to anyone young and even ethereally politicised who lived with the spectre of the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland. Diamond Dogs felt close to where I lived.
Of all the great run of '70s Bowie albums this is the one I return to with the same zest as I do Station to Station (which holds place as the first one I bought when still new). Bowie's frustrations at his thwarted ambitions produced this industrial strength lemonade, a suite of decadence that went further than when he was playing at it and a big punching critique sung in warning to a people who didn't understand where they were heading. Emerging, a very few years later from a mist of milk, capsicum and cocaine after Station to Station, he had his own moment that would see him cancelled in a second today (you can Google this) but it was a glitch and one that now forms more of a career curio. What he did do all the way back in 1974 was describe in deathless detail how bad it can get when we stop caring how it is. If you're new to it, listen. If you have listened, listen again. It's a lesson you can sing over and again.
