Diamond
Dogs occupies a strange place in the Bowie canon (the
European canon, if you will). It hasn’t quite got a space to itself; Zavid was
still sporting aspects of the Ziggy look, and before the accompanying tour was
quite finished he’d moved on to his Young
Americans look and sound. Chronologically, it sits awkwardly between the
rock-and-roll megastardom of Ziggy
Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and the still-astonishing roll of
musical changes that took up the ’75 to ’77 period – from Young Americans into Station
to Station and then to the Berlin albums. And yet, it’s an album that’s
very fondly thought of. According to an anonymous source who got in touch with
Chris O’Leary of the brilliant Pushing Ahead of the Dame, it may even have been
Bowie’s own favourite. And for good reason: it’s not my favourite album of his,
but on some level I’ve always thought of it as the quintessential Bowie album,
the one that most captures his unique appeal.
Maybe this is partly because of that hybrid identity I
mentioned, which is, of course, so very Bowie. Despite being in part an
adaptation of a failed musical project, the album lacks personae or characters
of its own; the closest it comes is the rather nebulous Halloween Jack, whom
Bowie never seems to have had much interest in developing. Yet it’s full of
voices; (presumably) Winston Smith in ‘We Are the Dead’, the imperious narrator
of ‘Future Legend’, the strangely removed warning of ‘1984’. Even other Bowies
come in and out; ‘Rebel Rebel’ is such a quintessentially Ziggy song that it
seems fundamentally out of place here, while the fanfare and paranoia of ‘Big
Brother’ are like omens of the Thin White Duke’s coming.
 |
| Notice the Aladdin Sane-coloured mask. |
Perhaps more than any other Bowie album, Diamond Dogs synthesises his disparate influences
to create a strange postmodern fusion of elements. Take the title track; a
melding of Orwell, Burroughs, Ballard and the Rolling Stones, with a reference
to Tarzan and opening audience noise taken from a Faces live show. Despite its
dystopian setting, Baz Luhrmann was able to appropriate it quite successfully
for Moulin Rouge! Even more
remarkably, despite being arguably the only song on the album (unless you count
‘Future Legend’) to deal directly with the album’s overarching concept*, it
works perfectly well out of context as one of the most straightforward rock
songs Bowie ever wrote. Once again, his gift for taking high concepts and
bringing them to the widest possible audience is on show.
All of this without even approaching the album’s high
point: the ‘Sweet Thing’/‘Candidate’/‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’ triptych. Mashing half-finished
songs together to create a greater whole is a trick Bowie nicked off the
Beatles, but nothing from Abbey Road
stands up to this, as the ever-reliable Mike Garson thunders away at the piano
and Bowie displays his remarkable vocal range more spectacularly than ever
before. For all the darkness of the rest of the album, the high note he hits at
the end of the song is one of the most beautiful, transcendent moments of his
career. And isn’t that so very Bowie, to hide such a human moment in something
so removed and intellectual? Just like how the austere Low ends with the emotional transport of ‘Subterraneans’, just like
how an album written and to an extent set amid a divided Berlin contains
arguably his most enduring and moving vocal performance, just like how his
extended and cynical album-long meditation on the nature of rock stardom ends
with a cry of “You’re not alone! Give me your hands!”
There are so many other triumphs. To my mind, ‘We Are
the Dead’, with its strands of sinister nonsense (“It’s the theatre of
financiers, count them, fifteen ‘round the table”) is the pinnacle of Bowie’s
use of cut-up technique. The inclusion of an “intro” (‘Future Legend’) and “outro”
for the album (‘Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family’) helps it to feel
like an enclosed, coherent world. And, of course, ‘Chant of the Ever-Circling
Skeletal Family’ is one of the finest names for a song (if it qualifies as
such) ever devised.
I don’t think Diamond
Dogs is destined to have the kind of wider cultural significance attached
to Ziggy Stardust, Low or (perhaps) Blackstar. But I do think that every Bowie fan probably has a soft
spot for it, at the very least. It’s a concept album with a less-than-coherent
concept, a staging post between extraordinary transformations, the residual
home for a few songs written for a project never allowed to get off the ground.
And yet it’s also the home of some of Bowie’s finest music of the period. More
than that, its high-minded brilliance, poised on the edge of absurdity, sums up
precisely why we love him so much.
Plus the cover is a painting of him as a dog. It’s hard
not to admire that.
* - While the 1984 songs obviously have a distinctly
dystopian element to them, they very much belong to another world; ‘1984’ and ‘Big
Brother’ in particular are too blatantly Orwellian to apply to another setting.
