The Dog's B*ll*cks

It's been a long, cold winter with a couple of false starts, but today's car boot sale had some vinyl worth flicking through and I returned home with a 1981 reissue of Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs (INTS 5068), bought for £4.

David Bowie - Diamond Dogs (1974)

This was his first post-Spiders album and is essentially a glam-rock record, but with a different sound to its predecessors due to Bowie playing most of the lead guitar parts himself (not to mention several other instruments).  Also present are the first signs of the R'n'B/Soul that would inform 1975's Young Americans.

The original concept for the record was based on Orwell's 1984, but when permission for this was denied by Orwell's widow, Bowie kept his head and worked the existing songs into a dark, fragmented narrative of his own, set in Hunger City where,

"Fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats
And ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes".

Yikes!

The cover was painted by artist Guy Peellaert, and the original artwork featured genitalia on the lower half of the Bowie/dog hybrid.  This was airbrushed out as you can see from this photo, although some copies with the original image did make it onto the shelves.

I love the segue from the epic Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing into its biggest hit Rebel Rebel, but my top picks are the Stones-y title track and the cinematic 1984.
Here's the 30th anniversary album remaster on Spotify: