Launched in the summertime of 1974, Diamond Canines discovered David Bowie navigating the canine days of the glam-rock period – a sizzling and sultry interval earlier than the cultural climate broke. Having surfed and outlined the pop zeitgeist about in addition to any particular person star since Elvis Presley, he was now cresting the final stretch of a wave because it got here crashing into shore.
Diamond Canines was a convincing business success – No.1 within the UK, No.5 within the US. However the album was marked down on the time. “A slightly grandiose temper piece… It’s okay, you already know, however is it actually mandatory?” was the NME’s verdict. And, retrospectively, it tends to get brushed apart within the grand sweep of issues as a transitional album, marking the purpose in Bowie’s creative timeline at which he was shedding his glam-rock pores and skin and entering into his function because the ‘plastic soul’ man of his subsequent studio album Younger Individuals. (NME later revised its opinion and, in 2013, rated Diamond Canines certainly one of “The five hundred Best Albums of all Time” – albeit ranked at No.447, a good distance behind a lot of his different albums.)
Bowie himself was fast to recognise the report’s limitations. “It was not an idea album,” he advised Robert Hilburn in September 1974. “It was a set of issues. And I didn’t have a band. In order that’s the place the strain got here in. I couldn’t imagine I had completed it once I did. I had performed a lot of it myself. I by no means wish to be in that place once more. It was horrifying attempting to make an album with no help behind you. I used to be very a lot alone. It was my most tough album. It was a aid that it did so nicely.”
Regardless of the sense of “rigidity”, each musically and personally, which overshadowed the making of Diamond Canines, the album is however a remarkably pure distillation of Bowie’s genius. Certainly, if you’re in search of a set of recordings that stands as a monument to Bowie’s across-the-board prowess as a songwriter, singer, guitarist, saxophonist, keyboard participant, producer and allround media maven, there isn’t a different album in his whole catalogue that compares to Diamond Canines. Transitional or not, it stays as true an expression of his artistry on each entrance as something he ever launched.
The album was recorded in London, largely at Olympic Studios, and Hilversum within the Netherlands, between December 1973 and February 1974. Having famously disbanded the Spiders From Mars reside on stage at Hammersmith Odeon the earlier July, Bowie’s first problem was to fill the guitar genius-shaped gap left in his musical life by the departure of Mick Ronson. In a defiant show of ambition and bravado, Bowie resolved to do the job himself.
“I knew that the guitar enjoying needed to be greater than okay,” he stated, trying again in 1997. “That couple of months I spent placing [Diamond Dogs] collectively earlier than I went into the studio was in all probability the one time in my life the place I actually buckled all the way down to study the stuff I wanted to have on the album. I’d really practise two hours a day.”
Having additionally disbursed with the providers of longstanding producer Ken Scott, Bowie’s preliminary plan was not solely to supply the album but in addition to play each instrument himself – maybe reaching the purpose at which ambition gave solution to hubris.
Wiser counsel prevailed and he discovered a brand new rhythm part comprising session bass participant Herbie Flowers (the person liable for the swooping bass line on Lou Reed’s Stroll On The Wild Facet) and drummer Tony Newman (finest identified for his stint within the Jeff Beck Group). Pianist Mike Garson and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who had each contributed to Pin Ups, the album of canopy variations which Bowie had in some way slotted into his schedule and launched in October 1973, have been additionally introduced in.
All kinds of grand concepts have been floated within the construct as much as Diamond Canines. Bowie had spoken of his intention to mount a “full-scale rock musical” re-telling the story of Ziggy Stardust. He’d additionally let it’s identified that he was planning to write down and direct a musical manufacturing for TV of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-4, certainly one of his favorite novels.
“I’d did not acquire the theatrical rights from George Orwell’s widow,” Bowie advised the Mail On Sunday in 2008. “And having written three or extra songs for it already, I did a quick about-face and recobbled the concept into Diamond Canines: teen punks on rusty skates dwelling on the roofs of the dystopian Starvation Metropolis; a post-apocalyptic panorama.”
The scene is about on the opening quantity, Future Legend, a quick, howling, growling, synthesised soundtrack with a voiceover from Bowie introducing us to a ghastly, ruined cityscape the place ‘Fleas the scale of rats sucked on rats the scale of cats/ And ten thousand peoploids cut up into small tribes…’ The recitation ends with the jarring proclamation: ‘This ain’t rock and roll. That is genocide!’ The title observe, which follows, really sounds much more like rock’n’roll than mass homicide – with an affect that owed a noticeable debt to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
As likelihood would have it, the Rolling Stones have been in Olympic Studios recording their album It’s Solely Rock’n’Roll concurrently Bowie was engaged on Diamond Canines. Olympic’s in-house engineer, Keith Harwood, who engineered Diamond Canines, had beforehand labored on a number of Stones albums.
And if the overall fraternising that went on through the course of the classes wasn’t sufficient to strengthen the connection, Bowie and his then-wife Angie (Angela Barnett) had just lately moved right into a grand terraced home in Chelsea the place they have been now close to neighbours of Mick and Bianca Jagger, with whom they socialised. Certainly, in response to the American singer and mannequin Ava Cherry, who stayed in the home for a time with David and Angie, there was much more than socialising happening.
“Mick Jagger knew David, and I used to be buddies with each of them,” Cherry advised Bowie biographer Dylan Jones. “So all three of us used to hang around quite a bit, and sure we did have some enjoyable collectively.”
In line with Cherry, on the finish of 1 occasion in New York, everybody had left aside from her, Bowie and Jagger. “So it simply ended up with the three of us sleeping collectively. That was it. And we had a beautiful time and we had a number of enjoyable.”
Diamond Canines carried out disappointingly when launched as a single in June 1974 (after the album was launched) within the UK, the place it peaked at No.21. Way more resonant and enduring as a flagship observe for the album was Insurgent Insurgent – the track that almost all clearly marked each the tip of an period for Bowie and the leaping off level for Diamond Canines.
Recorded on December 27, 1973, Insurgent Insurgent was the primary track of the classes and the final track that Bowie recorded at Trident Studios in Soho the place he had recorded the vast majority of his work since 1968. Launched as a single within the UK in February 1974, forward of the album, Insurgent Insurgent reached No.5 and stays certainly one of Bowie’s touchstone songs.
The lyric is as pertinent immediately – possibly much more so – because it was nearly 50 years in the past: ‘You’ve acquired your mom in a whirl, cos she’s unsure when you’re a boy or a lady.’ And the riff is a masterpiece: easy, unique and immediately recognisable in the way in which that solely a handful of pop-rock riffs – Candy Jane, Leaping Jack Flash, You Actually Obtained Me – may ever actually declare to be. Did Bowie actually provide you with that and play it fully off his personal bat?
“He had the riff about seventy-five per cent sorted out,” recalled Alan Parker, a session guitarist credited for his contribution to at least one observe (1984) on the album. “He needed it a bit like a Stones riff and he performed it to me as such, and I then tinkered round with it. I stated: ‘Nicely, what if we did this and that and made it sound extra clangy and put some bends in it?’ And he stated: ‘Yeah, I really like that, that’s superb.’”
No matter Parker’s contribution to the sculpting and performing of the track behind the scenes, Bowie is the only real author and guitarist listed on the credit. Whereas Insurgent Insurgent and the title observe echoed the triumphs of Bowie’s glam-rock previous, the remainder of the album supplied a tantalising glimpse of the future-Bowie that was but to completely materialise.
On the coronary heart of Facet 1 is the three-piece track suite Candy Factor/Candidate/Candy Factor (Reprise), which was initially supposed to be the centrepiece for the would-be stage manufacturing of Nineteen Eighty-4. It’s a craving but chilling sequence, with lyrics rendered as a collage of bittersweet photos and concepts. ‘I assume we may cruise down yet one more time, with you by my facet it ought to be superb/We’ll purchase some medication and watch a band, then leap within the river holding fingers.’
The sequence is notable for its intensely detailed association – delivered to life not least by Bowie’s contributions on saxophone and guitar. The tip of the Reprise part (which runs into Insurgent Insurgent) has him conjuring a screeching, crunching, overdriven guitar noise that prefigured the commercial sounds that Earl Slick would later develop on Station To Station and Reeves Gabrels would take to a different degree on the Tin Machine albums. Bowie wrote the lyrics for these and different songs on Diamond Canines utilizing the ‘cut-up’ technique popularised by the ‘beat’ author and literary figurehead William Burroughs.
“You write down a paragraph or two describing a number of completely different topics,” Bowie defined. “Making a sort of story components record, I suppose. After which lower the sentences into four- or five-word sections; combine ’em up and reconnect them. You may get some fairly attention-grabbing thought mixtures like this.”
Whereas the temper and material of the songs on Facet 2 is clearly derived from the nightmarish gloom of Orwell’s novel, it’s unimaginable to know the place and the way these cut-ups may need been made or what the exact which means is. ‘We’re immediately’s scrambled creatures, locked in tomorrow’s double characteristic, heaven’s on the pillow, its silence competes with hell/It’s a twenty-four-hour service assured to make you inform…’ Bowie sings mournfully on We Are The Useless. It definitely soundslike a foul journey.
The comparatively jaunty music on tracks resembling Rock’N’Roll With Me and Huge Brother sounds prefer it ought to be a part of a stage musical – as certainly it was initially supposed to be. The Rocky Horror Present, which opened on the Royal Courtroom Theatre in London in 1973, was on the way in which to turning into a cult phenomenon on the time Bowie was writing the album and there was a number of musical theatricality within the air.
There was additionally proof of the looming change of musical tempo and persona that Bowie would impact on his subsequent album, Younger Individuals – most clearly represented within the observe 1984, which took its inspiration from the wah-wah guitar and string preparations of Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack to the 1971 movie Shaft.
“Once we labored on the track 1984 he was already referencing Barry White,” stated Ken Scott, who had produced an earlier recording of the track as a part of the Aladdin Sane classes in January 1973. “He needed the hi-hat and the strings to sound like they might be on a Barry White album. He was already anticipating the sound of Younger Individuals.”
The faintly stunning, sci-fi cowl art work by the Belgian artist Man Peellaert, that includes an image of Bowie together with his decrease physique reworked into that of a canine full with genitalia (airbrushed from most variations on the time) grew to become immediately iconic. Bowie acquired the concept after Mick Jagger advised him that Peellaert was designing the sleeve of the forthcoming Stones album It’s Solely Rock’N’Roll.
“I instantly rushed out and acquired Man Peellaert to do my cowl too,” Bowie admitted later. When It’s Solely Rock’N’Roll was launched a number of months after Diamond Canines, everybody assumed the Stones had copied Bowie. “He [Jagger] by no means forgave me for that!” Bowie stated.
The spectacular and technically formidable tour to advertise Diamond Canines set new requirements for theatrical invention and sheer scale of endeavour. In line with the Bowie chronicler Nicholas Pegg the stage set “was extra elaborate than any beforehand tried for a rock tour and price an unprecedented $250,000… An enormous backdrop depicted the nightmarish Starvation Metropolis skyline, tilted in jagged perspective. To both facet stood two huge aluminium skyscrapers, linked by a shifting bridge which might rise and fall through the present. The specialist props, run by hydraulic mechanisms and early types of pc management, have been to be constructed from scratch.”
The early evaluations have been delirious. The reviewer from Melody Maker described it as “a mix of latest music and theatre that’s a number of years forward of its time… a totally new idea in rock theatre – probably the most unique spectacle in rock I’ve ever seen.”
In line with Bowie: “It was actually the primary actual rock and roll theatrical present that made any sense.” However he however remembered the tour as “fairly an unbelievable headache”.
At instances, the sheer ambition of the staging threatened to outstrip the technical knowhow. With cranes and cherry-pickers and bits of staging flying round, there was little margin for error.
In line with stage supervisor Nick Russiyan, “David was in nice hazard bodily and will have gotten electrocuted or killed.” There was a disconnect too between the delicate musicianship of the brand new stage band – that includes guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick – and the tough edges of the unique Diamond Canines recording, performed by Bowie himself.
“That album had a top quality of obsession with what I needed to recover from,” Bowie later mirrored. “They performed it too nicely and with an excessive amount of fluidity. So to me Diamond Canines was by no means performed nicely on stage, or at the least by no means with the sensibility that the album had.”
Regardless of the constructive response, the manufacturing was scaled again dramatically after the primary leg and morphed into the so-called Soul Tour, with a set-list that includes materials from Bowie’s forthcoming album Younger Individuals (launched in 1975).
“I threw the set away and got here again with a totally completely different present,” Bowie later recalled. “They have been imagined to be promoting all the present on this spectacular set, and the children would come and there was no set, no nothing, and there I used to be singing soul music.”
“Diamond Canines was a bizarre interval as a result of all the things that David had performed as much as that time out of the blue exploded,” stated guitarist Earl Slick. “It was like a nuclear explosion… Bowiemania… Then he determined to simply abandon the entire thing. Diamond Canines might be one of the iconic issues he did in his whole profession however… it [the tour] didn’t even make the WestCoast.”
“It was fairly apparent that David was taking coke,” recalled Jayne County, the American proto-punk glam-rocker who was signed to Bowie’s administration agency MainMan at the moment. “He grew to become very skeletal in his look and started rattling off speeches that sounded meaningless to the remainder of us… He started to get paranoid… accusing individuals of ripping him off and stealing his medication.”
“Diamond Canines scared me as a result of I used to be mutating into one thing I simply didn’t imagine in any extra, and the dreadful factor was, it was really easy,” Bowie stated, trying again in 2008. “The Diamond Canines interval was simply an extension of Aladdin Sane, which in itself was simply an extrapolation of Ziggy Stardust.
“However by the point of Diamond Canines that persona had began to really feel claustrophobic, and I wanted a change… Diamond Canines was making me sick, each bodily and creatively, and I used to be shifting into melodrama.”
