‘Diamond Dogs’: how David Bowie channelled his fascination with Orwellian dystopia in ‘1984’
David Bowie had already started working on a West End adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 when he was rejected the rights to it. “Sorry, David, you can’t write it,” his office told him after asking Orwell’s wife, who as good as spat in his general direction at the mere mention of the idea. Gravitating towards dystopian fiction like it was the prophecy of something divine, Bowie knew he had to do it his own way.
Bowie always seemed destined to become a star of otherworldly prowess, as evidenced by his deep-seated appreciation for the Orwell classic from an early age. In his mind, 1984 went beyond a novel and represented the sweeping haze of consciousness that defined growing up in the modern age, even from his childhood bedroom in Kent. “You always felt you were in 1984,” he said. “That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in. It was a terribly inhibiting place.”
Bowie had wanted to work on a theatre adaptation of the novel, knowing that his interest in and experience with societal disillusionment made him the perfect qualifier for the job. Diamond Dogs might not have been the project he initially planned for, but it eventually served as the creatively endearing and escapist byproduct of his early enamourment with Orwell’s gloomy reality.
Through the tracks ‘Big Brother’ and ‘1984’, Bowie conceptualised many Orwellian themes with his own artistic twist, not just creating a contemporary glam-rock masterpiece but portraying a doomed world of authoritarian control, surveillance, and fear through the magic of musical visionary alone. Bowie had already touched upon dark notes of disillusionment, loneliness, and clashing with convention and the elite in previous works, but these tracks, culminating from Bowie’s erratic interests at the time, mirrored the pressures of self-discovery in the nucleus of totalitarianism.
In ‘Big Brother’, for instance, cultural paranoia and reality distortion aren’t just manifested in Bowie’s suggestive lyricism; the arrangements also reflect the uncertainty of modern society and the unknown parameters of surveillance and technological advancement. Then, on top of the broader disconcerting feeling, Bowie’s repetition of “We want you, Big Brother” further mirrors the unrelenting haunt of social order and indoctrination.
“Beware the savage jaw of 1984,” Bowie sings in ‘1984’, directly referencing 1984’s exploration of societal oppression, continuing Orwell’s themes of fear, paranoia, and despair with fearmongering kitsch. This also bleeds into various Diamond Dogs tracks, including ‘Rebel Rebel’, ‘Sweet Thing’, and ‘Future Legend’, particularly in the unprovoked subtleties that reflect dystopia with various stylistic choices, not just in the shatters of varying genres but in how Bowie often contorts his delivery to appear more disorienting than welcoming.
The difference with Bowie’s previous works, like Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, was that his explorations of intergalactic alienation celebrated his own outlandish affair. In contrast, Diamond Dogs leaned into society’s more detached, insidious nature, where the destruction of the self and mind was almost inevitable. Using 1984 as his muse, Bowie seemed to comment on rebellion, surveillance, and oppression from an observational point of view using an anarchic delivery, presenting his caution in a more twisted manner, as if reflecting the decay of sanity beyond salvation.
