Diamond Dogs by David Bowie

Diamond Dogs, David Bowie's eighth album, came out on RCA in 1974, and it's the sound of a man tearing up his old script. The Spiders from Mars had disbanded and producer Ken Scott was gone, so Bowie produced it himself in London and the Netherlands in early 1974, and with Mick Ronson out of the picture he played lead guitar too. Tony Visconti came back after four years away and would stick around for the rest of the decade.

The album grew out of a pile-up of abandoned ideas: a scrapped Ziggy Stardust musical, an adaptation of George Orwell's novel, and an urban apocalypse inspired by William S. Burroughs. What's left is a sleazy, ruined-city glam-rock opera, with the title track introducing Halloween Jack, "Rebel Rebel" swaggering on one of the dirtiest riffs of his career, "Future Legend" and "1984" filling out the nightmare, and a few songs already leaning toward the funk and soul he'd dive into on Young Americans. It was his last glam album.

"Rebel Rebel" went out first, and the album went all the way to the top in Britain while stalling at number five in America. The cover, painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert from photos by Terry O'Neill, turned Bowie into a half-man, half-dog creature and stirred up controversy. Critics have long grumbled that it doesn't hang together, but Bowie's biographers count it among his best, and it has been credited as an influence on the punk explosion that followed. The Diamond Dogs Tour brought it to the stage with lavish, expensive sets.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.