society. It proved to be Bowie’s first-ever
UK No. 1 album.
The album was, interestingly enough,
written almost entirely on the road,
during Bowie’s American Ziggy Stardust
tour, and the cover, depicting Bowie as
a shirtless Ziggy-esque character with
a lightning bolt across his face, fast
became one of the most iconic album
covers of all time. The Spiders’ renowned
pianist Mike Garson also joined
Bowie on Aladdin Sane, with his
performance on many of the tracks
making his inclusion one of the
major highlights of the piece.
In a review, Ben Gerson of
Rolling Stone described Aladdin
Sane as being ‘less manic than The
Man Who Sold the World, and less
intimate than Hunky Dory, with
none of its attacks of self-doubt.
Ziggy Stardust, in turn, was less
autobiographically revealing, more
threatening than its predecessors,
but still compact.’ He added that
the album revealed Bowie as ‘more
mastermind than participant’.
The album was toured, in essence,
on the back-end of the Ziggy Stardust
tour, and was filled with much theatrics
and the occasional moment of shock,
including Bowie stripping down to a
sumo-like loincloth and simulating oral
sex on Mick Ronson’s guitar. Bowie
dramatically retired the character
of Ziggy Stardust on-stage at the
Hammersmith Odeon in London in
1973, famously announcing, ‘Not only is
this the last show of the tour, but it’s the
last show that we’ll ever do.’
In amongst the hustle and bustle of
1973, there also came another Bowie
album, or in this case, the first non-Bowie
Bowie album, as he released Pin Ups, acollection of cover versions of 1960s hits
from the likes of The Who and Pink
Floyd. During this time it can be argued
that it was Bowie’s androgynous stage
and public persona that sold records.
However, his popularity in gay culture
and the emerging gay rights movement
also created controversy both in Britain,
where homosexuality had only been legal
since 1967, and in America.Diamond Dogs, one of Bowie’s most
ambitious albums up to that time, was
released in 1974. Including a spoken-word
introduction and tracks that bled into
one another, Diamond Dogs is actually
the product of two distinctly different
ideas. It is primarily a musical based on
a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city,
and secondly a re-imagining of George
Orwell’s famed novel 19 84 to music.
As well as the album, Bowie also
made plans to develop a Diamond
Dogs movie. Unfortunately, he
didn’t get particularly far, although
Bowie himself has claimed there is
some footage of completed scenes
lying around somewhere. He’d also
had designs on writing a musical
of 19 84, but his interest waned
after encountering difficulties in
licensing the novel, so the songs he
had already written ended up on
Diamond Dogs.
The album did well, both
commercially and critically, and it was the
primary example of Bowie performing
every single instrumental part on an
album. As he himself explained in an
interview with NY Rock in February 1997,
‘That was the first time that I played all
the instruments myself on an album.
I had just broken up the Spiders and
didn’t really want to entrust my music to
another set of musicians at the time. So“... It wasn’t until later that it
became apparent that someof things we’d done were
actually quite innovative in
their own way.”
DAVID BOWIE
David Bowie as Aladdin Sane in 1973.