Coke, Crisps, Refreshers and Fleas The Size of Rats - let's have a listen to 'Diamond Dogs'

Watersmeet forever!!!

A few nights ago (Good Friday 2011 to be precise) I could not sleep for love nor money (or even a bit of both) so I ended up reaching for the ever faithful ipod and instead of the soporific tranquility of Brian Eno's 'Thursday Afternoon' which usually does the trick, I felt awake and jittery enough to listen to Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'. I got through the whole album, still couldn't sleep and then lay there conceiving the blog I am about to write. As this is the first chance I have had to sit down and get the thing written, I hope it comes across as well as it did in my head at 3am the other morning..............

I am pretty convinced that I became the person I am today - at least in terms of how I love music and how music affects me - on a particular night in 1974 when I was a mere 9 years old. Mum and Dad went out for the evening and the usual list of babysitters must have been so unanimously out of action that the job eventually fell with my brother Brian and a few of his friends. Our folks left Brian with a list of do's and dont's, vague bedtimes for us all and the price of a Chinese takwaway for all. The 'Chinese take away' the boys went and bought consisted of a bottle of Teachers, 40 cigarettes and enough Coke, crisps and sweets to keep the rest of us happy and also quiet. To complete the picture, the two brothers from up the road arrived with a copy of the recently released 'Diamond Dogs' which was played, over and over, on Dad's old radiogram for the entire evening. I don't remember there being any respectful, silent appreciation of the album - it was just kind of happening in the background, but as the older boys got more and more hammered on Whiskey and I got more and more charged on the sugar and inevitably deadly additives in cheap 1970s sweets I became more and more transfixed with what I was hearing. Quite content to stand in a corner out of the way, chopping Townsend-like at my makeshift tennis racquet guitar, I couldn't quite believe that music could have such a physical affect on a human being, as goosebumps rose on my arms, my scalp tingled and my chest hurt (it wasn't the three packs of Refreshers I had scoffed either) Not only was I transfixed by the album, I was also terrified by it as well, particularly the howl that kicks it all off and the terrifying imagery in the spoken 'Future Legend' that follows, as 'fleas the size of rats' suck on 'rats the size of cats' - In fact, for at least a year afterwards, I played 'Diamond Dogs' with numbing regularity, but everytime carefully placed the needle far enough over to miss out 'Future Legend' completely. I'm sure my brothers and my sister will remember just how scared I was of an album I enjoyed so much.

So the evening in question came to a not too sticky end. We managed to tidy up, get our comatose babysitter into bed and his friends off home - in fact we even managed to somehow muster up a chow mein and a couple of spring rolls from somewhere, just to make the deception complete. (Sorry Mum and Dad - it was all Brian's fault of course) and eventually Brian got his own copy of the album, only for me to comandeer it and play it until I wore the vinyl out.

'Diamond Dogs' is an exceptional album, possibly Bowie's best (very close though - my jury is still out on what is my actual favourite, if indeed I even have one) Whilst is misses a lead guitarist of the calibre of, say Mick Ronson or Earl Slick (at that time, past and present Bowie guitarists respectively) as Bowie himself opted to play all the guitars on the album, you do still have the wonderful avant guard piano of Mike Garson and some excellent sax playing from Bowie himself who also brings in Moog and Mellotron synthesizers to great and eerie effect. Aside from the chilling 'Future Legend' you get the (very Stones like) glam shuffle of the title track and the lead off single 'Rebel Rebel', the US Cop Show funk of '1984', the rousing ballad 'When You Rock and Roll With Me' and the dark and sinister 'We Are The Dead' - which is one of my favourite Bowie lyrics (it wasnt until years later when I bought a CD release with printed lyrics that I realised that what I thought was him singing 'funky bumps' is actually 'fuck-me pumps'). The real moment of magic on the album comes with the ten minute medley 'Sweet Thing / Candidate / Sweet Thing Reprise' - a beautiful and melancholy construction in which Bowie compares casual sex to 'putting pain in a stranger' and invites his friend / lover to 'buy some drugs and watch a band and jump in the river holding hands'. The whole show ends with the eerie Mellotron 'choir' that introduces the prayer like appeal to a higher God of 'Big Brother' (this 'choir' effect would be used to similar grand effect a decade later on XTC's 'Deliver Us From The Elements' and a further decade later on Radiohead's 'Exit Music') and ends with the quirky, almost funky, 5/4 shuffle; 'Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family' and the repeated echo to fade of 'Bro...bro.....bro....bro.....' which to me, did and still does sound like 'Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian' - When you consider the circumstances under which I first encountered this incredible album and then nurtured a love for it that holds strong to this day, that seems quite fitting to me. Cheers Hedge!

By the way - if you are one of the kind few to read this blog, please do add yourself as a follower and also you might care to read a lot of the comments added to past entries by my fine friend, the excellent and accomplished musician, poet, performance artist and psychoanalyst to the living dead, Mr Andy Warner, aka Drew Crow Star - I really do appreciate the comments he has added and have no reservation in saying that what he writes is a damn sight better than what I produce. Your good health, My Lord.

More to follow?

Col