JACKBOOT STOMPIN’
Bowie’s plans for George Orwell’s 1984 were thwarted, but his dystopian visions of chaos and tyranny lived on in Diamond Dogs and beyond, writes DORIAN LYNSKEY.
Wild boys: Bowie meets William S Burroughs, February 1974;
THE WAY BOWIE told it, there would be no Diamond Dogs if not for George Orwell’s widow Sonia. In September 1973 he began working on a musical adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with playwright Tony Ingrassia. The following month he debuted a song-inprogress, 1984/Dodo, on-stage in London at the punningly titled 1980 Floor Show. In November he told William S Burroughs it would be a TV special. He was to play Orwell’s unhappy rebel Winston Smith, with Marianne Faithfull rumoured for his hedonistic lover Julia. Yet within weeks the project was dead and Bowie was building a new home for the orphaned songs: Diamond Dogs. Speaking to Circus magazine in 1976, Bowie blamed Sonia Orwell for the change of plan. “She was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” he complained. “‘Good heavens, put it to music?’ It was really like that.”