Ninety Eighty-Four has one of the most famous opening sentences in literature: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” It’s uncanny, then, that at midnight on the day of David Jones’s birth—January 8, 1947—the intense cold is said to have caused the clock on Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton to strike thirteen instead of twelve. The mistake would have been audible at 40 Stansfield Road, five minutes’ walk away, where his mother, Peggy, was in labor.…
Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, did most of his work on Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1947. He’d had a so-so war, hacking out a pittance reviewing books before getting a job at the Indian section of the BBC World Service, then a better one at the left-wing (though anti-Stalin) magazine Tribune, where he wrote most of his best essays. But then the success of Animal Farm, published in 1945, made him wealthy enough to junk journalism and focus on writing the novel that had been coalescing in his mind for several years, precipitated by a reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian fantasy We (1924) in which the nameless but numbered citizens of One State live in glass buildings, the better to assist the secret police who watch over them.
Isolated on the remote Hebridean island of Jura, terminally ill with tuberculosis, Orwell recast the gray, bomb-ravaged London that would form the backdrop of Bowie’s childhood as the capital of Airstrip One, a province within the greater superpower of Oceania—ruled over by the Stalin-like Big Brother and locked in permanent war with rival superpower Eurasia. The novel’s working title was The Last Man in Europe. That man is thirty-nine-year-old Winston Smith, who works for the Ministry of Truth removing traitorous, vaporized “unpeople” from historical records.
It’s a miracle the book was ever finished, for Orwell had an extraordinary talent for self-sabotage. During an ill-fated boat trip in August 1946, he misread the tide tables and nearly drowned himself, his son, and his nieces and nephew. He avoided doctors for years and smoked constantly despite the terrible state of his lungs. Experimental treatment with the antibiotic streptomycin bought him extra time. Aneurin Bevan—Orwell’s former editor at Tribune, then secretary of state for health in Clement Attlee’s government, obtained the medication specially from America. It enabled Orwell to live long enough to see Nineteen Eighty-Four published, if not to luxuriate in the acclaim heaped upon it.
Nineteen Eighty-Four left a vast psychic imprint on Bowie. It’s possible, given that he remembered watching The Quatermass Experiment as a small child, that Bowie also watched its author Nigel Kneale’s BBC adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four in December 1954, starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith. However he discovered the book, though, he showed his love for it the way he knew best—extravagantly. In 1973 he hatched a grand plan to develop Nineteen Eighty-Four as a stage musical, then as a television show. But Orwell’s widow, Sonia, who controlled the rights, wasn’t having any of it. This was a major inconvenience for Bowie, who was left with a load of half-recorded material he wasn’t sure how or where to use.
The result was the album Diamond Dogs, into which he decanted songs like “Big Brother,” “1984,” and “We Are the Dead” while subtly changing the emphasis until the project felt more like Oliver Twist as rewritten by William S. Burroughs. Airstrip One became Hunger City and Diamond Dogs a portrait of disaffected youth running wild in gangs and living on rooftops—an echo, perhaps, of the kind of stories Bowie’s father, Haywood Jones, used to tell him about the displaced, war-damaged children he met in the course of his work as a publicist for the children’s charity Dr. Barnardo’s.
If the soul of Nineteen Eighty-Four exists anywhere on Diamond Dogs it’s in “We Are the Dead,” Winston’s hymn of doomed love for Julia. It is the album’s most sensuous and heartfelt moment, its title a direct quote: it’s what Winston says as he is lying with Julia, just before their hideout is raided by troops and they are separated forever.