David Bowie Songs You Didn't Know Were Inspired By George Orwell's 1984

David Bowie's forever future-forward songwriting inspirations took a dark turn in the early 1970s when he plumbed George Orwell's bleak dystopian novel "1984" for multiple tunes. Published in 1949, the book details life in the nightmarish, distant year of 1984, where the totalitarian Big Brother government rules and watches over all of Oceania, threatening freedoms with the Party's omnipresent Thought Police. There's a lot of scary stuff about contemporary politics and society to unpack in the chilling bestseller, and Bowie called it one of his most-loved books. 

In 1973, Bowie disclosed that he was in the process of writing a musical for a television adaptation of "1984" and that he'd written 20 songs for the project to go along with a script co-written by playwright Tony Ingrassia. It ultimately never happened because Orwell's widow and "1984" rights-holder Sonia Orwell wouldn't grant Bowie the legal go-ahead. Left with material explicitly about "1984" if not its relevant themes of an increasingly impersonal and dreary society living under a police state, Bowie padded out his LP "Diamond Dogs." The 1974 album features four such underheard and underrated Bowie songs that fit the bill: the lead-off track "Future Legend," and three consecutive flip-side deep cuts: "We Are the Dead," "1984," and "Big Brother." Here's how David Bowie wrote and recorded so many songs about George Orwell's "1984."

A minute-long prelude to the title track of "Diamond Dogs," "Future Legend" is a story snapshot, a grimy and visceral look at a terrible metropolis as it stands in ruin many decades along. With imagery and language suggestive of George Orwell's "1984," David Bowie delivers a spoken-word monologue set to music foretelling great science-fiction dystopian doom.

According to "Future Legend," a city eerily suggestive of New York now called Hunger City is strewn with dead bodies and infested with rat-sized fleas, cat-sized rats, and a greatly decimated population that has separated into factions that slaughter wild animals and repurpose their skins into clothes. That's all in advance of what Bowie ominously declares "The year of the Diamond Dogs." To contrast starkly with the nostalgic feelings associated with the past, Bowie interpolates a portion of the standard and show tune "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," making the whole piece that much more jarring and reminiscent of Orwell's enveloping novel.

"We Are the Dead" kicks off a triptych of songs near the end of "Diamond Dogs" that explore the world of George Orwell's "1984" in fine detail, and how the real world might someday unfortunately resemble it, per singer-songwriter David Bowie. Perhaps still stinging from the unrealized "1984" full-blown musical presentation, "We Are the Dead" is the only track from "Diamond Dogs" that the musician never re-created in concert, not even the tour that nearly killed Bowie.

The lyrics are rife with references to "1984," although Bowie doesn't quite name the characters whose lives or mental states he uncannily inhabited. Part of the plot of the book presented in "We Are the Dead" concerns hero Winston's Smith's affections for his beloved Julia, a relationship that can only careen toward an unhappy ending. "I hear them on the stairs," Bowie half-whispers, a call-out to the villainous Thought Police as they descend on the lovers in pursuit of Winston. In the book, "We are the dead" is the refrain the couple utters during that tense moment; Bowie ends the song with a similar recitation. The weird, layered vocals, feedback, and synthesizers make for an uncomfortable futuristic sound on "We Are the Dead," which Bowie nearly made the LP's title track before settling on "Diamond Dogs."

Unsurprisingly and obviously, "1984" was a leftover from David Bowie's "1984" musical, and it was intended to be the big showcase song. He even performed it publicly months before "Diamond Dogs," the album where it would find its forever home, was released to stores. Bowie was so eager to get going on the "1984" musical that he amusingly called the 1973 NBC TV special where he debuted the number (as part of a medley with the composition "Dodo") "The 1980 Floor Show." When it became clear the musical wouldn't come to pass, Bowie hit the studio to record "1984" in a different way than he'd presented it on television, speeding it up and adding crunchy guitar and strings until it sounded like proto-disco.

Aurally, "1984" is buoyant, chippy, and funky, a Bowie song that sounds even cooler today. Lyrically, it's dark and harrowing because the task Bowie gave himself was to present and explain the feel of the novel-turned-musical. "Someday they won't let you, now you must agree," Bowie begins before he describes "the savage jaw of 1984."

Both a symbolic ideological figurehead and a totalitarian politician ruling over much of the relentlessly surveilled Earth in George Orwell's "1984," the entity known only as Big Brother leads the Ingsoc Party and is the inspiration for the much-uttered phrase "Big Brother is watching you." This is the same concept David Bowie wrote and sang about on his 1974 "Diamond Dogs" entry "Big Brother."

Completing the "1984" suite, the creepy "Big Brother" examines the mass mindset that can lead to an iron-fisted political system. As Bowie sees it, the people clamor for Big Brother or something like him because he provides structure and saves them from themselves. He's "someone to claim us," "someone to follow," and "someone to shame us" all in one. By calling him "someone," Bowie suggests that almost anyone could be that Big Brother, underlining his point with an unsettling musical melange of keyboards and off-kilter brass instruments.