" coz we're the diamond dogs !"

“coz we’re the diamond dogs”

A-ha! This is going to be good.......not many people know this.

Not one, but TWO artists sang about the "diamond dogs!" A-hoooo!!

It's the scale of the joke, the humour of this which 'tickles' me; the fact that it's been 38 years and hardly anyone's picked up on it, not even Bowie's esteemed (a-hem!!) biographers!

Let's retrace a bit......to the mid-70s.

THREE times I've had gold-dust in my hands (not that I cared then, nor now), for I had other choices to make (which I did).

On the first occasion I found myself in Windsor or Slough (or somewhere equally non-descript) piling into the records in a rack. Always a compulsive digger. Right in front of me is a 12" cover of Hard On Love, the soon-to-be-withdrawn (never released, until recently) version of Bolan demos (by Napier-Bell). This was to become a 1974 release as The Beginning of Doves. I never bought my find and thought it was one of these cheap cash-ins that were popping up all the time, like the MFP releases. Nobody's believed this tale, then or now.

The next discovery happened at Cyclops Records in Birmingham (1974). This was a small but well-known place, whose owner had expert knowledge of rock music, etc. There in the rack in front of me, for the miserly price of £3.50, was a John Kosh cover (limited numbered edition) of "A Creamed Cage in August," the name of this site! The reason for my choice of this name for my site is simple - this was the real title of the album; the artist was Zinc Alloy & the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow. No Bolan. No Rex. Of course, EMI choked on this & baulked at the suggestion of a career-changing name/direction by its top artist (whose career they felt was spiralling badly). Consequently, they compromised and put in a red band across the corner of the album cover with the name of "Marc Bolan & T.Rex." Sticking T.Rex after his name made matters worse for fans, since they saw it as megalomania on Marc's part and demeaning to the musicians. Worse still, it was assumed that the artist, Zinc Alloy & the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow, was the title and that it was a cheap copy of Bowie's idea for the Ziggy title! This is still assumed to be the case today, even by Bowie's top biographers! So, Marc eats humble pie & EMI get their cheap red sticker-type name on the cover, as if the fans wouldn't have spotted Marc's exorcistic face on the cover!  And......it had been plugged to death on UK radio anyway!!

So, to curtail this long-short story (to paraphrase an icon), I did what any reasonable person would do - I left it there! Now these albums are going for £1500 each, if they ever appear on the market. I had been after a copy of Roxy Music's "Stranded" for sometime and that is why someone else is £1500 richer, bolanically-speaking.

And so to the third and final shopping debacle, which leads us to the real point of all this.

On another occasion, sometime in 1975, again in Birmingham, in some cheap sprawling basement supermarket which preceded the likes of Hypervalue & H & M, I was flicking through a rack of very cheap soul albums. (I was really into Curtis Mayfield by now - perhaps Bowie was watching me!).

There in front of me appeared this weird-looking T.Rex cover. I flipped it over & saw what I presumed to be another awful compilation. It transpired to be the Casablanca import, "Light of Love." This comprised Bolan's new recordings for the American market and some stuff from the Zinc Alloy sessions. Since I knew nothing of the machinations of label-management at the time and about Marc's signing to Casablanca in the States, I thought I was holding a pile of shit. Some may argue still that I was! Naturally, I left it there, since I had a copy of Zip Gun, which had more tracks on it! Logic.

Fortunately, today, I am the proud owner of a Promotional version of the 12" vinyl of this album, which is NOT FOR RESALE, of course. Collecting came very slowly to me. Now to the point of all this........

Missing from the latter platter (I can get away with this here) were three songs, which did appear on the UK album. These were "I Really Love You, Babe" "Golden Belt" & "Zip Gun Boogie," described as "execrable" by one journalist. One of my mates in Birmingham liked this track so much I gave him my single! There's two poles.....

"I Really Love You, Babe" is a pretty banal title. Obviously, it meant more to its author. The lyrics are far from banal, being both convoluted and tricky to decipher, tumbling out of the verse-chorus structure. The diction is not the easiest to understand during this period, since there is a very nasal tone to all the tracks, possibly from coke-inhalation or a mix of this and studio dynamics. There have been many published versions of these tunes, especially on the web, but closer inspection renders these disturbingly dodgy. There are several verses in IRLYB. During the last one most writers have a lyric line

"times worn, words wrong"

then .....

"until my angel comes.....ooh!"

Whatever IS sung here, there is an issue, for after the 1st line above, there are definitely 4, if not 5 syllables uttered, before the next line "until my angel comes." No matter what the correct words may be, no manuscript of the lyrics of this album has the missing line - and it is a complete line which is missing. Why?

"until my angel comes" could refer, of course, to kinetic meanings - she is coming to me.

or....knowing the author's preclivity for innuendo & cheek, it could refer to sexual stimulation - she's having an orgasm!

so, the missing line (if known to the publishers & it must be) could be rude.....who knows?

We tend to forget that, because the singles were so huge and widely-popular, the titles get ignored, semiotically. "Hot Love" is like a modern-day crude chat-line or porn site & "Get it on" does what it says on the tin. Live, he always sang at the end of Jeepster, "I'm gonna fuck ya!" not "suck ya."

On Telegram Sam, it was not "Sam says, 'Get stuffed!' " But "Sam says, 'Get fucked!' "

It was always tongue-in-cheek, too, and very funny live.

Whatever the truth, these published lyrics have to be treated with caution at best and more suspicion, I feel.

Now for the coup-de-grace.....after this verse, instead of chanting "I really love you, babe" as he does on every other verse (along with the backing singers), he loudly and UNMISTAKENLY lets rip with.........

"coz we're the diamond dogs ! "

And noone has mentioned it EVER in the music press or in any biography (Bowie or Bolan) !!

So what's going on here, then?