David Bowie´s Orwell: how Nineteen Eighty-Four shaped Diamond Dogs
(WorldNews Music)

On a bright, cold day in April 1973, David Bowie and his percussionist, Geoff MacCormack, boarded the Trans-Siberian railway in Khabarovsk. The aviophobic singer was taking the long way home to London from his Japanese tour. The week-long journey to Moscow was a lark to begin with, but the closer they got to the capital, the thicker the atmosphere of tension and suspicion became. In Moscow, Bowie watched a day-long military parade from the window of his hotel on Red Square. `On my trips through Russia I thought, well, this is what fascism must have felt like,` he later said. `They marched like them. They saluted like them.` As the train to Paris passed through the no man´s land between East...