The Ministry of Truth

by Dorian Lynskey

  Rock bands assimilated the novel into rallying cries for the counterculture. “Oh, where will you be when your freedom is dead fourteen years from tonight?” asked Spirit on their single “1984,” released in the dying weeks of the 1960s. “We don’t want no Big Brother scene,” cried John Lennon (middle name Winston) on “Only People.” Towards the end of “Hey Big Brother,” the white soul group Rare Earth warned listeners, “If we don’t get our thing together, Big Brother will be watching us.” In Stevie Wonder’s cool, contemptuous “Big Brother,” BB represented the Nixon administration. Orwell’s dictator was now another name for The Man.

  It feels apt that Nineteen Eighty-Four was also one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s favourite books. Oswald was both a victim and an agent of paranoia, a condition which flourished in the 1960s and went viral in the ’70s. The Soviet mystique had largely evaporated, but so too had the rival myth of America as a citadel of freedom and fair play, eaten away by wars, scandals, cloak-and-dagger interventions, and assassinations at home and abroad. Nourished by Orwell’s own fear of being surveilled, Nineteen Eighty-Four functioned as an essential paranoid text, in which all the worst fears were justified. Yes, they are lying to you. Yes, they are watching you. Yes, paternal figures of authority will betray your trust in the most terrifying way. The Orwellian mood rhymed most potently with the spirit of the ’60s in Patrick McGoohan’s remarkable television series The Prisoner.

  McGoohan was an Irish Catholic with a tough, ironic manner which gave the impression that he knew more than he was letting on, and that he found it bleakly amusing. He would have made an excellent screen O’Brien, though his politics were very different. He attributed his fierce hatred of authority to a Catholic education reminiscent of St. Cyprian’s: “it was almost impossible to do anything that wasn’t some kind of sin.” In 1966, McGoohan used his clout as the star of the cold war spy drama Danger Man to negotiate an unprecedented budget, and complete creative control, for an extended allegory about “the way we’re being made into ciphers.”

  In The Prisoner, McGoohan plays a secret agent who resigns from the security services, is gassed into unconsciousness, and wakes up in a boutique police state called the Village to find that he no longer has a name; he is only Number Six. Orwell’s line about the future belonging to “the holiday camp, the doodle-bug and the secret police” could almost have been a blueprint for the Village’s very English totalitarianism, which masks its oppressive violence with a brisk cheerfulness. The Orwellian slogan “Questions Are a Burden to Others, Answers a Prison for Oneself ” sounds like advice from a guide to etiquette. To be rebellious—or “unmutual”—is not so much a crime as a faux pas. When people bid goodbye in the Village, where every move is monitored by cameras, they say, “Be seeing you.” Between escape attempts, Number Six tries to wake the villagers from their zombie politesse. “You still have a choice!” he hollers. “You can still salvage your right to be individuals! Your rights to truth and free thought! Reject this false world of Number Two!”

  While Number One, like Big Brother, remains unseen and unidentified, a succession of Number Twos go to outlandish lengths to find out why Number Six resigned, less for the information than for the satisfaction of breaking him. To this end, he is tortured, tricked, seduced, beaten, electroshocked, brainwashed and gaslighted over and over again. “If you insist on living a dream, you may be taken for mad,” one Number Two tells him. The philosophical meat of the show lies in the cryptic dialogues between prisoner and captor, in which questions are constantly dodged, parried or turned on their heads. The back-and-forth in the opening credits (“Who is Number One?” “You are Number Six”) has a similar evasive rhythm to Winston and O’Brien talking about Big Brother. One exchange in the second episode indicates that the location of the Village and the allegiance of its rulers are as irrelevant as the differences between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia:

  NUMBER TWO: It doesn’t matter which side runs the Village.

  NUMBER SIX: It’s run by one side or the other.

  NUMBER TWO: Oh certainly, but both sides are becoming identical. What in fact has been created is an international community—a perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they’re looking into a mirror, they will see that this is the pattern for the future.

  NUMBER SIX: The whole Earth as the Village?

  NUMBER TWO: That is my hope.

  The sternly moralistic McGoohan was no flower child, but The Prisoner’s psychedelic eccentricity, enveloping paranoia and satire of every brand of authority—bureaucracy, religion, education, media, science—chimed with the counterculture. The final episode brought that connection to the surface by putting the anarchic jester Number Forty-Eight on trial as a representative of irreverent youth, heralded by a festive blast of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.”

  In Peter Watkins’s Privilege, also released in 1967, the fascists and the rock ’n’ rollers went hand in hand. To the angry, sceptical Watkins, pop music promised not groovy liberation but submission. Narrated by Watkins and set in the mid-’70s, the mock documentary follows Steven Shorter, a pop star who is exploited by Britain’s unity government to “usefully divert the violence of youth” with his phony rebel routine: “keep them happy, off the streets and out of politics.” Played by actual pop star Paul Jones with a bewildered blankness which may or may not have been deliberate, Shorter is later relaunched as a born-again advertisement for God and flag, performing folk-rock hymns at the National Stadium, where fans chant “We will conform!” amid red-and-black banners and burning crosses. When Shorter finally revolts, he and his career are effectively plunged down the memory hole, “to ensure that he does not again misuse his position of privilege to disturb the public peace of mind.” The film ends with a crisp promise from the narrator: “It is going to be a happy year in Britain, this year in the near future.”

  Watkins wasn’t the only person who looked at a rock concert and saw Nuremberg. In October 1973, an ITV documentary called The Messengers compared glam-rock hero Marc Bolan to Adolf Hitler: “Two superstars of their time . . . totally different but both subject to mass adulation.” Looking back on Ziggy Stardust, the alien alter ego through which he willed himself to stardom, Bowie was having similar thoughts. “I could have been Hitler in England,” he told Rolling Stone. “I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.”

  In 2013, Bowie included Nineteen Eighty-Four on a list of his one hundred favourite books, alongside Inside the Whale and Other Essays and Darkness at Noon. He had been obsessed with Orwell’s novel since growing up in post-war Bromley, in a house less than a mile away from the birthplace of H. G. Wells. “You always felt you were in 1984,” he said. “That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in . . . It was a terribly inhibiting place.”

  In November 1973, Bowie told the novelist William Burroughs that he was adapting the novel for television and gave his NBC TV special the mischievous title The 1980 Floor Show. During the show he debuted a new song called “1984/Dodo,” one of twenty he claimed to have composed for the adaptation, although attempts to write an actual script with the American playwright Tony Ingrassia had come to nothing. He was therefore furious when Sonia Orwell refused permission for his rock musical. “For a person who married a Socialist with Communist leanings, she was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in my life,” he told Circus writer Ben Edmonds. “ ‘Good heavens, put it to music?’ It really was like that.” Doubtless Sonia did hate the idea, but then she had approved almost no adaptations in any medium since the fiasco of the 1956 movie, and she certainly didn’t meet Bowie in person, so that anecdote can be taken with a pinch of salt.33 It’s debatable whether a hypermodern, hedonistic, bisexual rock star would have had better luck with a seventy-year-old Orwell, especially if he had told him he had communist leanings.

  Bowie’s eighth album, initially titled We Are the
Dead, was therefore a salvage operation. “To be quite honest with you . . . the whole thing was originally 19-bloody-84,” he told Edmonds. “It was the musical, and she put the clappers on it by saying no. So I, at the last minute, quickly changed it into a new concept album called Diamond Dogs. I didn’t ever want to do Diamond Dogs as a stage musical; what I wanted was 1984.”

  Diamond Dogs was a sick joke from a mind at the end of its tether, writhing with decadence, disease and dread. Bowie called it “a backward look at the sixties and seventies and a very political album. My protest.” It was stitched together from the body parts of two abandoned projects—Nineteen Eighty-Four and a Ziggy Stardust stage musical—and a vivid but half-baked narrative about a place called Hunger City. In the title track and the spoken-word intro “Future Legend,” Hunger City emerges as a very ’70s dystopia, where feral urchins squat atop abandoned skyscrapers and prowl the streets on roller skates (due to the fuel crisis) to loot jewels and furs. “I had in my mind this kind of half Wild Boys/1984 world,” Bowie explained, adding that the gang members “staggered through from Clockwork Orange too.”34 The brutal youth of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie version were an enduring influence: a lurid flash of colour that Bowie couldn’t find in Airstrip One. “That was our world, not the bloody hippy thing,” he later said. Although Burgess came to see it as “not, in my view, a very good novel,” A Clockwork Orange offered the most compelling and original near-future society since Orwell’s, updating the struggle between freedom and control for the era of Mods and Rockers and telling the story in Nadsat, an Anglo-Russian teen slang. Like Winston, Burgess’s violent protagonist Alex is mentally destroyed by the state in order to create an obedient citizen. “It is better to have our streets infested with murderous hoodlums than to deny individual freedom of choice,” Burgess explained.

  As for Orwell’s mark on Diamond Dogs, it might be fanciful to trace the image in “Future Legend” of “rats the size of cats” back to the old army song quoted in Homage to Catalonia (“Rats as big as cats”), but then again, anything was possible now that Bowie was obsessed with William Burroughs’s cut-up writing technique. Bowie’s previous album, Pin Ups, consisted of cover versions, and Diamond Dogs was, in a way, his irreverent cover, or sampling, of Nineteen Eighty-Four, collaging his own preoccupations with fragments of the novel to phantasmagoric effect. Bowie was the first person to treat the book as a trove of fungible ideas and images, famous enough to mess around with.

  Some of the fragments are substantial. The gothic hysteria of “We Are the Dead” reimagines Winston and Julia’s final moments before their arrest: “Oh dress yourself my urchin one, for I hear them on the stairs.” “Dodo,” dropped from the album but released later, feels like Winston waking from a dream inside the Ministry of Love as it scatters references to informants, memos, files and “scorching light” around a strikingly precise account of Parsons’s betrayal by his daughter. “Big Brother” is an anthem of ecstatic supplication to power: “Someone to claim us, someone to follow . . .” John Lennon and Stevie Wonder predictably hated Big Brother; only Bowie could imagine loving him. Other references are more fleeting. How many listeners to the funk melodrama of “1984” have spotted a reference to the year that Orwell’s alleged traitors Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford were arrested (“Looking for the treason that I knew in ’65”), or noticed that the reference to a “room to rent” allows “Rock ’n’ Roll With Me,” ostensibly about Bowie’s relationship with his audience, to be also read as a desperate love song about Winston and Julia? And when he sings “I’m looking for a party” in “1984,” it isn’t necessarily the fun lower-case kind. It was as if Bowie were leaving a breadcrumb trail for fellow Orwell buffs to follow.

  The closing track, “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” is the Two Minutes Hate rendered as a diabolical dance craze. It ends (or fails to end) with a stuttering metallic loop of bruh-bruh-bruh-bruh which threatens to last forever, like a boot stamping on a human face.

  According to pianist Mike Garson, the Diamond Dogs sessions, in January and February 1974, had “a heavy vibe.” So, too, did Britain, gripped by the three-day week and an unusually panicky general election campaign. In his election report, “Battle of Britain, 1974,” bemused New York Times writer Richard Eder diagnosed the country’s crisis as primarily psychological. Times were hard, he wrote, but not hard enough to justify “the warnings from right and left, in the newspapers, on television, that the fabric of British society is about to be ripped up.” Visiting from a country wracked by Watergate and recession, Eder wondered how this famously sensible island nation had lost its mind: “It is very difficult to make any assertion about the future in this peculiarly British climate that mingles hysteria, humour, despair and optimism.”

  The same four conditions contributed to the queasy brew of Diamond Dogs. Released on May 24, it was billed as an album that “conceptualizes the vision of a future world with images of urban decadence and collapse.” Collapse, like crisis, was a word on every commentator’s lips. Nobody looks for political consistency in a rock album, but there is a fundamental contradiction between Airstrip One and Hunger City. One state has absolute control, the other none at all. Bowie seemed both thrilled and alarmed in equal measure by totalitarianism and post-apocalyptic anarchy, but the fact that the most blissful, stirring song on the album was “Big Brother” was an unsettling clue as to where he was headed.

  For the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie gave set designer Mark Ravitz three cues: “Power, Nuremberg and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” The singer also made sketches and models for a never-realised Hunger City film, which would open on the lower floors of the “World Assembly building,” where the city’s mutant dregs would indulge in gambling, pornography and a synthetic foodstuff called “mealcaine.” The word was a fair description of Bowie’s own diet at the time. Since he started taking cocaine the previous autumn, he had become vampirically pale and thin: a human white line. For an already paranoid man, it was not a wise choice.

  Bowie was living in America now. He was done with England, and with rock ’n’ roll. His next album, Young Americans, explored a new black-influenced sound he called “plastic soul.” Its most disturbing song, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” is a slick, insinuating rumination on power narrated by a character who merges the roles of messianic rock star, demagogic politician and advertising pitchman.35 “Really I’m a very one-track person,” Bowie explained. “What I’ve said for years under various guises is that ‘Watch out, the West is going to have a Hitler!’ I’ve said it in a thousand different ways.”

  In interviews, however, he began to drop the “Watch out!” as his long-standing obsessions with power, mass media, Nietzschean supermen, black magic and the Nazi mystique curdled into something grotesque. Hitler, he said admiringly, was a “media artist” who “staged a country.” Liberal democracy had grown weak and decadent, and needed a revival of “a very medieval, firm-handed, masculine God awareness where we go out and make the world right again.” It would take a temporary fascist dictatorship. “You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up,” Bowie said, sounding rather like H. G. Wells at his worst. “Then you can get a new form of liberalism.”

  Reading these interviews in the light of Bowie’s subsequent liberal-left politics, the obvious explanation is that he was a paranoid, cocaine-maddened, sleep-deprived, deeply confused man searching for answers in dangerous places and amusing himself by throwing borderline incoherent provocations at hippyish music journalists. Bowie soon grew out of this phase when he moved to Berlin, where totalitarianism was a past and present reality, not a rock star’s babbling daydream. Looking back with a shudder many years later, he said: “my whole life would be transformed into this bizarre nihilistic fantasy world of oncoming doom, mythological characters and imminent totalitarianism. Quite the worst.”

  It speaks volumes about the fervid climate of the m
id-’70s that several members of the British establishment who had never touched a narcotic in their lives were thinking along similar lines. At one point Bowie tried to justify his outlandish comments as “a theatrical observation of what I could see happening in England.” True enough, for the first time since the 1940s, powerful people were talking seriously about dictatorship.

  Whispers of a coup first bubbled to the surface in December 1973, in Patrick Cosgrave’s Spectator article. Two months later, while Bowie was immersed in Diamond Dogs, the far-right Conservative candidate and former deputy director of MI6 George Kennedy Young raised the stakes by leaking news of his Unison Committee for Action to Chapman Pincher, the security correspondent of The Daily Express. Pincher reported that leading businessmen, ex-servicemen and former intelligence operatives had formed “a formidable vigilante group to help protect the nation against a Communist takeover” and quoted Young anonymously: “We are not Fascists. We are democratic Britons who put the nation’s interests before those of Russia and its political agents.” Young later called Unison “an anti-Chaos organisation.”

  Young was floating a more extreme version of sentiments that Conservatives were expressing openly during the February general election campaign. The Tory manifesto claimed that Harold Wilson’s Labour Party had been infiltrated by hardliners who were “committed to a left-wing programme more dangerous and more extreme than ever before in its history.” The right-wing lobby group Aims of Industry took out full-page newspaper ads which, echoing the anti-POUM posters of 1937, tore aside a smiling mask to reveal the face of Stalin. Their bogeymen were left-wing Labour MPs, led by Tony Benn, and union leaders such as Mick McGahey, the openly communist vice-president of the National Union of Mineworkers. The fear cut both ways. Several union leaders, hearing rumours of assassination plots, required armed guards. After all that, the election resulted in a hung Parliament and Wilson, who had served as prime minister from 1964 to 1970, returned to Number 10 Downing Street on March 5 at the helm of a minority government. The famously intelligent and upbeat Wilson was now ailing, paranoid and rudderless, much like his country between the February and October elections.