David Bowie’s ‘Diamond Dogs’ to be released as 50th anniversary half-speed LP and picture disc

David Bowie’s 1974 album ‘Diamond Dogs’ is set to be reissued later this year to mark the record’s 50th anniversary.

• READ MORE: David Bowie’s earliest years – as told by the people who knew him best

The legendary album will be available once again, in a limited edition, half-speed mastered LP as well as a picture disc LP pressed from the same master. The records will be released on May 24 via Parlophone, on the exact day of the album’s anniversary.

Bowie produced the original album himself and played lead guitar in the absence of Mick Ronson. It came out of a period when Bowie had been attempting to make an adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as project based on the writing of William S. Burroughs, but both had fallen through.

Out of that uncertainty, Bowie started to move away from the glam rock of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Aladdin Sane’ and began embracing soul, funk, which he would later expand on with 1975’s ‘Young Americans’.

It was also announced last month that a new ‘Ziggy Stardust’-era Bowie album will be released for this year’s Record Store Day. ‘Waiting In The Sky (Before The Starman Came To Earth)’ is a collection of recordings from Trident Studios in 1971 of songs that would largely go on to form the legendary 1972 album, and will be available on Record Store Day, which is being held on April 20.

Elsewhere in Bowie news, a street in Paris was recently named after the singer, and one of his handwritten lyric sheets was estimated to fetch up to £100,000 at auction.

The documents contain the late singer’s corrections, drafts and notes to his tracks ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ and ‘Suffragette City’, both of which appeared on the seminal ‘Ziggy Stardust‘ LP.

Brian May also revealed last week that he “never liked” the final mix of Queen’s Bowie collaboration ‘Under Pressure’, saying that it lost its “heavy guitar” sound after Bowie’s input.

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