“Sweet Thing” is the first song in David Bowie’s planned 1984 triptych; consisting of “Sweet Thing” / “Candidate” / “Sweet Thing (Reprise),” the three song suite was once at the center of Bowie’s fledgling attempts to create a theatrical stage production based on George Orwell’s genre-defining dystopian novel 1984.

Bowie’s failure to secure the rights to the story from the late author’s estate resulted in a change of narrative, and ultimately in the creation of Diamond Dogs as something of a concept album centering around themes of a glam dystopia; the end of the world with all of the rusty moral decay of something like 1984, but with less of the austerity or minimalism. According to Bowie:

“I was looking to create a profligate world that could have been inhabited by characters from Kurt Weill or John Rechy – that sort of atmosphere. A bridge between Enid Blyton’s Beckenham and The Velvet Underground’s New York. Without Noddy, though.”

While much of the album has been changed to bear a more abstract resemblance to the novel, “Sweet Thing” is still marked by tinges of paranoia, fear, and loneliness under the panoptic view of a “knowing one,” which all serve as clear homage to Orwell’s most well-known work.

In writing “Sweet Thing,” Bowie used the cut up technique, an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The process was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs.