We kind of heard that a few of the East Berliners might actually get the chance to hear the thing, but we didn’t realise in what numbers they would. They’d backed up the stage to the Wall itself so that it was acting as our backdrop. “It was one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever done. Its most memorable moment would come 10 years later, when he performed it live at the Platz der Republik Festival, right across from the studio in Berlin where it was conceived. But the emotional power of the song would continue to resonate, as it became one of Bowie’s theme songs, along with the likes of Space Oddity and Changes. It only reached No.24 in the UK, and didn’t chart at all in the US. Heroes was released as a single in September 1977. I’ve put a bunch of pieces of text into the thing, then hit the ‘cut-up’ button and it slices it up for me.” There are at least ten, and two or three of them are excellent. And I’m amazed these days at the amount of cut-up sites that are now on the internet. I still find it incredibly useful as a writer’s tool. “I’ll use that idea to provoke a new set of images for me,” he explained, “or a new way of looking at a subject. As Bowie said, he often used a William Burroughs-inspired cut-up method of writing, taking random text from a book or magazine and reshuffling it. But Bowie says he was just waiting for the right meaning, the right lyrical spark, which eventually came from the lovers by the Wall.ĭelivered in one of his greatest vocal performances, the us-against-the-world theme of his lyric was full of odd poetic touches, like the lines about the dolphins. There have been rumours that Heroes was intended as an instrumental (hence Fripp’s wall-to-wall soloing). For a guitarist known for playing while seated, it’s interesting that one of his most enduring performances came from stepping and swaying. Fripp marked with adhesive tape the spots on the studio floor where he could lock into certain singing tones. What the King Crimson leader later called “hairy rock’n’roll” was more a soaring series of aria-like feedback loops. The final touch was added by guitarist Robert Fripp. “We looked at ‘feel’ as being the priority.”įrom the start, Eno described the music as “grand and heroic”, and said he had “that very word, ‘heroes’, in mind.” After the basic track was done, he overdubbed shuddering atmospherics by twiddling knobs on his EMS Synthi, a mini-synthesizer built into a briefcase. “With such great musicians the notes were never in doubt,” Bowie later said. The underlying riff of Heroes came from guitarist Carlos Alomar, with the hypnotic pulse provided by bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis. And using Eno’s ‘oblique strategies’ cards (aphorisms that encouraged lateral thinking), they would often give themselves creative dilemmas within that frame.īowie threw his restricted chord progression out to the band, and they ran with it, building an eight-minute groove into a triumphant crescendo. Their working method during Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin period’ was to build layered tracks that would later inspire lyric and melody, like making the frame before the picture. The basic track had already been started by Bowie and Brian Eno in the weeks before, with Visconti behind the mixing desk.
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