David Bowie - Heroes
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 14.10.1977
"Even if a sharp sword rests upon a person’s neck, he should not prevent himself from praying for mercy."
Just before the point of no return, David Bowie left the seductive, all-too-accessible world of Los Angeles for cold, inward-looking Berlin. The move saved his life and his career, setting in motion a transformation that would influence countless new wave artists a few years later. "Heroes", the second album in his Berlin Trilogy, was released on October 14, 1977.
In the early seventies, Bowie reinvented himself as Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy and his Spiders gradually conquered London with glam rock and mesmerizing costumes. Along the way, he also extended a helping hand to a band he loved, "Mott the Hoople".
By the middle of the decade, he was reinventing himself again in Philadelphia, embracing what he called "plastic soul". Bowie successfully moved from glam rock into blue-eyed soul and American R&B on "Young Americans", before adopting the Thin White Duke persona during the "Station to Station" period. But his move to Los Angeles also brought an addiction to a troublesome new companion: cocaine.
His extraordinary output over such a short period, coupled with the limitless possibilities Los Angeles offered, pushed the young British musician to the brink of collapse. Bowie had to bring everything to a halt. He felt like a car hurtling toward the end of a dead-end road, with a precipice just beyond it. So he turned toward the relative quiet of West Berlin.
Bowie was running from drugs, from the darkness Los Angeles had planted in his heart, and from the uncertainty America stirred in him. He brought his friend Iggy Pop along, and together the two addicts fled to West Berlin to get clean and rebuild their lives.
Berlin was then divided between East and West. Bowie traded California sunshine for the Cold War, a world where everything was within reach for the quieter rhythms of Berlin. If anything helped him leave the chaos behind, it was the city’s artists and musicians, and the sheer joy of creating.
In Berlin, Bowie encountered a mix of "Kraftwerk" electronics and the electronic rock of "Neu!".
He heard "Hero" by "Neu!", while carrying with him his love of "The Velvet Underground" and "I’m Waiting for the Man". Those influences echo in the background of "Heroes", but Bowie and Brian Eno transformed them into a work with an identity of its own.
This electronic discovery, fueled in large part by Eno, encouraged Bowie to give synthesizers a greater role in his songs. On the title track, his abrasive, almost desperate singing blends with synthesizers, Robert Fripp’s floating guitar, and the natural reverberation of the room, captured by three microphones producer Tony Visconti placed at different distances from him. The more distant microphones opened up as Bowie sang louder. This mixture of electronics, rock, and guitars helped shape a sound that would pave the way for new wave.
"Heroes" was inspired by a pair of lovers Bowie saw kissing beside the Berlin Wall from "Hansa", the studios where the album was recorded.
Bowie and Visconti later confirmed that the lovers were the album’s backing vocalist Antonia Maass and Visconti himself, who was married at the time. Bowie kept their identities secret for years to protect his friend.
Unwilling to repeat what he had done before, Bowie created a revolutionary album that was not easy to digest. Its first half consists of cool-edged funk and rock songs, while the second is largely instrumental and experimental, bringing synthesizers to the foreground. It also includes a tribute to "Kraftwerk" and band member Florian Schneider in "V-2 Schneider".
The guitars of Carlos Alomar and Fripp, George Murray’s bass, and Dennis Davis’s drumming preserve the groove and warmth even as the album’s cool, experimental atmosphere takes hold.
The album cover was photographed by Japanese photographer Masayoshi Sukita. It nods to German Expressionism and the work of painter Erich Heckel, particularly "Roquairol". Heckel was a member of "Die Brücke", a group that sought to bridge the traditions of the past and a modern, expressive approach to art.
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