"Heroes" is a song by the English musician David Bowie from his 12th studio album of the same name. Co-written by Bowie and Brian Eno and co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti, the song was recorded in mid-1977 at Hansa Studio 2 in West Berlin. The backing track was recorded fully before the lyrics were written; Bowie and Eno added synthesiser overdubs while Robert Fripp contributed guitar. To record the vocals, Visconti devised a "multi-latch" system, in which three microphones were placed at different distances from Bowie and would open when he sang loudly enough. As with other album tracks, he improvised lyrics while standing at the microphone.
An art rock song that builds throughout its run time, Heroes concerns two lovers, one each from East and West Berlin. Under constant fear of death, they dream they are free, swimming with dolphins. Bowie placed the title in quotation marks as an expression of irony on the otherwise romantic and triumphant words and music. Bowie's lyrics were primarily inspired by seeing Visconti and singer Antonia Maass kiss beside the Berlin Wall; other inspirations included a painting by Otto Mueller and a short story by Alberto Denti di Pirajno. Scholars have associated the song with Cold War Berlin, interpreting the divided city as a metaphor for personal struggles and Bowie's recovery from addiction.
On 23 September 1977, the song was released as a single, shortened by two minutes and starting with the third verse. The song initially received mostly positive reviews, with some welcoming it as a classic addition to the artist's catalogue. Bowie promoted the song with a music video and sang it on numerous television programmes, including Marc Bolan's Marc and Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas special. Bowie also released German- and French-language versions of Heroes, titled Helden and Héros, respectively. Despite its heavy promotion, the song only peaked at number 24 on the UK Singles Chart, failed to chart at all on the US Billboard Hot 100 or the Canadian Top 100; however, it reached the top 10 and the top 20 in multiple European countries and Australia.
Over time, the song's reputation has grown substantially; it is now widely considered one of Bowie's finest songs, and one of the greatest songs of all time. His biographers pan the edited single version for diminishing the song's power. Following Bowie's death in 2016, the song reached a new peak of number 12 in the UK. The song remained a staple throughout his concert tours and live performances and is Bowie's second-most-covered song after "Rebel Rebel" (1974). A version of Heroes by the Wallflowers was positively received and charted in the US and Canada in 1998. Another version by the series 7 finalists of The X Factor was a UK number one in 2010. The song has also been widely used in advertising over the years and has appeared in several television series and films.
Writing and recording Backing track
After completing his work co-producing Iggy Pop's Lust for Life (1977) and various promotional events, David Bowie spent a few weeks devising ideas and concepts with multi-instrumentalist Brian Eno for his next studio album. One idea was using the same D–G chord sequence he had used for Pop's "Success". Eno wanted to call it "Heroes", as the sequence "sounded grand and heroic", and "I had that very word – heroes – in my mind." According to the biographer Chris O'Leary, the word also paid reference to the German krautrock band Neu!'s "Hero" (1975). Recording for the album took place entirely in West Berlin between July and August 1977 at Hansa Studio 2, a former concert hall converted into a recording studio that had been used by Gestapo officers as a ballroom during World War II and was about 500 yards from the Berlin Wall. The song was co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti, with contributions from Eno.
The backing track began with Bowie on piano and the core band of Carlos Alomar on rhythm guitar, George Murray on bass and Dennis Davis on drums. The band used the initial chord progression, creating a groove that built into a crescendo, lasting eight minutes. Alomar devised the underlying riff while Murray and Davis provided the "hypnotic pulse". Although he had fed Davis's drums through his Eventide H910 Harmonizer on Low (1977), Visconti used it sparingly on the album "Heroes", only during the mixing stage; as such, the drum sound was unaltered. He ran Murray's bass through a flanger.
According to Visconti, the recording sat for a week before overdubs commenced. Eno brought in his EMS Synthi AKS, a synthesiser built in a briefcase, using its joystick, oscillator knobs and noise filter to create a "shuddering, chattering effect [that] slowly buil[t] up and g[ot] more and more obvious towards the end". Bowie also added Chamberlin and high-pitched lines on his ARP Solina synthesiser. The guitarist Robert Fripp, then on hiatus from his group King Crimson, was recruited at Eno's suggestion. Receiving little guidance from Bowie, he cut three takes all based on feedback loops. For each take, Fripp marked different spots on the studio floor with tape and played a different note in each spot, such as A at four feet from his amp and G at three feet, all while his guitar was fed through Eno's EMS Synthi.
When mixing the backing track, Visconti merged Fripp's takes onto one track, creating what he called "a dreamy, wailing quality". He buried Davis's kick drum, finding it "seemed to plod" the track and becoming "more energetic without it", and elevated Murray's bassline, which Alomar augmented on guitar in a higher register. An intended horn section was replaced with a synthesised brass line by the Chamberlin, while the bassline replaced the originally planned string section. With percussion, Visconti added tambourine and struck an empty tape canister with a drumstick to mimic a cowbell.
Vocals
Similar to Low, Bowie did not write lyrics until all but he and Visconti had departed. As such, the backing track for Heroes sat untouched for many weeks and, for a time, it was rumoured that the track would remain an instrumental. One day, Bowie asked Visconti to leave him alone in the studio to focus on writing lyrics. As he stared outside the studio window, he saw Visconti and singer Antonia Maass, who were near the Berlin Wall, kiss, which he used as the basis for the lyric. Like with other songs on "Heroes", he improvised lyrics while standing at the microphone after seeing Pop use the same method during the making of The Idiot (1977) and Lust for Life.
To record the lead vocal, Visconti devised a "multi-latch" system that would make full use of the ambience at Hansa. Three Neumann microphones were used to capture the vocal: the first, a valve U 47, was set up from Bowie; the second, a U 87, was set up away; and the third, another , about away. The two farther microphones were routed through a noise gate, which activated them as a volume-controlling device that would turn them on as Bowie's voice reached them. Visconti explained: "If he sang a little louder, the next microphone would open up with the gate, and that would make sort of this big splash of reverb, and then if he really sang loud, the back microphone would open up, and it would just open up this enormous sound."
Bowie recorded three takes, the last of which mostly appears in the final song, and was completed in about two hours. Bowie and Visconti immediately recorded the backing vocals afterwards, harmonising in thirds and fifths below the lead vocal. The final mix was done at Mountain Studios in Montreux, Switzerland, a studio that became one of Bowie's mainstays. David Richards, an engineer at Mountain, also became one of his regulars.
Composition Music
Heroes uses a standard time signature and a simple D–G chord progression. At over six minutes in length on the album, it contains five verses, some longer than others, and an outro. The verses move from D major to G major, along with C major on "nothing will keep us together" and a foray into A minor and E minor on "beat them" and "forever". The song is mainly in the D mixolydian mode, wherein the A major dominant chord is replaced with A minor, thereby swapping from the parallel minor D minor back to the tonic D major.
Richard Buskin of Sound on Sound described the song as a "highly experimental piece of art rock". The biographer David Buckley likens it to a Wall of Sound production, with a forceful and noisy arrangement of guitars, percussion and synthesisers. The author James E. Perone finds the song a "great example of contemporary pop music", balancing early 1970s progressive rock on the synthesisers to the "avant-garde tone color manipulations" from Eno. According to Bowie, the track was "a combination of Brian's piano technique and [mine] which are both dastardly", turning into a reworking of the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man" (1967), a song long admired by the artist.
The song is led by Davis's drum beat, described by Tiffany Naiman as "a steadfast marker of rock and roll rhythm ... faded way back in the mix." The scholar Maximilian Feldner compared its simple, repetitive beat to the "monotonous, motoric beat" of 1970s krautrock bands. Combined with the bass, rhythm guitar, ARP Solina synthesiser and Chamberlin parts, the song's rhythm track features layers of sound on top of one another. Naiman states that Eno's contributions on EMS Synthi "swooshes and chatters, becoming more and more clear as the track continues and develops in intensity". Visconti created the song's soundscapes, which O'Leary called a "pulsating drone". The song builds in intensity throughout its six-minute runtime, aided by percussion. The result is what Buckley calls "a droning, repetitive, oncoming, unstoppable, mechanical black of sound". Fripp's contributions, consisting of mostly feedback notes, give the song a quality described as "monumental" and "a feeling of infinity". Bowie's vocal performance begins softly with a low croon, becoming increasingly strained before turning into a high shriek during the fifth verse.
Lyrics
Heroes tells the story of two lovers, one from East Berlin and one from West Berlin. Under constant risk of death, they dream of freedom, swimming with dolphins. Similar to other album tracks "Beauty and the Beast" and "Joe the Lion", the song, at its core, represents two opposing forces: the couple's love for each other, and a sense that the Berlin Wall will separate them. The first verse is from the point of view of the man who stresses unity, while the second describes the couple's explicit love and affection for each other. Perone contends that the instrumental passages separating the third verse, wherein the narrator wishes his lover could "swim like the dolphins", represent a transition in the story. The fourth verse is a reiteration of the first, albeit Bowie sings an octave higher and in a near-scream. In the fifth and final verse, the narrator recalls standing and kissing by the Wall while guards fired bullets above their heads. Perone states that this moment captures the sense that the narrator's love can "overcome anything" and, as dolphins can freely swim as they wish, the proclamation that "we can be heroes ... gets well beyond anything the listener might have anticipated at the start of the piece".