There’s a moment in the making of “Heroes” that tells you everything you need to know about how the record was put together. Producer Tony Visconti is sitting at his desk in Hansa Studio 2 in West Berlin. Through the window, three Soviet Red Guards are staring back at him through binoculars, Sten guns over their shoulders. Behind them: barbed wire, and a wall with mines buried in it. Visconti later said the band played with a kind of energy that the atmosphere simply demanded of them. He called it “one of my last great adventures in making albums.”
That studio — a former concert hall that Gestapo officers had once used as a ballroom — sat roughly 500 yards from the Berlin Wall. You can hear that geography in the music. The tension. The longing. The peculiar mixture of darkness and defiance that runs through every track.
Released in October 1977, “Heroes” was the second chapter in what became known as Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, following Low from earlier that same year. It was made quickly, intuitively, with lyrics improvised on the spot, guitars recorded by a man who hadn’t played in three years, and a title track born from a kiss Bowie witnessed through a studio window. Here are five things about it that might surprise you.
The Guitarist Had Never Heard the Songs Before He Played Them
Robert Fripp, then on hiatus from King Crimson, received a phone call from Brian Eno in July 1977. Eno passed the phone to Bowie, who asked if Fripp would be interested in playing “some hairy rock ‘n’ roll guitar.” Fripp said he hadn’t really played in three years, but if they were prepared to take a risk, so was he. A first-class Lufthansa ticket arrived shortly after.
When Fripp got to the studio, he sat down and recorded lead guitar parts for tracks he had never heard before. Bowie gave him almost no guidance — he hadn’t even written his vocals or melodies yet. Fripp cut all of his guitar parts across just three days. For the title track specifically, he marked different spots on the studio floor with tape and played a different note at each position — A at four feet from his amp, G at three feet — all while his guitar was routed through Eno’s synthesizer. Visconti merged the three takes into one, creating what he described as a “dreamy, wailing quality.” Both Visconti and Eno were stunned by Fripp’s ability to perform with such precision for songs he had never heard.
Bowie Wrote the Lyrics to “Heroes” by Spying on His Own Producer
The backing track for the title track sat untouched for weeks. There was even a rumour it might remain an instrumental. Then one day Bowie asked Visconti to leave him alone in the studio so he could focus on writing. As he stood at the window staring out, he watched Visconti and backing singer Antonia Maass share a kiss close to the Berlin Wall — and used it as the basis for the lyric.
Bowie initially claimed the song was about an anonymous young couple. He kept the secret for over two decades, because Visconti was married to singer Mary Hopkin at the time. It wasn’t until 2003, long after Visconti and Hopkin had divorced, that Bowie confirmed the story: “Tony was married at the time, and I could never say who it was. I think possibly the marriage was in the last few months, and it was very touching because I could see that Tony was very much in love with this girl, and it was that relationship which sort of motivated the song.”
The Vocal Was Recorded With Three Microphones at Three Different Distances — and the Farther Ones Only Switched On When Bowie Screamed
To capture the escalating emotional intensity of the vocal — that famous build from a near-whisper to an all-out howl — Visconti devised what he called a “multi-latch” system. Three Neumann microphones were placed at different distances from Bowie: one nine inches away, one 20 feet back, and one about 50 feet away. The two farther microphones were routed through a noise gate, a device that would only open them when Bowie’s voice grew loud enough to reach them.
As Visconti explained: when Bowie sang a little louder, the second microphone would open with a big splash of reverb; when he really let loose, the third would open up and create an enormous sound. The result is that the song physically expands as it progresses — the room itself seems to grow. Bowie recorded three takes in about two hours. Immediately after, he and Visconti recorded the backing vocals, harmonising in thirds and fifths below the lead.
The Title Track Was Initially a Commercial Failure
For a song now considered one of the greatest ever recorded — ranked 23rd on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time — “Heroes” had a remarkably underwhelming debut. Released as the lead single in September 1977, it peaked at number 24 on the UK Singles Chart and failed to chart at all on the US Billboard Hot 100. Despite Bowie promoting it extensively — performing on Top of the Pops, appearing on Marc Bolan’s television series, and filming it with Bing Crosby just weeks before Crosby died — the song simply didn’t connect with the singles-buying public at the time.
According to biographers Nicholas Pegg and Chris O’Leary, it wasn’t until Bowie performed it at Live Aid in 1985 — eight years after its release — that the song finally became recognised as the classic it is. Bowie himself acknowledged the strange phenomenon: “Many of the crowd favourites were never radio or chart hits, and ‘Heroes’ tops them all.”
The Cover Was Shot in Tokyo, and the Pose Was Inspired by a German Expressionist Painting Bowie Saw in Berlin
The striking black-and-white photograph on the cover — Bowie with his hands raised, eyes wild, frozen in what biographer Nicholas Pegg called a “pose of serio-comic agitation” — was taken by Japanese photographer Masayoshi Sukita at Harajuku Studios in Tokyo in April 1977, months before the album was even recorded.
The pose itself was a deliberate nod to Erich Heckel’s 1917 expressionist painting Roquairol, which Bowie had encountered during a visit to the Brücke Museum in Berlin. The same painting had inspired the cover of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, which Bowie had also produced. When asked about the quotation marks around the word Heroes in the album title, Bowie was direct: they were there to indicate “a dimension of irony about the word ‘heroes’ or about the whole concept of heroism.” Visconti offered a different take — that the album was heroic because it was one of the most positive periods of Bowie’s life, and during the making of it, everyone in that room by the Wall felt like heroes.
