Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are unpacking
something that, well, I was looking through the
notes this morning, and the gap between how we
perceive this topic today versus the reality
of its creation is just wild. Oh yeah, it really
is. We are of course talking about David Bowie's
Heroes, and we are pulling all our facts today
from the main Wikipedia entry for this song.
Which is a fantastic source for this. It is because,
you know, we think of this song as this monolithic
anthem today. It's a piece of sonic architecture
that totally defined an era. It's played at the
Olympics. It's all over pop culture. It's practically
the alternative national anthem of the UK at
this point. It's an absolute titan of a track.
But, and this is the crazy part, if you look
at the charts from late 1977, you would assume
it was a total failure. Yeah, that's the part
that really catches you off guard. It's widely
considered one of the greatest songs ever written.
Maybe Bowie's absolute masterpiece. Yet when
it dropped, it didn't even chart on the Billboard
Hot 100 in the US. Not even a blip. And in the
UK, it stalled out at number 24. So it was essentially
a commercial flop initially. Which is baffling
to us now. But it makes sense when you actually
dissect what the song is. I mean, it's not a
standard rock song. No, not at all. It is basically
a six -minute experiment in tension. And it was
recorded in a former Gestapo ballroom in West
Berlin featuring a guitarist playing my tape
marks on the floor because he couldn't control
his own instrument otherwise. So that is our
mission for you today. We need to unpack how
a track built on such strange, almost hostile
technical foundations, and frankly, a very cynical
lyrical premise, morphed into the world's most
enduring anthem of hope. It's quite a journey.
It really is. And I think we have to start with
the title itself. Because the clue has been staring
us in the face on the album cover for 40 years.
You mean the punctuation. Exactly. The punctuation.
It's not just the word heroes. It's heroes in
quotation marks. Yes. I remember seeing the vinyl
years ago and thinking, oh, that's just a cool
stylistic design choice. But it's actually doing
a lot of heavy lifting for the whole concept,
isn't it? It's doing all the lifting, honestly.
Bowie and Brian Eno, who co -wrote the track,
they were very specific about those quotes. They
insisted on them. Right. They signal irony. Because
Bowie wasn't writing about... superman or these
grand mythological figures he was writing about
desperate small people who are indulging in a
romantic fantasy of heroism just for one day
exactly just for one day that completely reframes
the whole chorus for me yeah it's not this triumphant
we are heroes it's more like We can pretend to
be heroes. Precisely. It's about facing a really
grim reality and choosing to escape it for a
moment, knowing full well that the reality is
still going to be there waiting for you tomorrow.
Wow. And to really understand why that escapism
was so necessary, you have to look at where they
were physically standing when they recorded this.
Right. So let's set the scene. It's West Berlin,
summer of 1977. Bowie is there trying to clean
up his life, basically getting away from the
cocaine psychosis of Los Angeles. Yeah, a dark
period for him. Very dark. And he lands at Hansa
Studio 2. Also known as Hansa by the Wall. And
that is not a nickname you take lightly. Yeah.
The studio was a converted concert hall. During
World War II, it had actually been a ballroom
for Gestapo officers. That is just so heavy.
It is. So the acoustic space they are recording
in is already haunted by this incredibly dark
history. And geographically, it's right on the
jagged edge of the Cold War. The Wikipedia article
notes it was only about 500 yards from the Berlin
Wall. It was so close that the Red Army guards
in the watchtowers could actually look through
the window right into the control room. That
is such a surreal image. Isn't it? You're trying
to make art. You're trying to find this new sound.
And you look up from the mixing board and see
a soldier with a rifle staring at you from East
Germany. It creates a complete pressure cooker
environment. You have that tension baked directly
into the DNA of the recording. You can hear it.
You really can. In a room designed for ballroom
dancing, used by the Nazis, now overlooked by
communists, and you're trying to invent the future
of music. And the sound they found, it's just
incredibly thick. It doesn't sound like a band
playing in a room. It sounds like a literal wall
of noise coming at you. The wall of sound. Yes.
And I know Brian Eno was... crucial for this
texture, he brought a very different approach
than a traditional rock producer would have.
Eno brought the whole concept of heroism before
there were even any lyrics. He had this chord
sequence that he said sounded grand and heroic.
But the instrumentation is where it gets really
weird, right? Oh, very weird. He was using an
EMS Cynthia AKS. Okay, that's the synthesizer
that looks like a battleship board game built
into a briefcase, right? That's the exact one.
I love that thing. It's wild. And it has this
tiny little joystick on it. Eno used that joystick
to create this shuddering, chattering effect.
Like a stutter. Exactly. It's not musical in
a melodic sense at all. If you isolate that track,
it literally sounds like machinery breaking down.
It's just noise. Yeah. But he runs it through
the entire song, and it slowly builds up and
up in the background. It creates this underlying
anxiety that just accumulates as the track goes
on. So it counters the heroism of the chords.
Perfectly. The chords are swelling and going
up, but the synth is just chattering away like
a nervous d***. Right. And then you add Robert
Fripp to the mix. Okay. The King Crimson guitarist.
This has to be one of my favorite stories in
rock history. It's legendary. So Fripp flies
in from New York, records his parts in a single
day, and then just leaves. Yep. In and out. And
apparently, Bowie gave him almost zero guidance
on what to play. Pretty much just, here is the
track, good luck. But Fripp didn't play standard
chords. He realized that in a room that massive,
at that sheer volume, he could play the room
itself. He was using feedback. Exactly. Which
is crazy because usually as a guitarist, you're
constantly trying to kill feedback. It's the
screech you don't want. But Fripp wanted to harness
it. He actually marked different spots on the
studio floor with tape. Tape marks. Yeah, he
figured out the physics of the room. If he stood
at one mark, let's say four feet from his amp,
the feedback loop would sustain a perfect G note.
If he moved to another mark three feet away,
he'd get an A. So the performance isn't just
his fingers on the fretboard. It's his physical
position in the room. He's essentially dancing
with the amplifier. He is physically moving through
the space to generate the pitch. And then Tony
Visconti, the producer. took three of those takes
and layered them on top of each other three layers
of feedback right that's why the guitar on heroes
doesn't sound like strumming it has this dreamy
wailing quality it sounds like a siren or a scream
that never quite takes a breath it feels unstable
which fits the theme perfectly the guitar sounds
like it's struggling to sustain itself just like
the heroes in the song that makes total sense
now we have to talk about the rhythm section
because for a song that feels so driving The
mix is very unusual. Ah, the Visconti mix. He
made a very bold decision with the drums. What
did he do? Well, usually in rock music, the kick
drum, the bass drum, is your anchor. It hits
you right in the chest. But Visconti felt the
kick was making the track plod. Like it was too
heavy. Too heavy, too grounded. So he just turned
it down. He essentially buried it. If you listen
closely, you can barely hear the kick drum in
the final mix. That's so counterintuitive. It
is. but instead he pushed the bass guitar and
the snare up and that gives the track a floating
quality it's driving forward but it's not stomping
on the ground it's propelling you without dragging
you down exactly and then there's the cowbell
Or rather what people think is a cowbell. Right,
the famous cowbell. It sounds like one, but it's
actually a metal tape canister that Visconti
salvaged from the trash. From the garbage. Yeah,
he literally just hit it with a drumstick. Which
again, adds to that industrial scavenged feel
of Berlin. It's not polished studio gear. It's
literally garbage being used to keep the beat.
It's brilliant. But all of this, the feedback,
the chattering synth, the trash canister, it's
really just the bed for the vocal. And this is
where I think the true genius of the track really
lives. The vocal recording of Heroes is arguably
one of the greatest feats of audio engineering
in the entire 1970s. That's a big statement,
but I think the source backs it up. It absolutely
does. The challenge they had was narrative. Bowie
had this idea for a vocal that starts very intimate
and conversational, almost whispering. But by
the end, he wanted to be screaming his lungs
out. Now, in a modern studio, you just record
that in sections. Or you'd use a digital compressor
to squash the loud parts so they don't clip the
microphone. Exactly. Or you'd just have the engineer
ride the fader, turn him up when he's quiet,
turn him down when he gets loud. Right. But Visconti
wanted to use the natural ambience of that massive
former Gestapo ballroom. He wanted the room itself
to be a part of the performance. So what did
he do? He invented a multi -latch system using
three microphones. This is such a cool setup.
Walk us through the spacing of these mics because
that's the key. Okay, so microphone one is a
high -end valve U47. It's placed exactly nine
inches from Bowie's face. Very close. Right.
That captures the dry, intimate sound you hear
in the first verse. I will be king. It sounds
like he's right in your ear. Then you have microphone
two. Mic two is a U87 placed about 20 feet away
from him. And microphone three is another U87
placed 50 feet away, basically at the very back
of the hall. Wow. 50 feet. And this is the true
innovation. The two farm microphones were muted.
They had electronic gates on them. So they're
effectively turned off. Until his specific condition
is met. Exactly. They were set to open only when
Bowie sang loud enough to trigger them. Oh, that's
incredibly clever. So for the first couple of
minutes of the song, Bowie is singing softly.
Only the close mic is active. It sounds dry and
intimate. Right. But as he starts to push his
voice in the middle verses, he hits the volume
threshold for the second mic. The gate snaps
open. And suddenly you hear the reverb of 20
feet of space. Yes. The sound physically widens.
And then when he gets to the climax, the big
I, I will be king scream, he hits the volume
threshold for the third mic at 50 feet. And that
gate slams open and you get the full cavernous
roar of the entire ballroom echoing behind him.
It's brilliant. Yeah. Because it means the acoustic
space of the song actually expands in real time
with his emotion. That's exactly it. He starts
in a tiny box and he ends up in a cathedral.
And the best part is he didn't have to think
about it while he was singing. He just performed
the emotion and the room responded to him physically.
Amazing. They did three takes, but the final
version you hear on the record is mostly just
that last take, unbroken. It captures a genuine
progression from calm to total desperation without
an engineer ever touching a volume fader. That
progression mirrors the lyrics perfectly, too.
We start with a couple standing by the wall,
and by the end, we're in this desperate screaming
plea. It fits the story. Let's talk about that
couple. The lyrics say, standing by the wall,
and the guns shot above our heads. It's incredibly
cinematic. It is. And for a long time, the story
behind those lyrics was just part of the Bowie
mythology. Right, the official story. Yeah. Bowie
always told interviewers that he asked Visconti
to leave him alone in the control room so he
could write lyrics. He claimed he looked out
the window and saw this anonymous couple kissing
in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, and he just
documented what he saw. But according to the
Wikipedia deep dive, that was a cover story.
It was a very necessary lie. It wasn't an anonymous
couple at all. Who was it? In 2003, Bowie finally
admitted that the couple he saw out the window
was actually his producer, Tony Visconti, and
a backing singer named Antonia Mass. And the
problem was that Visconti was married at the
time. He was married to Mary Hopkin, the famous
folk singer. Oh, wow. So Bowie knew that if he
went on public radio and said, oh, yeah, this
song is about Tony and Antonia, he would completely
destroy his friend's marriage. Right. So he invents
the anonymous lover's story. To protect his producer.
Exactly. Which adds this incredible layer of
doomed reality to the song. The line, we can
be heroes just for one day, knowing it's about
an illicit affair that one day becomes very literal.
They knew this relationship had an expiration
date. It transforms the song entirely. It takes
it from being a broad political statement into
a very personal tragedy that just happens to
be set against a political backdrop. It's forbidden
love in a literal forbidden zone. Yes. The wall
isn't just a political barrier anymore. It's
a metaphor for the impossibility of their relationship.
And Bowie didn't just pull from real life for
the lyrics. He was pulling from art, too. The
notes mention a specific painting. Lovers Between
Garden Walls by Otto Mueller. Okay. Bowie and
Iggy Pop had been visiting the Brook Museum in
Berlin. The painting depicts a couple separated
by a wall, which obviously resonated with the
divided city he was living in. And what about
the dolphins? I wish you could swim like the
dolphins. That always felt like such a specific,
almost psychedelic image to throw into a gritty
song about Berlin. That's a literary reference.
Bowie had been reading a book called A Grave
for a Dolphin. Really? Yeah. It contains a short
story about a doomed love affair between an Italian
soldier and a Somali girl during World War II.
And the girl has this mystical connection with
a dolphin. So you have the painting, the short
story, the affair happening right outside the
studio window, and the armed guards watching
from the tower. Bowie just synthesizes all of
this into one lyric. That is the core of his
genius. He takes these totally disparate inputs,
high art, trashy romance, geopolitical tension,
and he creates a unified narrative out of it.
Okay, so you have this masterpiece of engineering.
You have lyrics with incredible depth. The track
is finished. RCA releases it in September 1977.
They push it hard, too. They do. Bowie goes on
a massive promotional blitz. He performs on Mark
Boland's show. He even does a Christmas special
with Bing Crosby where he sings it. The Bing
Crosby special is iconic. So they are marketing
this thing everywhere. And the public just shrugged.
Why do you think that is? Yeah. I listen to it
now and it sounds like an instant classic. Was
it just too weird for 1977? i think context is
everything here think about the musical landscape
in 1977. you have the absolute explosion of punk
the sex pistols the clash right music is becoming
very fast very short and very aggressive and
on the other side you have the absolute height
of disco and here comes david bowie with a six
minute art rock track with no traditional chorus
chattering synthesizers and a verse about swimming
with dolphins it just didn't fit any radio format
and and the record label didn't help matters
did they they tried to fix it oh the single edit
was a total disaster what happened well the album
version is over six minutes long And it needs
that length to let the chattering synth build
up anxiety, to let the vocal gates open naturally
over time. Right, the progression we talked about.
Exactly. But RCA hacked it down to 3 minutes
and 32 seconds, so radio stations would play
it. And biographers like Chris O 'Leary and James
Perrone have been pretty harsh about that edit
in our source material. Rightly so. The edit
completely cuts the build. It starts the song
right around the dolphin's verse. So you jump
right into the climax. Yeah, you're entering
the song when the energy is already high. but
as a listener, you haven't earned it yet. It
feels frantic rather than epic. It completely
destroys the pacing. So the radio version didn't
work, and the critical reaction was really mixed
at the time. NME called it weary. Weary is such
an interesting critique. It is. Because they
weren't entirely wrong. It is a weary song. It's
about total exhaustion. But they saw that as
a negative thing. Whereas Hit Parader saw it
differently. Hit Parader saw the cinematic potential
immediately. They actually predicted it would
be a theme song for great movies for years to
come. Which turned out to be the most accurate
prediction in music journalism history. Seriously.
But it took nearly a decade to get there. The
song had to climb out of that initial commercial
hole. The consensus among music historians seems
to be that the real turning point was 1985, Live
Aid. Wembley Stadium. Exactly. Bowie performs
it live to a massive global audience. No studio
tricks, no gated mics, just the melody and the
sheer emotional force of those lyrics. And that
performance reminded everyone, oh, wait, this
is actually a massive stadium anthem. It really
was the moment it clicked for the general public.
And then two years later, history loops back
around. Yeah. 1987, Bowie returns to Berlin to
play the concert for Berlin. This is a moment
that genuinely gives me chills every time I read
about it. The stage was set up at the Reichstag,
right up against the Berlin Wall. Right. The
speakers were pointing west for the audience,
but they were massive, so loud. So the sound
physically bled over the wall. Deliberately,
thousands of young East Berliners gathered on
the other side of the wall to listen to the concert.
Wow. They were beaten back by the Stasi and the
police, but they stayed. They sang along to Heroes
while standing in the very death strip the song
describes. That is the ultimate closing of the
circle. The song written about the wall. becomes
the soundtrack to the people trying to tear it
down. It was a genuine catalyst. In fact, when
Bowie died in 2016, the German Foreign Office
actually tweeted a public thank you to him. Really?
Yes. They said, thank you for helping to bring
down the wall. They officially acknowledged that
cultural moment as a key shift in the politics
of the time. That's incredible. And since then,
the song has just refused to die. It keeps finding
new lives in pop culture. We saw the wallflowers
cover it for the Godzilla movie in 1998. Which
ironically charted higher in the U .S. than Bowie's
original ever did. That's hilarious. It hit number
10 on the modern rock tracks. It proved that
the melody itself works even without the specific
Berlin production magic. And then you have the
X Factor finalists in the U .K. taking it to
number one in 2010. Which introduces it to a
whole new pop audience. And then of course most
recently. Stranger Things. Season 3 finale. A
huge cultural moment. They used the original
Bowie track, not a cover. And immediately, streaming
numbers spiked 500%. Incredible. You have a whole
generation of kids who know absolutely nothing
about the Cold War or Tony Visconti's affair,
but they connect instantly with that sense of
desperate heroism. It's amazing that a song so
specific to its time and place, literally recorded
at the place it describes, has become so universally
applicable. It works for giant mon - monsters,
for political revolutions, for teenage sci -fi
drama? It truly does. It's now ranked by Rolling
Stone and NME as one of the greatest songs ever
recorded. It has completely transcended its original
context to become something much larger. So for
you listening, when we step back and look at
the blueprints of this sonic architecture we
started with, what are we really seeing? We're
seeing a perfect collision of elements. You have
the wall of sound technique, Eno's synthesized
atmosphere colliding with Fripp's chaotic guitar
feedback. You have Visconti's brilliant engineering
innovation with the gated mics creating that
expanding cavernous space. And you have the very
human element grounding it all. The secret affair,
the view from the window. That's the real key.
It's the alchemy of taking a personal messy secret
and projecting it onto a massive geopolitical
tragedy. It really changes how you hear the song.
I don't think I can listen to that cowbell the
same way again, knowing it's just a piece of
metal trash found in a studio bin. It's a great
reminder that masterpieces very often come from
just making do with what you have in the room.
Absolutely. Now, before we wrap up today, I want
to go back to that idea of the weary singer that
the critics pointed out, because I think that's
the part that sticks with me the most after reviewing
all this. It's the final irony I want to leave
you with today. We started by talking about the
quotes around the title Heroes, the irony of
it. Yeah. But think about the emotional state
of the artist himself. Here is a song written
by a man who was totally exhausted, trying to
get sober, recording in a dark ballroom that
used to belong to the Gestapo. A heavy environment.
And he's singing about a doomed, adulterous affair
that he knows can't possibly last beyond that
single day. By all accounts, it should be a depressing
song. It should be a complete tragedy. And yet,
it became the world's most enduring anthem for
hope. How does that happen? I think it's because
Bowie tapped into something very true about the
human condition. Real heroism isn't about winning.
It isn't about successfully tearing down the
wall, at least not that day. Right. It's simply
the act of finding joy just for one day, despite
the overwhelming odds against it. Survival is
a form of victory. Exactly. Even if the guns
are literally sheeting above your heads, you
kiss anyway. That small personal act of defiance
is the only heroism that actually matters in
the end. That is a truly beautiful place. Thank
you for listening to this deep dive into the
architecture of heroes. It's been an absolute
pleasure unpacking this one for you. Keep listening.