David Bowie

Thanks to its famous distorted riffs, an anguished melodic line and David Bowie's textbook David Bowie vocal performance, "Heroes" became one of the Thin White Duke's biggest hits. Legend has it that it was his friend Brian Eno who suggested that title, since "the sequence sounded grand and heroic, and I had that very word, heroes, in my mind," while according to biographer Chris O'Leary, the inspiration also came from the song "Hero" by German band Neu!, all while, in that same period, The Stranglers released one of the anthems of punk titled "No More Heroes". Whatever the case, the song's epic quality is beyond dispute, as is its grieving, compassionate spirit, which tries to cling to an optimistic future to exorcise a bitter present: being heroes for just one day ("just for one day"), then, even within the dimension of everyday life. "The point of the song was an invitation to look reality in the face and confront it, drawing a bit of joy from the simple pleasure of being alive," its author would later explain. Even though the longing for immortality ("for ever and ever") that tries to steal time ("steal the time") clashes with the inevitability of fate, reaffirmed by the recurring awareness that "nothing will keep us together" ("Nothing will keep us together").

Standing by the Wall

Around the narrative core of the lyrics, however, David Bowie circulated for years an "official version" according to which he had been inspired by a young couple who used to meet right beneath the Berlin Wall, whom he would watch from a window of Hansa Studios, the legendary Berlin location where the entire "Heroes" album was recorded. Later on, though, producer Tony Visconti would reveal the truth, confessing the real origin of the lyrics: it was a fanciful retelling of his own real-life affair with backing singer Antonia Maass, whom his friend had diplomatically "protected" so as not to ruin his marriage. It was a love lived in the shadows, in a place where even breathing felt like an act of rebellion. Bowie saw in that kiss all the fragility, and at the same time all the strength, of the human being: two people clinging to each other beside a wall that, in his eyes, became the symbol of a silent resistance, fuelled by hope and courage.
After divorcing his first wife, Siegrid, Visconti married Welsh folk singer Mary Hopkin in 1971; the marriage ended in divorce in 1981. The couple had two children, both musicians: Jessica Lee Morgan and Morgan Visconti. In 1989 the producer married his third wife, May Pang — known for her relationship with John Lennon during the famous "lost weekend" — with whom he had two more children before divorcing in 2000. "I've been better as a producer than as a husband," Visconti would later joke; he currently lives with his partner of over twenty years, musician Kristeen Young.
Among the artistic sources behind "Heroes", meanwhile, are the expressionist painting "Lovers Between Garden Walls" by Otto Mueller (1916), depicting a couple of lovers embracing between two looming walls, a symbol of the Great War, and the short story "Una tomba per un delfino" by Italian author Alberto Denti di Pirajno, which tells the love story between an Italian soldier and a Somali girl during the Second World War.

The Crimson King in Berlin

The rest is well known: Fripp's magical guitar line, trailing drones and feedback, makes history, fusing with the circular harmonies of Eno and his EMS synthesizer. The English guitarist did it all in about six hours, fresh off the plane that had brought him from New York to Berlin. "He arrived at the studio at eleven at night, I hooked him up to the synthesizer for the effects, we played him pretty much everything we'd done, and he started playing without even knowing the chord sequence," Visconti would recall. But it's precisely the trademark guitar work of the absolute monarch of King Crimson that helps make "Heroes" (with ironic quotation marks added to undercut the drama) if anything even more dazzling than the masterpiece that preceded it, "Low", released the same year.

"Heroes" is the paradigm of the perfect Bowiesque song, further enriched by a splendid vocal performance that swings from a hushed delivery to full-throated singing, reaching peaks of searing intensity. Equally ingenious was the method Visconti devised to record the vocal: a "multi-latch" system, with three microphones placed at different distances: "When David sang the opening passages, which were quieter, only the closest microphone was active," the producer recalls. "If he sang a bit louder, the next microphone would open up, creating a reverb effect; when he was really singing at full voice, the third microphone would kick in too, and that's what let us get such a huge sound."
And behind its greatness lies a small story of friendship and complicity, between David Bowie and the man who would remain his most trusted collaborator for an entire lifetime.

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13/07/2026