“Heroes” by David Bowie

"Heroes" is the title song of David Bowie's 12th studio album, cut in mid-1977 at Hansa Studio 2 in West Berlin, and it's the sound of a man finding hope in the shadow of the Wall. Bowie wrote it with Brian Eno and produced it with Tony Visconti, and the backing track was finished before a single word existed. Carlos Alomar's guitar, George Murray's bass and Dennis Davis's drums lock into a steady, rising drone; Eno and Bowie pile on synthesizers, and Robert Fripp's guitar sustains and sings over the top like a siren.

Bowie improvised the lyrics standing at the microphone, while Visconti rigged three mics at different distances that opened only as he got louder, so the vocal climbs from croon to desperate roar. The song tells of two lovers, one from each side of the divided city, who dream of freedom while fear hangs over them. Bowie took the idea from watching Visconti and singer Antonia Maass kiss by the Wall, and he put the title in quotation marks as a wink of irony.

The single, cut down by two minutes, peaked at number 24 in the UK and missed the American and Canadian charts entirely, even with Bowie singing it on Marc Bolan's show and Bing Crosby's Christmas special and recording German and French versions. Time has been kinder: after his death in 2016 it climbed to a new UK peak of number 12.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.