Heroes was released on 23 September 1977 as the title track of David Bowie’s twelfth studio album, recorded at Hansa Tonstudio in West Berlin with the Wall visible from the control room windows. It came out of the same creative period as Low and Lodger, the so-called Berlin trilogy, and managed the rare trick of becoming an international hit while remaining an extremely experimental piece of art-rock, full of live synth treatments from Brian Eno, pitched guitar feedback from Robert Fripp and a vocal sound that was as much about room acoustics as it was about microphones.
The single was not a huge chart smash at the time compared to some of Bowie’s earlier hits, but it grew steadily in status, becoming one of his defining songs and a Cold War anthem of sorts, associated with resilience, romance and the strange atmosphere of divided Berlin.
By the mid-1970s Bowie had relocated to Berlin to escape Los Angeles excess, recover from heavy cocaine use, study art and immerse himself in the European electronic scene. He and producer Tony Visconti treated album projects as social as well as musical events; they would live, eat, explore clubs and soak up the local culture together before and during sessions.
Berlin suited that approach perfectly, with its stark political backdrop, intense nightlife and a circle of experimental artists that included Tangerine Dream. Bowie arrived there with a trusted rhythm section that had already powered Station To Station: Carlos Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass and Dennis Davis on drums. Those three were expert jammers. Bowie would throw them loose chord sequences and a general emotional direction, and within half an hour they could turn that into a structured backing track. Lyrics usually came much later.
Heroes started life exactly that way. Before the album sessions, Bowie and Brian Eno spent a couple of weeks sketching instrumental structures with no melodies or words, and one of those long frameworks became the basis for Heroes. When the band tracked it at Hansa, the arrangement was roughly eight minutes long, with extended cycles of verses, pre-choruses and choruses, and a bridge appearing several minutes in. Carlos Alomar came up with the central guitar figure that underpins the song and also the pre-chorus lines that have a string section feel, while the rhythm section locked into a hypnotic groove.
Bowie played piano alongside them. Once the initial takes were captured the tapes were heavily edited; Bowie and Visconti were happy to live dangerously with razor blades, lifting better choruses from later in a performance, trimming down overlong sections and sometimes copying parts between reels via 24-track to 24-track transfers. You could only risk a couple of edits at any one physical point before the tape started to suffer, so decisions had to be made with conviction.
Hansa’s Studio Two, “by the Wall”, was a huge orchestral room used in the past for symphonic recordings. There was a raised choir riser at one end that Visconti used as the drum platform. Dennis Davis set up there with his kit, often expanded with an extra snare, congas and a timpani, and would move around the setup during fills, so what sounds like overdubbed percussion on some Bowie tracks is actually him playing live across multiple instruments.
For Heroes the drums were recorded without a booth, taking full advantage of the size of the room, with close mics on the kit and at least one Neumann U87 placed far away as an ambience mic. Bass and guitar amps, along with the grand piano, were screened with gobos, but the kit itself was left open. The feeling of a huge acoustic space on the drums is entirely real. The tempo of Heroes stays remarkably steady without a click track, something Visconti credits to Davis’ metronomic sense of time.
Brian Eno’s contributions moved the track decisively into more abstract territory. After the live basics were edited down to just over six minutes, Eno set up his briefcase EMS Synthi on the console and began creating a shuddering, chattering texture that runs through the track. Using an oscillator at a very low rate and working the noise filter and joystick, he performed live sweeps across the song in a couple of passes, changing speed and intensity as he went. Those layers gradually build towards the end of the song and add a constantly shifting undercurrent that pushes it beyond conventional rock.
Robert Fripp arrived about a week later and added the high, sustained guitar lines that have become one of Heroes’ most recognisable elements. He and Eno already had history working together with the EMS Synthi, feeding guitar into the synthesiser while Eno rode the controls. For Heroes Fripp set up in front of a loud monitor system and used a technique he had developed where he measured exact positions on the floor corresponding to different notes feeding back. A strip was marked with the spots for A, G, F sharp and so on, and he would stand on the appropriate mark for each sustain.
At high volume the guitar fed back naturally without an E-bow. Eno manipulated the Synthi filters and envelope while Fripp played, and they recorded three complete passes. Individually the performances could sound patchy; when Visconti combined the three tracks the filtering motions and feedback overlaps produced the smooth, haunting melody that floats above the rest of the arrangement.
Around these core elements Bowie and Visconti added more colour in opportunistic ways. A faux brass figure that appears like a Stax horn line in the second verse was played from a Chamberlin, a tape-based keyboard instrument related to the Mellotron that Bowie had used previously on Diamond Dogs. It had been written as a trumpet part but ended up sounding more like a thin string patch, yet they kept it because its slightly odd quality suited the track.
When they wanted a cowbell and did not have one, they grabbed an empty German metal tape reel and used it instead, bending it with a drumstick about 15 feet from a distant U87 to capture not just the impact but the room around it. The large hall also doubled as a natural echo chamber during overdubs and mixing. Sounds could be sent from the console to a speaker in the room and re-recorded at the far end as a live reverb return.
Technically, Visconti was constantly managing headroom and track counts. Eno’s filter sweeps could jump by 15 dB in the midrange when he swept resonance, while other changes made elements almost disappear, so everything went through compressors and outboard EQ on the way to tape just to keep the signals under control. With only 24 tracks and a growing number of overdubs he had to bounce regularly, for example combining three Fripp tracks down to two or mixing toms to a stereo pair. He mixed as he went, committing balances that could not easily be changed later, and Bowie preferred that approach. Once a decision was made it would stand.
One notable aspect of Heroes is the way the drums sit in the final mix. The kick drum is barely present compared to most rock records. Visconti found that when the kick was mixed at a normal level the track felt heavy and plodding. When he pulled it back and instead emphasised George Murray’s bass guitar, the song seemed to flow forward with more energy, the bass line carrying the pulse and Eno’s rhythmic synth textures adding an extra timing reference. It is one of the very few mixes he has done where the kick is almost absent by deliberate choice.
The lyrics and vocal were left until very late. Bowie tended to become tense at that stage, knowing he had to commit words and a performance to tape. During the Heroes sessions he asked Visconti to take a break one afternoon, and the producer went for a walk along the Wall with backing singer Antonia Maass. From the Hansa control room Bowie could see them kissing near the concrete and guard towers, a small human moment against a heavily policed border. When Visconti returned a couple of hours later Bowie told him the words were finished.
The famous line about “the lovers who kissed by the wall” was drawn directly from what he had seen out of the window. At the time Visconti was married, so that detail stayed quiet for many years, but it shows how immediate and observational Bowie’s writing could be when inspiration struck. The lyric was written, the vocal recorded and the backing parts added in the space of a single day.
For the lead vocal Visconti proposed a setup that has since become part of studio folklore. Rather than rely on a single close mic and artificial reverb, he wanted to use the Hansa room itself as the ambience. There were only a couple of tracks left on the multitrack and no chance to record multiple mics separately, so he rigged three microphones and fed them all to a single track using gates. A valve U47 was placed right in front of Bowie and heavily compressed for intimacy. A Neumann U87 was set roughly 15 feet away, and another U87 was placed at the far end of the hall.
Each of the distant mics had a gate keyed so that it would open only when Bowie sang above a certain level. At low intensity only the close U47 could be heard, which makes the opening verses sound almost like he is singing directly into the listener’s ear. As he moves up an octave and pushes into the top of his range, the mid-distance mic starts to open, then finally the furthest mic joins in when he really shouts, bringing the full size of the room into the sound. All of this ambience is genuine space, there is no plate or digital reverb on the lead. They captured it in one composite take with a couple of punch-ins, probably on the third complete pass, while Bowie was still in the emotional state of having just written the words.
Immediately afterwards Bowie and Visconti recorded the backing vocals as a duo, stacking two tracks of harmonies. In roughly five hours the lyric, lead and backing parts for Heroes went from blank page to finished performance. Visconti has often said that very few artists can walk into a control room, write a lyric under that sort of pressure and then deliver a definitive vocal within a handful of takes; Bowie was one of them.
Heroes has since become one of David Bowie’s most celebrated songs and is often used as shorthand for this Berlin period. Its combination of jam-based band playing, radical processing, inventive use of an acoustic space and a lyric rooted in a specific place and moment has influenced a wide range of artists and producers, from post-punk bands like Joy Division through to stadium acts such as U2 and electronic groups like Depeche Mode. Hansa itself acquired a near-mythic status in part because of this recording. What began as an experimental art-rock piece built on long jams, tape edits, feedback science and live synth treatments ended up an enduring anthem that still feels both human and otherworldly decades after it was recorded.