“Heroes”

The title

I was only involved in that track up to doing the backing-track. He wrote the lyrics and the melody after I’d left – as he did for all the other tracks.

And, when I left, I already had a feeling about that track – it sounded grand and heroic. In fact, I had that very word in mind.

And then David brought the finished album round to my place and that track came up and it said ‘We can be heroes’ and I was absolutely It was such a strange feeling, you know. I just shivered with… When you shiver, it’s a fear reaction, isn’t it?

Shortly after the album’s release, Bowie gave his reasons for added quotation marks around the title, explaining that it was an ironic commentary on the story of two lovers meeting beneath the Berlin Wall.

The situation that sparked off the whole thing was – I thought – highly ironic. There’s a wall by the studio – the album having been recorded at Hansa by the Wall in West Berlin – about there. It’s about twenty or thirty meters away from the studio and the control room looks out onto it. There’s a turret on top of the wall where the guards sit and during the course of lunch break every day, a boy and girl would meet out there and carry on.

They were obviously having an affair. And I thought of all the places to meet in Berlin, why pick a bench underneath a guard turret on the wall? They’d come from different directions and always meet there… Oh, they were both from the west, but they had always meet right there. And I – using license – presumed that they were feeling somewhat guilty about this affair and so they had imposed this restriction on themselves, thereby giving themselves an excuse for their heroic act. I used this as a basis… therefore it is ironic.

In the same interview he downplayed the significance of the album title.

There was no reason why the album should have been called “Heroes”. It could have been called “The Sons of Silent Ages”. It was just a collection of stuff that I and Eno and Fripp had put together. Some of the stuff that was left off was very amusing, but this was the best of the batch, the stuff that knocked us out.

Cover artwork

Their visit to Japan was primarily a holiday, although they also undertook some promotional duties for The Idiot.

Bowie and Pop were invited to Tokyo’s Harajuku Studio by photographer Masayoshi Sukita, who had previously photographed Bowie in 1972 and 1973. Stylist Yasuko ‘Yacco’ Takahashi also assisted on the shoot.

The photos were meant to have a ‘punk’ feel. David-san had asked Yacco to get as many leather jackets as possible and instead of shooting on a straight white background, I included the door edge to break the image up and give a rougher feel. Elegantly wearing several layers of leather jackets, it reminded me of Kenneth Anger’s movie Scorpio Rising. The whole session was over in an hour. Afterwards, I selected about 20 photos to give to David-san, including the shot on the “Heroes” LP sleeve. When he contacted me to say he wanted to use it, I was delighted.

In addition to the “Heroes” images of Bowie, Sukita took a number of photographs of Iggy Pop, one of which was used on the cover of his 1981 album Party.

For some of the photographs, Bowie struck a pose inspired by Erich Heckel’s 1917 painting Roquairol. One such image was selected for the cover of “Heroes”.

Bowie and Pop knew Heckel’s artwork from visits to Berlin’s Brücke Museum, where it was displayed along other Expressionist paintings and woodcuts. Bowie had even bought the reproduction rights, intending to use the image on the cover of Pop’s The Idiot, though the decision was instead made to have photographer Andy Kent shoot Pop in a similar pose.

In 2001 Bowie confirmed that Roquairol had been the inspiration behind the “Heroes” image, along with another Heckel work, a woodcut print titled Young Man.

Bowie also clears up conflicting stories over the “Heroes” sleeve pose. Some claim it derives from a self-portrait by a Brücke Museum artist, Gramatté, while others insist it shares its inspiration with Iggy’s The Idiot cover in Erich Heckel’s portrait of a mad friend, Roquairol. “I couldn’t stand Gramatté,” he says today. “He was wishy-washy. I’ve seen the Gramatté, but no, it was Heckel. Heckel’s Roquairol, and his print from around 1910, Young Man, were a major influence on me as a painter.”

The cover of “Heroes” was adapted by designer Jonathan Barnbrook for Bowie’s 2013 album The Next Day.