"Heroes"
RCA PL125222

October 1977

`Low's release in January 1977 was greeted with a mixed response from both critics and fans alike, due primarily to it's total difference from anything Bowie had offered before. The artist was disappointed by the reception `Low' received from the press-he had given them `more credit than that...I put a lot of guts into that album, a fact that tends to be ignored.' While the album floundered in the charts, RCA, eager as ever to obtain some return from the project, released `Sound And Vision' as a single which managed a minor glory. `Be My Wife' however, was not so successful.

Iggy Pop had accompanied Bowie on his European venture, and Bowie reciprocated his favours by writing a majority of the songs on `The Idiot', released in March 1977, the title of which came from a painting which Bowie had seen and reminded him of 'Jimmy O'.

This was Bowies first Collaboration with Pop since 'Raw Power', and gives valuable insight into Bowie's capability to write for another person. The initial track, `Sister Midnight', had not only been performed by Bowie during the Station TO Station tour, but had also been recorded at Sigma Sound in March `76 for a possible single. `Nightclubbing' is a descriptive account of the pair's evening exploits in Berlin. `China Girl was repeated by Bowie on the 1983 `Let's Dance' LP, but perhaps his most interesting offering is the mellow saxophone work on `Tiny Girl'.

Bowie had become disenchanted with the album-tour-album- continuum of previous years, and consequently did not take `Low' out, electing to aid Iggy Pop in promoting `The Idiot'. They toured England and North Americas during March and April, Bowie strictly in the background,(adopting a `low' profile), playing keyboards.

By the time the "Heroes" single was released in September, a month prior to the album, Bowie had taken up permanent residence in Switzerland with Angie and Zowie, yet regularly commuting to Hansa in Berlin, where he had solicited the talents of Robert Fripp, Eno's friend, to replace Ricky Gardener as a foil to Alomar's rhythm work.

To promote the "Heroes" single, he performed on Marc Bolan's television show, and recorded the Bing Crosby Christmas Special. Bolan died in a car crash on September 17th, the "Heroes" single was released less than a week later, Bowie receiving news of his close friend's death back in Berlin. Crosby died in October, the programme had to be re-scheduled, the Bowie/Crosby single emerging five years later.

By the time the album was on general sale in October, Bowie had returned home to 40 Stansfield, in Brixton.

"Heroes" was very much an extension of `Low'. It was the second of a projected trilogy, and continued Bowie's utter disaffection with anything vaguely resembling orthodox music. The verbal reticence of `Low' gave way to a mature and trenchant lyric overflow with each sense and sentence twisting at every opportunity: "Weaving down the byroad sing the song - That's my kind of highroad - Gone Wrong. My My." This track, and the rest of the album cannot be suggested as being subjective; they are observations portrayed through oblique narratives, in many ways up-dating the `Diamond Dogs' fatalism. "Something in the night, something in the day, nothing is wrong but darling something's in the way. There's slaughter in the air, protest on the wind."

This weird mixture of adversity and humanity, painted in various shades of black, stem from the impression Berlin had upon Bowie. `(Berlin)'s a city made up of bars for sad, disillusioned people to get drunk in. I've taken full advantage of working there to examine the place quite intensively.'

`From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconies facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes...I am a camera with it's shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.'

Christopher Isherwood - 'Goodbye To Berlin'

Visions of Berlin, before the wall came down, such as Isherwood's , were quite familiar to Bowie, who saw the city as being something ugly and timeless, attractive and fascinating. This compulsion to an irresistible combination of beauty and ugliness became manifested fully in the songs allegorical title. "Nothing will corrupt us, nothing will compete. Thank God heaven left us standing on our feet.. The Beauty and the Beast."

Again, fragmented images of darkness abound, suggesting a world as organised as that of `Diamond Dogs'. Out of control, balanced somewhere between nightmare and reality. According to the notes on BowieNow, the song expresses `compassion for the people and the desperate situation they've gotten into. illustrations of future panic and social disintegration.'

Bowie certainly has concern and compassion for the `sad, disillusioned people', who spend their lives getting drunk in the bars of Berlin; "A couple of drinks on the house an' he said, `Tell me who you are if you nail me to my car'." (Having read an article where an artist had himself crucified to the top of a Volkswagen.)

Comparisons between the way in which Bowie was seeing life, and the American poet, T.S.Eliot's spiritual autobiography, `The Waste Land', appear very similar.

With Eliot, the imagery is the wasteland, with Bowie, the medium is the message.

Both agree that there are certain things - emotions which cannot be described in a single context, consequently, comparisons and metaphors are drawn. The isolated community is very sad, and the form of reality it exposes contributes greatly to the mood of the music. `"The wind blows on your cheek, the day laughs in your face, guess you'll bus a gun, you'll bus it second-hand." Once one lost soul relinquishes himself to the desperate struggle, another simply takes his place.

Bowie insisted in the use of quotation marks around the title track as a means of emphasising the compassionate irony of the song. The song ostensibly indicates that the meekest of us can be heroes. It is performed with such fervent passion and resolute optimism, laughing loud in the face of danger and defeat. "I will be king, and you will be queen. although nothing will drive them away, we can beat them, just for one day."

The song extols the virtues of facing reality in the world, and standing defiant in it's threatening shadow. The moral is to derive some empirical pleasures of simple existence in the face of impending doom. "And you can be mean, and I'll drink all the day. `Cause we're lovers, and that is a fact, yes we're lovers and that is that."

Many people are aware of the anecdote which promoted the song, but for those who are not, I've included Bowie's full account

`The situation that sparked off the whole thing was - I thought - highly ironic. There's a wall by the studio, the album being recorded at Hansa By The Wall in West Berlin - abort there. Its about twenty or thirty metres away from the studio, and the control room looks out onto it. There's a gun-turret on top of the wall where the guards sit and every day a boy and girl would meet there and carry on. They were obviously having an affair. And I thought, of al L the places in Berlin to meet, 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 would always meet right there. And I - using licence - presumed that they were feeling somewhat guilty about this affair and so they'd imposed this restriction upon themselves, thereby giving themselves an excuse for their heroic act.'

"I remember standing by the wall The guns shot above our heads and we kissed as though nothing could fall. And the shame was on the other side." Witnessing an event such as the couple's meeting, obviously brought a sensation of optimistic compassion for the individuals, an antithesis of `Joe The Lion'. In fact, the only heroic act that can be extracted from the oppressive nature of the Berlin Wall scenario, is that of enjoying life for it's own sake. The song is a beautiful escape from the entropy of a forlorn society, heightened by an extremely moving and passionate performance by the artist.

`Sons of the silent age'

There are two forms of interpretation of the first song. One is that Bowie ineffectually retreads the thought which permeated `Drive-In Saturday' and `Sound And Vision'; That of some future/present time, with the song shifting from the first-person subjectivity into a universal grotesque disease. "Sit in back rows of city limits, lay in bed, coming and going on easy terms, pacing their rooms like a cell's dimensions."

The second centres around the mass-marketing of anarchistic `new-wave' music which was fashionable at the time. It is said that Bowie was looking for another vehicle to espouse beside the extremities of anarchism.

The `Sons of The Silent Age' was a paradox to the violent cacophony of `new-wave' exponents. "Stand on platforms blank looks and no books...rise for a year or two then make war, search through their one-inch thoughts then decide it Couldn't be done."

When Michael Watts in the 'Melody Maker' suggested that the `Punks' were supposed to be oppressed by figures such as Bowie, the singer agreed with the meat of the statement, relating that to him popular music was no longer expressive of a generation. It had altered, for when he began to write songs, it was with a particular generation in mind, to coin Townshend, 'My Generation'.

But he also admitted that the middle nineteen-seventies were `an incredibly important era...having the same chaotic appeal to future generations as the Twenties do to us, to a certain -extent.'

However, in light of the environment within which Bowie was living at the time, I feel inclined to adopt the first explanations as an observation of the oppressed people of Berlin, who "Don't walk, just glide in and out of life, they never die, just so to sleep one day."

To a degree, the lyrics re-iterate those found on `Joe The Lion', and plausibly explain why the `ray of hope' discovered in the title-track was sandwiched between them, as opposed to opening the album as would've been normally expected.

Blackout

`It's the feelings I was picking up about America while I was in Europe. Get me off the streets reflected the mood of the people following the New York City blackout.'

Bowie had also unfortunately `blacked-out' while in Berlin, and was rushed to hospital. The song consequently a blend of these two happenings. The actual cause of the human blackout is pure conjecture. "Too high a price to drink rotting wine..get me to a doctors...I'm under Japanese influences and my future's at stake..Hot air gets me into a blackout."

Searching for a cause in a surreal song can often be dangerous. In New York, "panthers are steaming stalking screaming - get me off the streets-get me some protection."

The song ends in a turmoil, fragmented and disorientated, very similar to the panic of a real blackout, physical or urban.

The greatest difficulty in attempting to decipher the lyrics to both `Low' and "Heroes" is the way in which Bowie incorporates words into his music. By moving from the narrative, a single phrase can often produce a desired feeling, but the song does not as a whole. Consequently, with the exception of "Heroes", there is no overall idea of the feeling. In parts he uses the straightforward narrative for maybe two or three lines, but this soon disappears into disorientation.

The four instrumental pieces on side two of "Heroes", are far less organised, in a mechanical sense, than their counterparts on `Low'. Bowie, `though still experimenting to a large extent, appears more concise in what he requires from the music. Consequently, the compositions tend to be more ambitious and positive.

`V2-Schneider' is a tribute to Florian Schneider of Kraftwork. Schneider, from Dusseldorf, was a good friend to Bowie while he was in Europe. Bowie was not particularly impressed with Kraftworks later work, more the material they were producing with Neue as a `driving force'.

Even though `V2-Schneider light-hearted piece, Bowie was searching for an idea of sequence in the melody. As it happened, when Alomar's opening riff was turned around, Bowie accidentally began playing his saxophone over the offbeat instead of the on-beat, the result being a piece of music,(with the occasional telephone trill) that would be impossible to notate.

This `unusual' effect from spontaneity and improvisation was the direction Bowie had sought all along. In order to obtain the feeling from a piece of music, he often drew the shape that was required on a blackboard, and presented it to the rest of his musicians - a technique with which they became well-acquainted

`Sense of Doubt' provides an aura of lost visions, very foreboding in it's mood. Based around a powerful five-note piano scale, it brings a feeling of suspense that E.A.Poe may have held in preference to Alan parsons.

A crime has been committed and the camera pans in on all the inanimate weapons on the `Cluedo' board.

`Moss Garden' is greeted with a sigh of relief four minutes later, with Bowie sat cross-legged in his pagoda, plucking away on a koto. Eno, in the background, way over on the other side of Old Kyoto, hovers with a warm synthesised, back-to- nature sound.

`Neukoln' sweeps more action into the final liquid moments of `Moss Garden' The title is derived from the Turkish Quarter, where Bowie stayed on his initial visit to Berlin, hence the half-throttled, snake-charming saxophone.

In the background, Fripp and Eno wander up and down icy chords. The listener is a victim, lost in the wilderness of the inner-city desert.

The eyes which peek out from the Turkish ghetto are unnerving and vividly surreal.

Bowie claimed that the last song on the album-'The Secret Life of Arabia' was included purely as a `filler', although it does possess elements of his new-found belief in discovering the joy of being simply alive and free. "I was running at the speed of life, through mornings thoughts and fantasies... ..secret life, ever green."

As with other tracks, especially on `Low', Bowie mixed up the bass very high and disorientated the snare drum because he had become bored with the heavy, up- front use of the bass drum in American rock and roll. He discovered that when the entire drum kit was treated, a psychedelic sound was formed, so eventually, only certain drums were picked out for treatment. `We found that corrupting the snare drum definitely put the whole thing out of focus with the normal perspective of how drums have sounded.'

On `The Secret Life of Arabia', this gives a disco-floor `bounce' to the music, enhanced by the rhythmic hand-clapping. This form of drum sound is best heard on it's own at the start of `Sound And Vision' on `Low'. `My role as a rock artist is different than most. I encapsulate things very quickly in a very short space of time. And, generally, my policy has been that as soon as a composition has come out, it is out of date. I move on to another era, another piece of time.'

Bowie left, clones moved in with `electrical' friends.

This document last updated Saturday, 15-Apr-2000 15:37:21 EDT