(BONUS POST) : ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN SINGLES : #020

aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser

#020– David Bowie – ‚”Heroes” (RCA Victor Records ’77)

Dear friends,

aaah … Berlin, summer of 1977 – an island of fun in a desert of boredom!! No military draft, a vibrant atmosphere, no cold war in sight yet, the Soviets taking real good care of their protégés with a solid wall helping them to keep Western influence at bay! Fun, fun, fun for everyone – and who was there in those golden days, enjoying the big party? Yes, David Bowie and his chum Iggy Pop! On a working holiday, as you would call it these days, with Pop recording ‘Lust For Life’, the album, and Bowie recording, well, ‘”Heroes”’, the album, in the famous Hansa Tonstudios, located a stone’s throw away from the Berlin wall – Köthener Strasse in Kreuzberg actually.

And this location is of some importance for the story the song tells us: ‘”Heroes”’ was a produced by a chap named Tony Visconti. Also recording in a different part of the studio was Antonia Maaß with The Messengers, some jazz-rock-combo. If you listen closely, you can also hear her singing in the background on ‘”Heroes”’, in fact. Now, every once in a while, Bowie would stop whatever he was doing, and stare out of the studio’s window a bit, thinking whatever pop stars have to think about. And quite often he noticed a couple caressing right at the wall, always at the same place, directly below an East German gun turret. What Bowie couldn’t understand was why on earth – with so many nice and certainly more romantic places within the city – this couple would always meet there: underneath the bloody gun turret, probably with the NVA border guards above them jeering foolishly whenever they kissed!

Either way, that’s where they used to meet, for reasons only becoming obvious to Bowie a bit later: first the couple was unknown to him, but being a clever bloke, he quickly realized that whenever he saw them kissing down there at the wall, his producer and background singer were always absent. So the famous protagonists which ‘”Heroes”’ tells us about, were – as you will already have gathered – Tony and Antonia. With Tony – surprise, surprise – being married to Mary Hopkin at the time: that’s Mary Hopkin who did the damn awful ‘Those Were The Days’ back in 1968. I’m tempted to say that the sheer abomination of this song, at least in my book, might even justify a bit of betrayal to Mary!

So, that’s the story behind ‘”Heroes”’, friends. As far as I’m concerned, by and large everything else that could be said about this song has already been said elsewhere. Apart from the fact that all of the inverted commas above, which most surely you have been wondering about all the time, are there for a sense: the idea behind them was to create some ironic distance to the rather romantic and/or pathetic lyrics. So there you are …:

mp3:  David Bowie – “Heroes”

And before you think: “Ah, no need to download this – I know it by heart!” … no, probably you don’t! Why? Because this is the radio-friendly 7” version, which you don’t hear all too often. Perhaps you have never even heard it, who knows, I mean: does radio-friendlyness still exist in the days of internet at all? Either way, this version here is cut down from 6:07 minutes to 3:32 minutes, which gives quite a new feeling to a song so well known. One of my all time favorites, this, in all of its versions!

Enjoy,

Dirk