48 Years Ago, David Bowie Turned an Unusual Inspiration Into One of His Greatest Songs

Among the many, many timeless hits David Bowie has graced the music world with, very few hit as hard as “Heroes” does. Contrary to what readers might assume, “Heroes” was not a huge commercial success. The song didn’t do well on the charts, despite being embraced by audiences around the world, but its popularity grew steadily through the years. It became an anthem at every live performance, and after Bowie’s death, it was unearthed by lots of fans, and over 45 years after its release, the track charted in several countries for the first time.

The song, a single from the album by the same name, has a distinct universal feeling. It is, on the surface, a song about love, but as he did with many other songs, in “Heroes,” Bowie is using romance as a Trojan horse to send a deeper message. A lot of fans might not know that this track has a political message hidden. And fewer will suspect that the singer was sneakily uncovering an affair.

David Bowie’s Unusual Inspiration for Writing ‘Heroes’

David Bowie recorded and released “Heroes” in 1977. The song, co-written by legendary producer Brian Eno, came from a bizarre source of inspiration. “I, I will be king / And you, you will be queen / Though nothing will drive them away / We can be heroes, just for one day / We can be us, just for one day.” On the surface, this song is about star-crossed lovers, a common but always successful trope in fiction and music. But the undercurrent of the song becomes clearer when Bowie, in one of the last verses, sings about the lovers “standing by the wall,” kissing as though “nothing could fall” while guns shot over their heads.

He’s not talking about any wall. Bowie is building a story about people falling in love despite being separated by the Berlin Wall. The universal message of love transcending political divides is a tale as old as time, but it never stops being relevant.

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However, the inspiration for the love story across the Wall didn’t come merely from a political interest. No, he actually saw the couple he was writing about, though at the time, he had to keep the secret. It was his friend and producer, Tony Visconti, and he was kissing Antonia Maass, a German singer who was, crucially, not his wife. So, for a while, the singer had to keep the secret of the true story behind the hit.

“I always said it was a couple of lovers by the Wall that prompted the idea for ‘Heroes’,” Bowie said in 2015. “Actually, it was Tony Visconti and his girlfriend. Tony was married at the time, so I couldn’t talk about it. But I can now say that the lovers were Tony and a German girl that he’d met while we were in Berlin.” In Bowie and Visconti’s defense, “his marriage was in the last few months,” and he found that seeing him fall in love again was “very touching. I could see that Tony was very much in love with this girl, and it was that relationship which sort of motivated the song.”

Bowie Developed a New Writing Method While Living in Berlin

“Heroes” is the perfect example of how much a new environment enriched David Bowie’s songwriting. Some of his best songs came from what he called the “Berlin period,” when he was living, writing, and recording in Germany. Finding himself in a foreign land and having to find his way around it exposed him to new experiences and, as a result, led him to develop new writing techniques. Living in Berlin in the ’70s was not easy, but in his own words, he had to “put myself in those situations to produce any reasonably good writing.”

“I have to put myself on a dangerous level, whether emotionally or mentally or physically, and it resolves in things like that: living in Berlin, leading what is quite a spartan life for a person of my means, and in forcing myself to live according to the restrictions of that city.”

The idea of restrictions made its way into the song, and Bowie used it as a guideline for his songwriting of that period. He also urged his fellow musicians to follow that idea. “Maybe I’d write out five or six chords, then discipline myself to write something only with those five or six chords involved,” Bowie explained about that period of his career. “So that particular dogma would dictate how the song is going to come out, rather than me and my sense of emotional self.”

“Heroes” is a song that has it all. A deep, universal message in the lyrics, a fascinating technical background, and even an adulterous secret behind it. 48 years later, it’s still a masterpiece and one of the many indelible marks that Bowie left on this world.