by Paul Trynka
Yet buried within the abstract shards of the songs that were slowly pieced together – making sense of the random – there were plenty of traces of Bowie’s hard-learned traditional skills. ‘Sons of the Silent Age’, the only song sketched out before the sessions, showed many glimpses of earlier Bowie personae: its opening is delivered in a nasal Tony Newley croon and the agonised swooping melody of its middle section – ‘baby I’ll never let you go’ – is an almost literal restatement of the middle-section theme from 1971’s ‘Width of a Circle’. Then, suddenly, the melody morphs into multitracked, Lennon-esque vocals; the gloriously naive saxophone evokes a barren future world and the fifties kitsch of the Kon-Rads or Joe Meek.
Similarly, the futuristic gleam of ‘V-2 Schneider’ – a tribute both to the terror weapons that had landscaped south London and Florian Schneider, the founder of Kraftwerk – was also humanised by the glorious teenage honk of Bowie’s sax, while ‘Blackout’ briefly quotes ‘Boney Maroney’ by Little Richard acolyte Larry Williams. Like the 1930s futurism that inspired him, the music of “Heroes” evokes both past and future. For perhaps the first time, Bowie’s long, circuitous route to his present state seemed to make sense.
For Bowie and Eno in particular, the sessions pushed them to a new level of intensity; both had hardly any time to eat, with Bowie subsisting mainly on a rushed raw egg, Eno on cereal. (‘Brian would start his day with a cup full of boiling water into which he would cut huge lumps of garlic,’ adds Bowie. ‘He was no fun to do backing vocals with on the same mike.’) Guitarist Robert Fripp, with whom Eno had worked closely since July 1972, would be thrown into the mix for just two days; forty-eight hours in which he would fantasise fondly, in a Somerset accent, of unleashing his ‘sword of union’ on the locals – but he would never get the chance.
For all of the tiny crew, their time in Berlin during “Heroes” would result in a series of unforgettable images: the day that Visconti cropped Iggy and David’s hair and they wandered around looking like old men; visits to an antique shop whose proprietor had known Marlene Dietrich; the frenzied warehouse parties with local tearaways like artist Martin Kippenberger; the day Tony Visconti saw a huge black tank rumbling down the Kurfürstendamm; or the time Edu Meyer saw a guard on a DDR machine-gun post surveying them though his binoculars and attempted to dazzle him with an Anglepoise lamp, causing Bowie and Visconti to duck under the control desk, terrified.
For David, these Berlin experiences had ‘a calming effect’, says Alomar. But even in the act of creation, his joy was always controlled. In this, he was a complete contrast to Iggy, who would swing from euphoria to depression – indeed, just when “Heroes” was being completed, Iggy succumbed to a manic-depressive cocaine jag, for which David and Coco arranged an ‘intervention’, asking Barbara and Tim Dewitt to whisk him away to Capri. David was ‘an educated thinker – so that would rescue him from the depressions’, says Carlos. But David also thought ‘way too much’. His enjoyment of the now was always overshadowed by the thought it wouldn’t last.
Likewise, David’s trademark futurism was omnipresent in “Heroes”, but gained a new poignancy in their Potsdamerplatz outpost. Later, describing this time in Berlin as one of the happiest periods in his life, David would pick up this poignant note. ‘In some ways, sadly, [the three albums] really captured, unlike anything else in that time, a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass.’
‘Neuköln’, the most desolate song of the set, epitomised the bleakness at the centre of this futuristic optimism. Haunting and stately, it played the same role as Low’s ‘Warszawa’, and was inspired by the once-grand, now grim multi-occupation buildings of the Berlin sector – actually called Neukölln – that housed the city’s Turkish gastarbeiters (guest workers). Workers brought in to supply Berlin’s insatiable demand for labour, they were denied citizenship: stateless, temporary residents, like David.
One song was notably simpler than the rest; based on the same, basic G-to-C chord change that David had used for Iggy’s song ‘Success’ just a few weeks before, and taken at a similar stately pace: Alomar’s ‘controlled gallop’. The song’s melody, when it arrived, was based around the same three notes that David had sung on the Iggy song; and as the musicians worked on the backing track, Alomar once again added an insistent, unforgettable guitar line that emphasised the purity of its two-chord sequence; yet it would be Robert Fripp’s majestic, yearning guitar that would emphasise the song’s monumental quality.
In future years, rumours would persist that David had told Fripp the track was an instrumental, to encourage him to play all the way through; Visconti remembers otherwise, although Eno, who left before it was complete, assumed the track would be an instrumental. He thought it sounded ‘heroic’. Fripp recorded his guitar in the huge ballroom, stepping between two taped marks on the floor, which marked the location at which each note would build into a feedback loop. Fripp made three passes at the song; Visconti blended all three, to ensure the guitar line floats serenely overhead, without falling to earth.
When David came to add the vocals after Eno had left, he used the technique he’d seen Iggy harness on Lust for Life, improvising words, or finalising them at the last moment. The improvised lyrics, simple and deep, were the making of the album’s most famous song. Visconti: ‘He would scribble down a few notes on the top of the piano, then say, “OK, drop me in after ‘dolphins can swim’.” And that way he wrote and sang “Heroes” simultaneously. At the end of an hour and half we had a complete vocal.’
The unique ambience of Hansa, with its view of the Wall, imprinted itself on the sound as well as the imagery of ‘Heroes’. The moment he’d walked onto the studio floor, Visconti realised the room itself had a unique sound; when it came time to add the vocals to ‘Heroes’, Visconti placed one Neumann mike in the normal position, close up, then one fifteen feet away, and one on the back wall. The two distant mikes were routed through a noise gate, a device to switch them on as David’s voice filled the space. The effect was magnificent; Bowie’s singing was the best he’d committed to tape, fresh and without artifice.
Few lyrics have been created and captured in such quick succession; and this is what gives ‘Heroes’ much of its immediacy. The lyrics are simple, but shot through with caveats. The song’s lovers yearn for transcendence, but will only reach it briefly. Even the brief state of lover’s bliss, as they kiss by the Wall, is an act of the imagination. David claimed he had indeed seen two lovers underneath the Wall; later, once Tony Visconti had divorced his wife, Mary Hopkin, it turned out the lovers in question were Visconti and Antonia Maas, a nightclub singer whom he’d met and asked to sing on the album just a few days before. Yet in 2008, Maas stated that the song had been completed before their tryst – and that Bowie could not have seen them.
The six or so minutes that Bowie, Visconti and Eno carved out were all the more precious because they were irreplaceable. To shape the song, Visconti had cut apart the master tape to edit it; to record the vocal, Visconti had mixed the three microphones onto one track on the master – all he had space for. They couldn’t revise the effect, or re-arrange the song. This was Bowie’s doing. ‘He quoted this Buddhist philosophy, how we live in a mire of options,’ says Visconti. ‘If you commit yourself, you’re free.’
Bizarrely, ‘Heroes’, the song that would become arguably the best-known of David Bowie’s career, would hardly set the charts alight. In the UK, it entered the charts in October, peaking at number twenty-four in an eight-week run. David himself would come to treasure the song for the effect on his live audience. ‘In Europe, it is one of the ones that seemed to have special resonance.’ The song failed as a single in America, but according to Bowie, it would become ‘pivotal’ in live shows: ‘It’s a strange phenomenon … Many of the crowd favourites were never radio or chart hits; “Heroes” tops them all.’
Resistant as they were to Low, RCA summoned up more enthusiasm for its successor, unleashing a memorable p
rint campaign for its release on 14 October, 1977; the press ads featured the “Heroes” sleeve photo – the pose based on Roquairol, Erich Heckel’s portrait of his friend Ernst Kirchner – accompanied by the slogan, ‘There’s New Wave, there’s Old Wave, and there’s David Bowie’. It was a masterful piece of positioning which allowed him to remain aloof from a punk movement which, like glam before it, soon turned into a parody of itself.
The new, dressed-down David would do his own share of promotion, spending most of the autumn engaged in press and TV interviews. His first appearance, on 9 September, was his most memorable; like his appearance on Lift Off with Ayshea, five years before, this would be in Granada Television’s children’s slot, designed to catch kids just back from school. From late August, this half-hour slot had also become the venue for the comeback campaign of David’s earliest musical friend and rival, Marc Bolan, in his new TV series, simply titled Marc.
The reunion with Marc was warm, chatty – relaxed at first, for what was their second meeting that year. In the spring, Marc had been chubby and pasty, thanks to his brandy and cocaine diet – ‘people used to call him the glam chipolata’, says Marc’s PR and confidant, Keith Altham – but a brief reunion with David back in March had helped rebuild his confidence. Marc had played Altham an acetate of ‘Madman’, a song the pair had recorded together: ‘It was avant-garde, quite Eno-ish,’ says Altham, ‘and Marc said they were going to work on it together as a single. Though you never knew if there was any foundation to some of Marc’s stories.’
Since that meeting, though, Marc had been through ‘a wonderful, hard-working summer’, says his friend Jeff Dexter, who was business partners with Bolan’s manager, Tony Howard. Marc cut out the cocaine and booze, instead staying in his room writing, going out in the evening to tap into the vibe of London’s punk scene, many of whose leading lights were featured on his show, which was filmed at Granada’s Manchester studios and launched on 24 August, 1977. Marc oversaw every aspect of each programme, choosing guests including Generation X, The Boomtown Rats and The Jam, introducing each of them, and playing three or four songs of his own with the latest line-up of T. Rex. Throughout the series ‘everything was on a high’, according to Dexter. ‘And then we came to the last one in the series. The one with David.’
The two men’s conversation was affectionate; the only awkward moment was when it turned out David hadn’t brought a guitar. Marc handed him a vintage Fender Stratocaster, insisting a little too anxiously that David keep the valuable instrument, still intent on playing the role of wealthy, gracious superstar. Marc’s new band was essentially David’s old band – Tony Newman and Herbie Flowers – and were greeted like long-lost friends; Jeff Dexter, too, was happy to see his fellow Buddhist and UFO-spotter from the Redington Road days.
Jeff left the studio to pick up Tony Howard, confident the afternoon’s show would be a fitting finale to Marc’s series. Things began to fall apart soon after Jeff’s exit. Anxious to put Bowie at ease, Bolan had asked his own guitar roadie, Cliff Wright, to attend to his guest. ‘They all got on OK, absolutely, it was old buddies,’ says Wright. ‘David was chatting with Herbie and Tony, they’d discussed the new song. And then it became apparent that Marc wasn’t going to play on “Heroes”.’
This would be the song’s TV debut and David, reasonably enough, insisted on overseeing the backing track, sitting down and playing the guitar part himself, as Flowers and Newman picked up the song straight away, playing in a folky, almost Velvets style. ‘David just sat on a chair, and somehow got that feedback, it was really cool,’ says Wright. ‘Herbie and Tony were the kind of players who could pick up the song straight away, Marc’s guitar wouldn’t have suited – [but] I suppose he wanted to be on TV playing it.’
As the musicians swiftly assembled the backing track, Marc mulled over what he considered a snub; looking ‘miffed’, he asked Wright to fetch four bottles of wine for David, then retired to his own dressing room – with some of the bottles. ‘And he stayed in there,’ says Wright. ‘He felt he’d been blanked.’
Sitting in his dressing room, Marc got ‘a little bit worse for wear’, says a staff member. There was worse in store for his fragile ego, as Jeff Dexter discovered. On his return to the studio, accompanied by Tony Howard, Dexter found his way blocked by a burly figure, who informed him, ‘You can’t come in. This is a closed set.’
After insisting, ‘This is our session, and no one’s closed it,’ Dexter managed to gain entrance, only to find the union floor manager complaining he’d been banned from his own set – the entire studio had been over-run by David’s security. Keith Altham, who’d brought journalist Chris Welch down to cover the show, managed to get in, only to find ‘there was some daft woman throwing her weight around, upsetting people, being really obnoxious, and this heavy-handed bunch trying to get everyone out. And it was Marc’s show!’
Welch hid behind a pillar and watched as Coco Schwab, an RCA executive and other members of Bowie’s entourage argued with the crew, Tony Howard, Altham and others. David, occupied with the music, hadn’t noticed what was going on. But as the time for the pair came to record their own appearances over the backing tracks, the scene was ugly, says Dexter: ‘Right before they went on, both of them were upset, Marc particularly, he was in tears.’
With the programme now running late, David and Marc each taped their own vocal overdub before they tackled a jam they’d worked on earlier. Marc looked slightly forlorn as he introduced ‘a new song’ in his familiar camp murmur, before the band launched into a chunky riff copped from Bo Diddley’s ‘Road Runner’, with David on Strat and Elvis shades. As Bowie slinks up to the mic and sings ‘what can I do’ there’s a sudden flurry in the corner of the screen, a hand grasping a microphone, a confused smile and a streak of curly hair as Marc Bolan attempts to stand on a monitor wedge, misses, falls off the stage and out of the picture. As the band shudders to a halt, the camera zooms to Bowie’s grin, and the credits roll.
Some of the cast members of Coronation Street, who’d arrived to record their own show, looked on at Marc as he laughed and picked himself up. Then the union crew, riled by the confrontation with Bowie’s minders, refused to go into overtime and reshoot. This would be the last public appearance that Marc Bolan would ever make. ‘It was a really shameful end,’ says Dexter. ‘The whole of that summer we’d been working on the show, making sure they were as good as they could be. It was very sad. I was very affected by it.’
On the train back to London, Bowie was low-key and cheery, chatting happily to the very people, like Keith Altham, that his own security had tried to eject from the studio. ‘You must read this book by Kurt Vonnegut, you won’t regret it,’ he told him, showing him his copy of Cat’s Cradle. ‘He wasn’t heavy at all, once you took him away from this suffocating protection,’ says Altham. Back in Manchester, there was a hurried, miserable debrief with producer Muriel Young about the fate of the programme, before Bolan, Howard and Dexter returned to London. Later that night, says Tony Visconti, Marc and David went out to dinner and made up their quarrel.
The heavy-handedness that had overshadowed Bolan’s show was an example of behaviour that would soon become commonplace in the music industry. For writers like Chris Welch, who’d championed Bowie a decade before, ‘It was new in pop terms – that distancing. Mick Jagger would have still been going around on the subway back then; David set this entourage to create a vibe. Really it’s just a way to draw attention to yourself.’ It was ironic that, having decried the hype of the MainMan years, David would unwittingly replicate the same heavy behaviour.
In this respect, as in so many others, David would establish a new convention. Those who followed in his wake – Madonna, Prince – also employed a protective screen of minders to shield both their person and their image. To this day, friends who send David Bowie packages of photos or records might find they’d been edited or censored, with seemingly random items removed before they reach him. Such behaviour saves time for a bus
y man, and there were many occasions in the future where David would venture out without minders. But from this period onwards, much of David’s reality – the sensory input of people, communications, ideas – would be filtered by other people. His life had changed, irrevocably. At thirty, he’d grown up; that earnest, child-like quality had dissipated, for he was too savvy to attempt to prolong it. And there was a powerful reminder of his mortality to come.
The kerfuffle around the Marc show would have been a passing concern, but for the fact that by the time it was broadcast, David’s friend and rival was dead. Marc enjoyed a happy, quiet week after the taping of his show, but when girlfriend Gloria Jones returned from America, he stayed up drinking into the small hours at the Speakeasy and then Morton’s restaurant on 15 September. Marc had never learned to drive; it was Gloria who took the wheel of the purple Mini GT, which crashed into a tree on the south side of Barnes Common, around 5 a.m. Gloria was badly injured, her jaw broken and foot trapped beneath the Mini’s engine, but it was the left side that took the full force of the collision, with Marc’s seat crushed into the back of the vehicle. He was killed instantly.
David was devastated by Marc’s death. He would be one of the highest-profile stars at Marc’s funeral in Golders Green, joined by Tony Visconti and wife Mary Hopkin, Rod Stewart and The Damned. David would pay endless tributes to his friend and there would never be any doubt of his affection for the teenager with whom he’d fished for clothes in Carnaby Street, twelve years before.
Their final appearance together had typified their relationship of interlaced respect and rivalry. It was also a stark illustration of how, where Bolan had rested on his laurels or simply repeated himself, David had now spent a dozen years relentlessly pushing himself forward. With Bolan’s life over, it was more obvious than ever that David had won the race for fame they’d both embarked on. It was also more obvious than ever that, despite the companions he’d acquired in Berlin, David was now quite alone.