David Bowie’s single ‘Heroes’ turns 40
When it was released 40 years ago ‘Heroes’ barely made a dent in the charts. So how DID this droning art-rock song become fêted as David Bowie’s greatest-ever single?
David Bowie ‘Heroes’ 40th Anniversary Picture Disc Parlophone, out Friday ★★★★★
On August 24, David Bowie reached a billion streams on Spotify. It was a fitting achievement for the man who told the world in 2002 that music would one day be ‘like running water’. Spotify can even tell us which of Bowie’s many classics is played the most, and the answer is ‘Heroes’.
The funny thing is that ‘Heroes’ began life as a relative flop. Released 40 years ago this week, it peaked at No.24 in Britain, and didn’t even make the Top 100 in America. (It reached No.8 here when it entered the charts in November 1977.) In the hot streak from The Jean Genie in 1972 to Modern Love in 1983, nearly all Bowie’s hits were hares, sprinting into our affections. So why was ‘Heroes’ a tortoise?
One factor is dead simple. Any single, however singular, still has to beat the competition. The UK Top 30 that ‘Heroes’ entered on October 9, 1977, was full of cheese (Silver Lady by David Soul), corn (From New York To LA by Patsy Gallant), film themes (Star Wars, Nobody Does It Better) and disco (two tracks from Donna Summer, one by her producer Giorgio Moroder). The Stranglers were there, with No More Heroes, leading the peloton of punk; Status Quo, with Rockin’ All Over The World, represented the ancien régime.
Three weeks later, ‘Heroes’ had crept up only three places. The grandmasters of pop, Abba and the Bee Gees, had released The Name Of The Game and How Deep Is Your Love respectively. Queen had weighed in with We Are The Champions, their most shameless anthem. The chart of October 30 contained eight songs now regarded as classics. With its snappy title, stirring chorus and romantic subject – lovers, kissing by the Berlin Wall – ‘Heroes’ is almost pop. The vocal, oozing, doomed grandeur is Bowie at his majestic best. ‘I,’ he begins, ‘I will be
king,’ and the drama hits you right between the ‘I’s.
But ‘Heroes’ is also art-rock, with an air of angst, Brian Eno’s droning synths and a bizarre guitar solo. ‘We needed a guitarist,’ Eno once told me, ‘so we rang up Robert Fripp, who was in New York, and he came over the same night, straight from the airport to the studio. So you get this wonderful out-of-tune guitar, circling round the melody, matching the yearning of the words, and then he finally gets there, and there’s this great sense of relief.’
Eno, as ever, was ahead of the game: that guitar is an acquired taste. The recordbuyer, in any case, may have been suffering from Bowie fatigue. His Berlin period, beautifully captured on the box set A New Career In A New Town (Parlophone, out September 29), was almost too prolific. ‘Heroes’ the album was an Irish twin, born exactly nine months after Low. In between, Bowie played midwife to two Iggy Pop albums, The Idiot and Lust For Life.
‘Heroes’ grew on us over the years, as great art does. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave it an extra dimension: on tour, Bowie noticed that ‘in Europe, it seemed to have special resonance’. When he died, the German foreign office tweeted: ‘Thank you for helping to bring down the wall.’
At the London Olympics in 2012, ‘Heroes’ was everywhere. It was as if the organisers hadn’t spotted those quote marks, silently subverting the notion of heroism. But that may be the lyrics’ secret: you can take them with or without irony.
In 2014, ‘Heroes’ was named Bowie’s greatest song by the NME, which had once dismissed it. The only problem now is the company a ‘Heroes’ fan has to keep. On Desert Island Discs, it was chosen by Jeremy Clarkson. If a song can survive that, it can survive anything.