Fripp marked with adhesive tape the spots on the studio floor where he could lock into certain singing tones. What the King Crimson leader later called “hairy rock’n’roll” was more a soaring series of aria-like feedback loops.
The final touch was added by guitarist Robert Fripp. “We looked at ‘feel’ as being the priority.”įrom the start, Eno described the music as “grand and heroic”, and said he had “that very word, ‘heroes’, in mind.” After the basic track was done, he overdubbed shuddering atmospherics by twiddling knobs on his EMS Synthi, a mini-synthesizer built into a briefcase. “With such great musicians the notes were never in doubt,” Bowie later said. The underlying riff of Heroes came from guitarist Carlos Alomar, with the hypnotic pulse provided by bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis. And using Eno’s ‘oblique strategies’ cards (aphorisms that encouraged lateral thinking), they would often give themselves creative dilemmas within that frame.īowie threw his restricted chord progression out to the band, and they ran with it, building an eight-minute groove into a triumphant crescendo. Their working method during Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin period’ was to build layered tracks that would later inspire lyric and melody, like making the frame before the picture. The basic track had already been started by Bowie and Brian Eno in the weeks before, with Visconti behind the mixing desk. And it was very touching because I could see that Tony was very much in love with this girl, and it was that relationship which sort of motivated the song.” I think possibly his marriage was in the last few months. But I can now say that the lovers were Tony and a German girl that he’d met while we were in Berlin. Tony was married at the time, so I couldn’t talk about it. “Actually, it was Tony Visconti and his girlfriend.
“I always said it was a couple of lovers by the Wall that prompted the idea for Heroes,” Bowie told Classic Rock in 2015, explaining its meaning.
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