David Bowie "Heroes" (1977): Inside the Sound Born by the Berlin Wall
Overview
"Heroes" is David Bowie's 12th studio album, released by RCA Records on 14 October 1977.
It was recorded in July and August 1977 at Hansa Studios in West Berlin,
produced by David Bowie and Tony Visconti. Made in collaboration with Brian Eno, it is the second album of the so-called Berlin Trilogy. It followed Low, released that January, but it is the only album of the trilogy recorded entirely in Berlin.
The sessions began in mid-1977, right after Bowie had finished work on Iggy Pop's second album, Lust for Life.
Most of it was improvised: once a backing track was finished, Bowie would step up to the microphone
and write the lyrics on the spot.
The studio: Hansa by the Wall
The album was recorded at Hansa Studio 2 in West Berlin, known as "Hansa by the Wall".
The building was originally a concert hall, and during the Second World War it was reportedly used as a ballroom by the Gestapo.
It stood just 500 yards (about 450 m) from the Berlin Wall,
and Tony Visconti recalls that "the studio was about 500 yards from the Wall,
and East German guards would look into the control room window with powerful binoculars".
This hall, known as the Meistersaal, was big enough to hold around 150 performers,
with a stage at one end where a choir is thought to have once stood.
Visconti used this stage for Dennis Davis's drum kit,
making the reverberation of the huge space itself an important part of the recording.
Personnel
The core band carried over from Low.
- David Bowie: vocals, keyboards, guitar, saxophone, koto, backing vocals
- Carlos Alomar: rhythm guitar
- Dennis Davis: drums, percussion
- George Murray: bass guitar
- Brian Eno: synthesisers, keyboards, guitar treatments
- Robert Fripp (King Crimson): lead guitar
- Tony Visconti / Antonia Maass: backing vocals
Alomar, Murray and Davis were close allies who formed Bowie's rhythm section, the "D.A.M. Trio",
for five years from 1975 to 1980.
How Robert Fripp came to join is telling. In July 1977, while Fripp was in New York, he got a call from Brian Eno
telling him that Bowie and Eno were recording in Berlin.
Fripp went straight into the studio as soon as he arrived in Germany and dropped off his bags,
and the piercing guitar you hear at the start of "Beauty and the Beast" is recorded as the very first note he played at the session.
Fripp is said to have been available for just one weekend.
Equipment in detail
Robert Fripp's guitar setup: arriving in Berlin without an amp
That "weeping", sustained guitar that defines the sound of "Heroes"
was long mistakenly thought to have been made with an E-Bow (a device that vibrates the strings electromagnetically for sustain).
But as Fripp himself states clearly in his diary, the equipment was extremely simple:
"a Les Paul, a Marshall cabinet, and a certain way of playing."
Fripp came to Berlin with just his guitar, no amp.
According to Visconti, because Fripp could only come for one weekend,
they had to rely on feedback from the studio monitor speakers,
and recorded while playing the track back at ear-splitting volume.
The actual technique:
- Les Paul (neck pickup, reportedly with the tone rolled right off)
- Through a fuzz box (thought to be a Big Muff type)
- Moving in front of a Marshall cabinet (some say Hiwatt), checking positions in advance
- Marking with tape on the floor the distances at which particular notes began to feed back, then stepping onto those marks to get sustain on the notes he wanted
In other words, not an E-Bow, but learning physically where feedback happens and using that as a playing technique:
a very physical approach. And the striking chorus-like, swirling effect
came from recording the same guitar part as three separate takes and playing them back layered together.
There's a story that Visconti and Eno had Fripp play each new take without letting him hear the previous ones,
and that the moment they heard all three layered together, "it was so beautiful that we all looked at each other".
Brian Eno's "magic suitcase"
Eno brought an EMS Synthi AKS, the so-called "briefcase synth",
a small synthesiser with a keyboard and patch panel built into the case itself.
As Fripp later recalled, Eno suggested, "Why don't you plug in?"
Fripp plugged his guitar into Eno's "magic suitcase". The tape rolled on one, two, three,
and the "sky-splitting guitar" he jumped in with on the third beat
was used as is for the very first note of "Beauty and the Beast".
Through this device Eno handled synthesisers, keyboards
and "guitar treatments" (real-time processing of the guitar signal).
Tony Visconti's three-microphone vocal technique
The most innovative thing about the album "Heroes", especially in making the title track, was how the vocals were recorded.
Of the 24 tracks on the analogue tape, 23 were taken up by the backing tracks alone,
leaving just one track for vocals.
Faced with this limit, Visconti came up with his own technique of using the room's reverberation itself to give the spread of several tracks.
He used three Neumann microphones, each placed at a different distance from Bowie.
| Mic | Model | Distance from Bowie |
| 1 (close) | Neumann U47 (valve) | about 23 cm (9 in) |
| 2 (middle) | Neumann U87 | about 6 m (20 ft) |
| 3 (far) | Neumann U87 | about 15 m (50 ft) |
The three mics were brought up on returns on the console,
with a compressor on the close mic and variable noise gates on the two mics capturing the room.
The louder Bowie sang, the more the far mics' gates opened
and the more of the whole room's reverberation was mixed in: a "multi-latch" system.
This meant that, on just one track, the sense of space changed organically with the dynamics of the singing,
creating that unique echo.
Visconti himself
has also said that "if I mixed this today in 5.1, I would definitely put those distant ambient mics in the rear speakers", showing his awareness of a spatial quality that stereo recording at the time couldn't fully capture.
In 2016, after two years of joint development with Eventide, this technique became a reverb plug-in called Tverb. It models the acoustic space of the Meistersaal itself and lets you place two "moving mics" freely in the virtual room,
a digital extension of the analogue technique of the time.
About the Eventide Harmonizer: gear that "breaks the structure of time", not used on "Heroes"
The Eventide Harmonizer (H910) that defined the drum sound on the previous album, Low,
is an experimental pitch-shift/delay unit that the Bowie and Eno camp described as "breaking the very structure of time".
But on the "Heroes" sessions it was only used partly at the mixing stage,
and not on the title track itself. Visconti says that "just putting the sound of that huge room on the drum kit was enough", and the Meistersaal's natural reverb took on that role instead.
The drum kit was set up on the stage mentioned earlier (the old choir platform),
and the way the room's physical acoustics worked directly as an "effect" could be called the philosophy running through the whole album.
Track by track
Side 1
1. Beauty and the Beast: It opens with piano, guitar, electronics and vocals tangling unevenly together as they build in a crescendo. As mentioned, the first note Fripp played through the "magic suitcase" is captured here. Released as a single in January 1978, it reached number 39 in the UK.
2. Joe the Lion: Featuring Robert Fripp's lead guitar. The lyrics were inspired by the self-harming works of American performance artist Chris Burden (most famously "Shoot", in which he had an assistant shoot him in the arm at close range).
3. "Heroes": Written by Bowie and Eno, co-produced by Bowie and Visconti. The signature song about lovers who meet at the Berlin Wall. The album take runs 6:07, while the single was cut to 3:32. Fripp's guitar, Eno's synths and Visconti's three-mic technique all come together in this song, the heart of the album.
4. Sons of the Silent Age: According to Eno, this was the only song written before the sessions; everything else was improvised. Bowie has said he once considered naming the album after it.
5. Blackout: Critic Nicholas Pegg called it the song that best captures "the dark, exhilarating sonic schizophrenia of the "Heroes" album".
Side 2(A largely instrumental side)
6. V-2 Schneider: An almost entirely instrumental track, released as the B-side of the "Heroes" single. The title is a tribute to Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk.
7. Sense of Doubt
8. Moss Garden: A strongly ambient piece, known for Bowie himself playing the koto.
9. Neuköln: An instrumental inspired by Neukölln, the Turkish immigrant district of Berlin.
10. The Secret Life of Arabia: A song co-credited to Carlos Alomar, also born from improvisation in the studio.
The album title itself is a nod to the song "Hero" on Neu!'s album NEU! '75, and there's also a story that guitarist Michael Rother was originally asked to take part.
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