Tom Dunne: The real story behind Bowie's Heroes revealed at last
David Bowie on the cover of his Heroes album, recorded in Berlin.
For the record: I was always suspicious. Tony Visconti, producer to the stars sitting at a studio desk, and saying, “Yes, I inspired Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. That was me. I did it.” It was just too smooth. A stolen lunch time smooch inspires that epic track! Nah, Not buying it, Tony.
The story was that during the recording of the Heroes album in Berlin’s Hansa studios in September 1977, Bowie was at an impasse. “Look,” explained Tony, “You stay here and write your lyrics, I’ve to, em, go out. I’ll be back.”
Tony was then married to singer Mary Hopkin, herself a piece of living Bowie memorabilia through her singing the kind of “Do da do ya do” bit on ‘Sound and Vision’. But in Berlin Tony had met, and become smitten with, a certain Antonia Maass, who sang with Berlin band The Messengers.
Now maybe it was Tony’s modus operandi to inveigle people he was seeing into singing on his latest project, but Antonia was soon in the studio giving it socks. And it is claimed that it was she he was meeting that day.
The legend is that he met Antonia just outside the studio, by what was then the Berlin Wall. They held hands and a kiss followed which was observed by Bowie from the studio window. On his return, Tony found Bowie bright eyed and ready to record. Obviously, what he has seen had inspired him.
The story was kept quiet at first but when Tony’s marriage to Mary Hopkin ended, it started to come out. Bowie seemed to go along with it, but Maass was emphatic. She maintained that she and Tony were not a couple at the time ‘Heroes’ was written. That was later, she insisted.
It might have stayed there where it not for the intrepid detective work of Francis Whately. A former BBC producer, Whately made the wonderful Five Years documentary on Bowie in 2013, and had interviewed him extensively down the years.
Whately’s latest work, Heroes, airs on BBC Radio 4 Radio next Saturday. In it, he presents the artist, model and actor Clare Shenstone, as a witness for the defence that the ‘Tony inspired Heroes’ side might prefer not to take the stand. Tony, you are banged to rights.
Shenstone had started life as model. That’s her on the poster for Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls film. She toured the world with the Royal Shakespeare Company and as an artist so impressed Francis Bacon that he invited her to paint his portrait.
She was also a witness at the marriage of Bowie to Angie. But, by 1977, as Bowie retreated to Berlin “get clean,” become flat mates with Iggy Pop, and record three superb albums, she was considerably more than a witness.
She claims in the documentary that they shared a date one fateful day which she has described as “extraordinary.” Meeting early on she had shared with Bowie a dream she had had that night about swimming with dolphins. Then they had crossed via Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin.
This she described, understandably, as an “extreme experience”. They visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and watched Red Army troops goose-stepping about the city they had reduced to ruins in 1945 as they overcame the Nazis. History here was alive, in your face and dangerous.
Returning to the West they walked along the wall. “There were spotlights,” she said, “and you could see the guns silhouetted. We were holding hands, and he took my other hand and kissed me. It was so beautiful.”
Those experiences correlate almost perfectly with verses two and three of ‘Heroes’. From “I, I wish you could swim, like dolphins, like dolphins can swim” to “I, I can remember, standing, by the wall, and the guns shot above our heads, and we kissed as though nothing could fall”, they chime perfectly.
The story has also a certain authenticity lacking in the lunchtime snog scenario. It’s a towering lyric and a visceral vocal. It resonates with danger and romance and impossible belief in the face of overwhelming odds. The song deserves that origin story.
Shenstone is fascinating too. Despite Bowie’s advances and their obvious passion, she was determined to leave Berlin. She felt if she stayed her career would be subsumed by his fame. Her art and her career meant more to her. She went on to A New Career in a New Town, as it were, and thrived. What a story!
