Bowie PDF Book from JFK247

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