To understand what you're watching in this film, you need to go back roughly a year — to a recording studio 500 yards from the Berlin Wall, a summer afternoon in 1977, and a secret that Tony Visconti kept for four years.
David Bowie arrived in West Berlin in 1976 as a man trying to save his own life.
The years between Diamond Dogs and Station to Station had been the years of cocaine and Los Angeles, of the Thin White Duke persona growing so large it threatened to swallow the person inside it. Bowie was rail-thin, reportedly surviving on milk, peppers and cocaine, conducting meetings about his own career with little conscious memory of them afterward. He had become rich and famous and utterly lost. By the time he packed for Berlin, he had been awake for so long he had stopped counting the days.
In the second half of 1976, Bowie and his friend Iggy Pop relocated first to the Château d'Hérouville in France, then to West Berlin, to escape from the drug culture of Los Angeles. The city was a deliberate choice. West Berlin in the 1970s was an island of capitalism surrounded by the Eastern Bloc — walled in, geographically isolated, psychically strange. It was a concrete jungle still bearing war scars, cut through by the Berlin Wall. But it was also a hub for a new wave of musical experimentation — Krautrock bands such as Tangerine Dream, Neu! and Harmonia were using electronics like never before, reinventing the sound of rock music. Bowie immersed himself in this world, riding his bicycle through the city, visiting galleries, eating in ordinary restaurants where nobody bothered him, living as anonymously as a man of his fame could manage.
The greatest gift the city had given him was its indifference — the war-torn metropolis allowed him to be subsumed by its grey concrete and resilient residents, to be a face in the crowd once more.
He made Low in this state of recovery. Then, in the summer of 1977, he made something else.
Recording for the "Heroes" album took place entirely in West Berlin between July and August 1977 at Hansa Studio 2 — a former concert hall converted into a recording studio that had been used by Gestapo officers during World War II as a ballroom, located about 500 yards from the Berlin Wall.
Producer Tony Visconti recalled the atmosphere: "Every afternoon I'd sit down at that desk and see three Russian Red Guards looking at us with binoculars, with their Sten guns over their shoulders, and the barbed wire, and I knew that there were mines buried in that wall — and that atmosphere was so provocative and so stimulating and so frightening that the band played with so much energy."
The core band was the same as Low — Carlos Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass, Dennis Davis on drums — with two crucial additions. Brian Eno arrived with his EMS Synthi AKS synthesiser built into a briefcase, using its joystick, oscillator knobs and noise filter to create effects unlike anything in conventional rock. And Robert Fripp, then on hiatus from King Crimson, was recruited at Eno's suggestion.
Fripp's Les Paul ran through Eno's EMS Synthi and then into the Neve console. He used measurements taped on the studio floor to indicate the optimum position for the feedback of each note — 'A' at four feet, 'G' at three and a half — and by moving between these positions he tamed what could have been formless noise into something celestial.
Then there was the song that would become the title track. And the secret.
One afternoon, Bowie looked out of the Hansa Studio window toward the Wall.
He saw his producer Tony Visconti kissing a woman named Antonia Maass — a Berlin jazz singer who had come to provide backing vocals on the album. Visconti was married at the time, so when asked about the inspiration for the song, Bowie invented a story about an anonymous young couple he had observed. He kept the secret for four years, until after Visconti's marriage ended. Only then did both men admit what the song had really been about: two people kissing in the shadow of the Wall, under the eyes of armed guards, in a city that was itself an act of defiance.
To record the lead vocal, Visconti devised a "multi-latch" system using three Neumann microphones placed at different distances from Bowie — nine inches away, twenty feet away, and fifty feet away. The two farther microphones were routed through a noise gate that would only open when Bowie sang loud enough to reach them, progressively adding reverb and ambience the more he projected. Bowie's performance thus grew in intensity precisely as more ambience infused his delivery — until, by the final verse, he had to shout just to be heard. The more he shouted, the further back in the mix the system pushed his vocal tracks, creating a stark metaphor for the situation of the doomed lovers: the harder they reached for each other, the more the world pushed back.
Bowie told The Observer in 1977: "I had no melody so I only sang the lines I'd written for four or five bars at a time. Having sung one line, I'd take a breath and do the same thing again and so on to the end. I never knew the complete melody until I'd finished the song and played the whole thing back."
When Brian Eno later heard the finished album at Bowie's house, the title track came on. "I just shivered," he said. "When you shiver, it's a fear reaction, isn't it?"
Nine months later, Bowie brought the song home.
The Isolar II World Tour — also known as the Low/"Heroes" World Tour — opened on March 29, 1978 in San Diego and swept through North America before reaching Europe in the summer. By the time it arrived in London for a three-night stand at Earls Court in late June and early July, the band had been on the road for three months and had become, in the words of the NME reviewing a Newcastle show, "the tightest outfit he's ever worked with, and that includes the Spiders."
Earls Court was one of the most popular arenas in the UK, with a capacity of around 19,000 including standing room. Slade and Bowie himself had been the first rock acts to play there, back in 1973. By 1978 it had hosted Led Zeppelin's legendary five-night run in May 1975 and Queen's sold-out shows in June 1977. It was the room you played when you had arrived — enormous, difficult acoustically, utterly thrilling when it worked.
Bowie had the foresight to bring in filmmaker David Hemmings to shoot the shows for an intended concert film. Among the audience across the three nights were Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen, Iggy Pop, Dustin Hoffman, Ian Dury, and Bob Geldof. The July 1st show — the last night of the European leg of the entire tour — was the first time Bowie ever performed "Sound and Vision" live.
All three nights opened with the low, slow instrumental "Warszawa" going directly into "Heroes" — the song arriving not as a climax but as a statement of intent, the very first thing the audience heard after the lights went down. In an arena of 19,000 people. Nine months after it was recorded. Six months after it was released. Still fresh enough to feel like a discovery.
The footage has never received an official cinema release. Bowie said in 2000: "I simply didn't like the way it had been shot. Now, of course, it looks pretty good and I would suspect that it would make it out some time in the future." He died in January 2016 before that future arrived. The arena itself was demolished between 2014 and 2017. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Hansa Studio still stands.
What remains is the footage on YouTube — slightly hazy, shot in the half-dark, Bowie in a white shirt moving across the stage while Robert Fripp's guitar feeds back and swells and the crowd fills in the words they already know by heart. A song written in a studio 500 yards from the Wall, about two people kissing in the shadow of it, performed nine months later to 19,000 Londoners who felt, for the duration of those six and a half minutes, like they might be heroes too.
Just for one day.
The stage remembers.