‘Heaven’s In Here’: The David Bowie song that became his ‘Dazed and Confused’
David Bowie and Led Zeppelin are two artists with, realistically, not that much in common. Led Zeppelin came first, dominating the music world at the height of rock and roll, standing as a kind of hyper-masculine act with the ultimate 1960s look. Then came Bowie, lanky and odd, androgynous and theatrical, in the ‘70s. But in the late 1980s, there was one song of Bowie’s that tapped into the rock band’s energy.
If there’s one thing the two acts did share, it was experimentation. When Led Zeppelin first launched, they went straight in with something bold. The band’s own Jimmy Page self-funded their debut to ensure that no label boss or higher-ups messed with that, allowing them to unleash six-minute-long, spanning tunes with no pressure to dilute their vision. They stuck true to that ethos from then on. While often grouped in with the other rock and roll groups of the time, their music was always something different, defying the traditional song structure and demanding that the music world keep up with them rather than squashing their creativity to fit in with it.
That exact sentence could be used to describe Bowie, too. At any point that the world might have felt like they understood the artist, he switched on them. After a period of glam rock, he moved to Berlin to get weird. When people got used to that, he turned to pop. After going pop, he morphed through just about every genre and style possible throughout his incredibly varied career.
In the 1980s, Bowie was changing at hyper-speed. Starting out with Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), through Let’s Dance and Beyond, the artist ended the decade in a band. Tin Machine was made up of Bowie, Reeves Gabrels, Tony Fox Sales and Hunt Sales. It’s an often forgotten side project of the artist’s, founded during a period of creative slump as a sort of stress-free chance to play around with a different sound outside of the pressure of his solo career.
On their self-titled debut album, released in 1989, they seemed to be taking notes from the great bands that had come before them, including Led Zeppelin. It opens with ‘Heaven’s In Here’, a six-minute long rock song not too dissimilar from the kind Led Zeppelin launched with. Led with Bowie’s vocals, it’s obviously a very different energy to the roaring voice of Robert Plant, but to Tin Machine, the song had the same expensive potential as ‘Dazed and Confused’.
In 1989, the band did their first-ever performance, telling no one in advance and mentioning nothing about the band’s lineup. “We just walked up on stage, and you could hear all these voices whispering, That’s David Bowie! No, it can’t be David Bowie; he’s got a beard!” Gabrels remembered of the show. But the songs they’d written, especially ‘Heaven’s In Here’, were built for that kind of excitement. “It was obvious that songs like ‘Heaven’s In Here’ were suited to the live environment,” he said, adding, “That was our ‘Dazed And Confused’ – it could be 20 minutes long on any given night.”
Just as how Led Zeppelin could get swept up in the rock epic from their debut, Tin Machine could do the same, being carried away by the same musical spirit and energy that ruled over the ‘60s troupe.
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