The iconic David Bowie song that hid an illicit affair
Several influences contributed to the final version of the classic David Bowie song ‘Heroes’. There’s Otto Mueller’s 1916 painting Lovers Between Garden Walls, a piece of art that Bowie observed first-hand with close friend Iggy Pop while visiting the Brücke Museum in Berlin. There’s Alberto Denti di Pirajno’s 1956 short story A Grave for a Dolphin, which Bowie confirmed as an influence in the forward to his wife Iman’s book I Am Iman. But more than anything else, ‘Heroes’ was kickstarted by a real-life affair.
Not any from Bowie, however, as he was already estranged from his wife Angela at that time and wouldn’t marry Iman until 1992. The affair came from producer and Bowie associate Tony Visconti, who contributed to numerous early Bowie records and was back with him during the Heroes sessions in Germany. Visconti became smitten with backing singer Antonia Maaß. When Bowie spied the pair stealing a kiss outside the Hansa Studio, Bowie used the incident as the starting point for ‘Heroes’.
Visconti was married to English singer Mary Hopkin then, and Bowie’s desire to protect his friend led him to credit an anonymous couple with the kiss. “Tony was married at the time, and I could never say who it was,” Bowie explained in Nicholas Pegg’s The Complete David Bowie. “I think possibly the marriage was in the last few months, and it was very touching because I could see that Tony was very much in love with this girl, and it was that relationship which sort of motivated the song”.
An interview with NME in 1977 was a perfect example of Bowie remaining vague about Visconti and Maaß’s identities. “The situation that sparked off the whole thing was – I thought – highly ironic. There’s a wall by the studio – the album having been recorded at Hansa by the Wall in West Berlin – about there,” Bowie shared. “It’s about twenty or thirty meters away from the studio and the control room looks out onto it. There’s a turret on top of the wall where the guards sit and during the course of lunch break every day, a boy and girl would meet out there and carry on. They were obviously having an affair”.
“And I thought of all the places to meet in Berlin, why pick a bench underneath a guard turret on the wall?” Bowie wondered. “They’d come from different directions and always meet there… Oh, they were both from the west, but they had always meet right there. And I – using license – presumed that they were feeling somewhat guilty about this affair and so they had imposed this restriction on themselves, thereby giving themselves an excuse for their heroic act. I used this as a basis… therefore it is ironic”.
Visconti would later confirm that Bowie was protecting his identity should the true nature of the affair be revealed. While he and Maaß weren’t meant to last, the affair would become immortalised as one of the most romantic love songs of all time.
Check out ‘Heroes’ down below.
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