1.

In the summer of 1977, in the winter of the Cold War, David Bowie was in West Berlin to record a new album. His band was working in a run-down studio less than half a mile from the Berlin Wall. It was an old ballroom where Nazis used to party.

One of the tracks on the album was supposed to be an instrumental. The band had the sound down: an experimental number with guitar feedback, a whirring synthesizer, and even a clanging ashtray.

Late one night, gazing out from the studio’s window, David Bowie spied something mysterious in the shadow of that nearby wall: a man and a woman kissing, just steps away from soldiers patrolling with rifles. Love and guns, close enough to touch.

Possessed by that image, Bowie would write the lyrics to “Heroes” in a matter of hours, and that instrumental track would get its words.

As the band recorded the new song, the producer had a strange idea: with each verse, he would pull the microphone farther away from Bowie, forcing him to sing louder and louder so that, by the end of the song, Bowie had to shout just to be heard.

There was David Bowie, in an old Nazi partyplace, shouting at that wall about love and guns.1