It was the unofficial soundtrack to the 2012 Olympics, inspired a Philip Glass symphony and is David Bowie’s most popular track on Spotify.
Now a new BBC documentary claims the song was created after a day he spent with Clare Shenstone, the model, actor and artist who had a relationship with Bowie in the mid-1970s.
The notoriously inscrutable singer may have left more questions than answers on his final album, Blackstar, but the origin of 1977’s Heroes was something fans thought was sewn up: Bowie consistently claimed the song was written after he saw the producer Tony Visconti sharing an embrace with the German singer Antonia Maass by the Berlin Wall.
However, BBC Radio 4’s Bowie in Berlin tells how the song was informed by time spent with Shenstone in the German capital that inspired three of his most feted records: Low, Heroes and Lodger. The documentary is a reappraisal of the much-mythologised period, with Shenstone telling Francis Whately – who made the 2013 Bowie film Five Years – about their outing.
The pair shared an “extraordinary day”, according to Shenstone, who said it began with her telling Bowie about a dream that involved swimming with dolphins, before they went to a museum show and crossed into the city’s east via Checkpoint Charlie.
“We spent a couple of hours at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the guards were goose-stepping. We held hands very tightly and just took it all in, it was so extreme as an experience,” says Shenstone, who then returned with Bowie to the west.
“We walked along the other side of the wall. There were spotlights and you could see the guns silhouetted and we were holding hands and he took my other hand and he kissed me. It was so beautiful.”
The account of the day mirrors many of the lyrics from Heroes, which includes the line: “I wish you could swim/like dolphins can swim”, while Bowie sings that he remembers “standing by the wall/And the guns, shot above our heads/And we kissed, as though nothing could fall”.
“I recognised it immediately,” Shenstone tells Whately in the documentary. “I knew what each word meant, and it described exactly from moment to moment what that day was about.”
Shenstone ultimately chose to leave Berlin because she did not want to give up her artistic freedom and enter a world of tabloid attention and intrusion. “By the time he wrote Heroes I’d managed to make him see that I would have to give up my painting my career, who I am. I wouldn’t be me,” she says. “I went back to London and when I heard Heroes I realised he had thought it through and he did understand.”
The usual focus of Bowie’s Berlin era is on the singer’s attempt to live a relatively anonymous existence and shake a destructive cocaine habit, which also inspired some of his more chaotic songwriting while in Germany.
His creative partnerships with Iggy Pop (with whom he shared a flat in Berlin), the co-producer of the Berlin-era albums Tony Visconti and collaborator Brian Eno are often explored. Bowie in Berlin, however, centres on three women in the singer’s life: Shenstone, the performer and nightclub owner Romy Haag and the former journalist Sarah-Rena Hine.
Shenstone’s own artistic life was remarkable. She started as a model, appearing aged 16 on the poster for Andy Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls, before acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company – touring the world in the process – and then becoming an artist who impressed Francis Bacon so much with her 1979 Royal College of Art MA show that he invited her to paint his portrait.
Whately calls Shentone’s version of the Heroes origin story, “poignant, romantic and utterly convincing”, while acknowledging there’s no way of finding out whether or not it is definitive.
Archive on 4: Bowie in Berlin airs on 14 September at 8pm on BBC Radio 4
