“I asked David, ‘Any suggestions?’ He said, ‘Think Ritchie Blackmore.’ I didn’t expect that”: When David Bowie asked Robert Fripp to play like a Deep Purple legend

David Bowie (left) and Robert Fripp perform onstage.

A towering love story set in the face of the division of Berlin during the Cold War, Heroes is one of David Bowie's greatest achievements – an epic that will long outlive him (and has already). It wouldn't be half of what it is, though, without Robert Fripp.

It was Fripp that contributed the song's defining instrumental element, a whirring guitar part that adds a touch of the weird and surreal as it coils around Bowie's heroic vocal performance.