Meertens Constellation "Heroes"

Tracing David Bowie's Berlin Album Song By Song
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-573-1
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 144 Seiten

CONSTELLATION 'HEROES' is a track-by-track exploration of David Bowie's 1977 album 'Heroes', one of the most forceful and elusive records of his career. Combining lyric interpretation, studio history, cultural context and legacy, the book examines how the record was made, what shaped its songs, and why it still resonates. The chapters move from the album's abrasive opening tracks through the instrumental sequence and into the bonus material, drawing the divided city outside the studio into Bowie's restless collage of language, sound and image.
For readers drawn to the late-1970s arc that runs from The Idiot, Low and Lust For Life through the Isolar II Tour and Lodger, this is an immersive and deeply considered inquiry into the creative world surrounding 'Heroes'. Discerning, imaginative and historically attuned, the book traces a web of connections from Chris Burden to Blackstar, from Tokyo to German Expressionism, from Cold War unease back to Bromley. Framed by Bowie's Berlin era, it follows the currents that infused the album and offers the most expansive and searching reading of 'Heroes' to date, a record still transmitting.

'A sharp and impressive quest through the many layers of 'Heroes'. A must for any Bowie lover.' - Eduard Meyer, sound engineer at Hansa Studios 1976-2003.

'A fascinating study of Bowie's creative process, bringing an almost forensic insight into the ideas and influences behind the music.' - Kevin Armstrong, guitarist with Bowie at Live Aid1985 and beyond.

Hans Meertens is a Dutch artist, writer and illustrator whose work is shown internationally and held in private, museum and corporate collections. He studied fine art in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, and refined his practice through residencies in New York City. He is the author of On Track... Iggy Pop 1977-1999: Every Album, Every Song, a detailed survey of Iggy's solo output from that era. A longtime admirer of David Bowie, he turns his focus in this book to a defining work at the heart of his enduring fascination with Bowie's universe.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meertens, Hans

Leseproben

Chapter 3

White Light Transit

Under a hard wash of white light, the Thin White Duke materialised: slicked-back hair, black waistcoat, white shirt, a pack of Gitanes tucked neatly into one pocket. The stage was flooded in icy brilliance, lit from above by neon strips and searing Klieg lights that bleached it into stark monochrome. The effect was theatrical in its severity: an expressionist glare that sharpened both the music’s attack and Bowie’s own silhouette as a French matinee Dracula of cabaret control. Detached and mesmerising, he radiated focus without warmth, like a flicker sealed inside frosted glass. The construct was born of the psychic wreckage of Thomas Jerome Newton, whose descent mirrored Bowie’s own. In 1978, Bowie described the Duke in Crawdaddy as ‘a very Aryan, fascist type; a would-be romantic with absolutely no emotion at all but who spouted a lot of neoromance.’

Two weeks after turning 29, Bowie released Station To Station, his highest-charting US album, which peaked at number three and also reached the top ten in Australia, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Norway and the UK. The sessions that produced it had already slipped into a fug, and would remain that way. ‘I can’t even remember the studio’, Bowie told VH1 in 1997. ‘I know it was in LA ‘cause I’ve read it was in LA.’ He took it on the road as the Isolar Tour, now more widely remembered as the White Light or Station To Station Tour. From February to May, it travelled through Canada, the US and Europe, earning praise from both audiences and critics. The album’s monolithic drive found its match on stage, where the music’s austere grandeur was mirrored in a stylised production shaped by the shadows and severity of Lang and Pabst. Behind the scenes, a curious observer followed closely, taking in the stagecraft and rigour, then joining the parties after dark. His name was Jim Osterberg, known to the world as Iggy Pop.

Iggy had made chaos and history with The Stooges before the band disintegrated in 1974, undone by poor sales and the wreckage of heroin-fuelled self-destruction. Bowie had been an early supporter, befriending Iggy back in 1971, and had mixed their album Raw Power, the band’s final studio album of that era. After the collapse, Iggy drifted between New York and LA, unmoored, gaunt and chemically undone. Friends found him incoherent, volatile, vanishing before their eyes. By 1975, his decline had become such a public nuisance that the LAPD gave him a choice: jail or rehab. He chose the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. Bowie was one of the few who visited, offering support and, in a murky gesture of loyalty, bringing a sizeable amount of drugs. After his release, Bowie arranged a demo session in LA to launch Iggy’s solo career, but it quickly fell apart. He was still erratic, in no state to work.

Nearly a year later, Iggy was still adrift, living as chaotically as Bowie but without his discipline and resources. After being caught shoplifting apples and cheese in Beverly Hills, their mutual dealer bailed him out and told him that Bowie wanted to reconnect and work together again, and Iggy got in touch. The chemistry was still intact. Bowie invited him to join the touring entourage as a companion, a friend, maybe even to tinker with new ideas. Iggy took four days to decide. With no real way out of the wreckage, he agreed. The ride would offer no shortage of defining and disorienting moments.

In Rochester, a post-show party in Bowie’s hotel suite ended in a drug bust. At 2.25 am, narcotics officers charged Bowie, his bodyguard, Iggy and a young Rochester woman with possession of eight ounces of marijuana. They spent several hours in jail before Bowie posted bond for the group. The case was effectively dropped when a Grand Jury declined to indict. Speaking to Playboy later that year, Bowie shrugged: ‘Bloody potheads. What a dreadful irony – me popped for grass. The stuff sickens me.’

During the European leg of the tour, Bowie drew criticism for a series of controversial political remarks. In an interview with Rolling Stone, conducted during the occult-infused madness of the previous summer and published that February, he had spoken of his fascination with power and dictatorship: ‘I think I might have been a bloody good Hitler. I’d be an excellent dictator. Very eccentric and quite mad.’ He described himself as ‘certainly right-wing enough’ to become either Prime Minister of Britain or President of the United States.

While the controversy simmered, the tour moved deeper into Europe. In Berlin, Bowie and Iggy crossed at Checkpoint Charlie and drove through East Berlin in Bowie’s rickety limousine, absorbing the heavy stillness of the divided city. With a week before the next concert in Helsinki, they made a side trip by train to Moscow via Warsaw. At the Polish-Soviet border, they were detained by the KGB and strip-searched. Among Bowie’s belongings were books on Goebbels and Speer, which he described as research for a planned film about Hitler’s propaganda minister. In Moscow, they visited Red Square and the GUM department store, ate caviar at the Metropol, then left the city by train seven hours after arrival. At his next stop in Helsinki, the newspaper headline the following day read: ‘Bowie Lost in Russia!’ From there, he travelled on to Sweden. At a press meeting after the Stockholm concert, Bowie was confronted by a journalist about the Rolling Stone remarks. Asked whether he still believed that Britain needed a fascist leader, he replied, ‘Oh yes, not a Nazi leader, a fascist leader’, adding that people ‘won’t know what they really want until they are ruled.’ The remarks were published the next day and caused immediate controversy in the British press.

A week later, on 2 May, Bowie arrived at Victoria Station in London and was photographed with his arm raised in a gesture that could be construed as a Nazi salute. NME published the image under the headline ‘HEIL AND FAREWELL’, offering no clarification or supporting context. ‘It upsets me. Strong, I may be. Arrogant, I may be. Sinister, I’m not’, he told the Daily Express three days after the incident. Film footage suggests he had merely been waving to the crowd, a version he consistently maintained in subsequent statements and which was later corroborated by Gary Numan and photographer Philippe Auliac, both present that day. ‘I just waved. Believe me. On the life of my child, I waved. And the bastard caught me. In mid-wave, man. And, God, did that photo get some coverage ...’ Bowie would tell Melody Maker in 1977.

But the damage had been done. The combination of the pose and his recent comments cemented the perception of an artist aligning himself with authoritarian posturing, amplified by the Aryan froideur of the Thin White Duke and earlier allusions to Nietzschean visions of the future. It is hard to miss how his cocaine-fuelled immersion in Nazi occult mythologies, from Arthurian Grail quests to the imagined power of the Spear of Destiny, fed into his lapses at a time when his public statements were already under scrutiny.

The fallout would echo in September 1976, when Playboy published an interview conducted before the Victoria Station incident, in which Bowie again made provocative comments. One of them: ‘I believe very strongly in fascism.’ He praised the efficiency of fascist regimes in contrast with liberalism’s indecision, and likened Hitler’s stagecraft to that of Mick Jagger, before dismissing such remarks as ‘inflammatory’ in the same conversation. In retrospect, Bowie had been drawn to the theatrical force of propaganda for its aesthetics and perceived potency, rather than any political ideology. ‘What I said was Britain was ready for another Hitler, which is quite a different thing from saying it needs another Hitler. I’m closer to communism than fascism – that at least has some saving graces’, he told Record Mirror in 1977. In Popster the same year, he stated: ‘All the statements I’ve made are ‘theatrical warnings’. I am completely nonpartisan.’

Whether driven by shock tactics, cocaine delusion, or obsessive intellectual curiosity, the controversies in 1976 proved difficult to shake off and led to speculation over whether Bowie should also be seen as racist. His face appeared on ‘Rock Against Racism’ leaflets, and the backlash only intensified the dangerous allure of the Thin White Duke myth. In later interviews, he repeatedly distanced himself from the remarks, insisting they did not reflect his personal convictions. In 1993, he told Arena that he had equated fascism with communism, specifically Stalinism, adding: ‘It’s hard to see that you could get involved with all that and not see the implications of what you were getting into.’ He consistently blamed his erratic behaviour and his dalliances with fascist rhetoric and occultism on drug-induced paranoia and depression. ‘I was out of my mind, totally, completely crazed. Really. But the main thing I was functioning on was – as far as that whole thing about Hitler and rightism was concerned – it was mythology’, he told NME in 1980:

This whole racist thing, which came up quite inevitably and rightly. But – and I know this sounds terribly naive – but none of that had actually occurred to me, inasmuch as I’d been working, and still do...