Viele Menschen wissen, dass David Bowie ein paar Jahren in Berlin wohnte.
Helden (Heroes)
David Bowie
Du
Könntest Du schwimmen
Wie Delphine
Delphine es tun
Niemand gibt uns eine Chance
Doch können wir siegen
Für immer und immer
Und wir sind dann Helden
Für einen Tag
Ich
Ich bin dann König
Und Du
Du Königin
Obwohl sie
Unschlagbar scheinen
Werden wir Helden
Für einen Tag
Wir sind dann wir
An diesem Tag
Ich
Ich glaub' das zu träumen
Die Mauer
Im Rücken war kalt
Die Schüsse reißen die Luft
Doch wir küssen
Als ob nichts geschieht
Und die Scham fiel auf ihre Seite
Oh, wir können sie schlagen
Für alle Zeiten
Dann sind wir Helden
Nur diesen Tag
Dann sind wir Helden
Dann sind wir Helden
Dann sind wir Helden
Nur diesen Tag
Dann sind wir Helden
Über diese Zeit in Berlin . . . .
David
Bowie moved to Berlin in the mid-70s in the grip of a cocaine
addiction. But the city purged his demons and pushed him to new creative
heights. Rory MacLean remembers their nights in his Hauptstraße flat –
and one wild night out with Iggy....
It’s Christmas Day in Berlin in 1977. Seated at the table are David Bowie
and the film-maker David Hemmings, along with various partners,
children and add-ons like me. At a secluded restaurant in the Grunewald,
the deep and dark urban forest that hugs the city’s western fringe, we
eat and drink too much and Bowie gives me a copy of Fritz Lang’s
biography, which one day will help me to write a book about Berlin.
In return, I gift him a retro Japanese “space jet” model made of tin.
Just right for a wannabe alien. At the end of the happy evening, I
follow him downstairs to the huge, ceramic lavatory where – as we stand
before the urinals – we sing Buddy Holly songs together, or at least a
line and a half from Little Richard’s Good Golly Miss Molly.
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‘An extraordinary, alien, otherworldly creature’: David Bowie 1947-2016 - video tribute
When Bowie moved from Los Angeles to Berlin in late 1976, he’d been
on the edge of physical and mental collapse. At first, he fell back on
old habits, cruising around the divided city with flatmate Iggy Pop,
drinking KöPi at Joe’s Beer House, stumbling into gutters and
transvestite bars, clubbing at the Dschungel and the Unlimited. One
night, Iggy sat in the passenger seat as Bowie rammed their dealer’s car
again and again, for five crazed minutes. He then drove around their
hotel’s underground car park, pushing 70mph, screaming above the screech
of the tyres that he wanted to end it all by driving into a concrete
wall. Until his car ran out of fuel and the two friends collapsed in
hysterics.
To defeat his demons, Bowie needed space and stability. His estranged
wife Angie no longer provided it. For much of the time, she kept their
son Zowie (later Duncan Jones)
away from him, in London or Switzerland. So his assistant Coco Schwab
found him a modest, first floor apartment in an art nouveau building in
the leafy Berlin area of Schöneberg. Coco – the devoted, unsung heroine of Bowie’s career – had its walls
painted white as a private gallery for his dark images. She ordered in
blank canvases and tubes of oil paint. She read Nietzsche
beside him, beneath the fluorescent portrait he painted of Japanese
author Yukio Mishima. Above all, she went with him to the Brücke Museum,
to gaze at the works of Kirchner, Kollwitz and Heckel. The
expressionists’ rough, bold strokes and melancholic mood captured a
sense of the ephemeral, as well as Bowie’s imagination.
David Bowie in the studio at Hansa with Robert Fripp, left, and Brian
Eno, right, in July 1977. Photograph: Christian Simonpietri/Sygma/Corbis
In the capital of reinvention, and in Coco’s care, Bowie began to
edge away from cocaine psychosis, finding his way out of his life of
excess, remaking himself as an ordinary man. He dressed in baggy
trousers and dowdy shirts, and enjoyed the Berliners’ disinterest in
him. No one bothered him on the street, unlike in star-struck LA. One
night on a whim, he climbed onto a cabaret stage to perform a few Frank
Sinatra songs. The local audience shrugged and asked him to step down.
They had come to see a different act. Away from the limelight, he
composed, painted and, for the first time in years, “felt a joy of life
and a great feeling of release and healing”, as he put it.
He realised his goal was not simply to find a new way of making
music, but rather to reinvent – or to come back to – himself. He no
longer needed to adopt characters to sing his songs. He found the
courage to throw away the props, costumes and stage sets.
By the summer
of 1977, Bowie was on a creative high. With producer Tony Visconti and friend Brian Eno,
he began to make a new album. Over long sessions in the studio, he ate
almost nothing, sailing home to Hauptstraße with Eno at dawn, breaking a
raw egg into his mouth, and sleeping a few hours before returning to
the studio.
One of the first songs recorded that summer had been an instrumental
track until, alone at the piano, Bowie began to sketch out some lyrics,
eventually making it the title track and calling it “Heroes”. Visconti
rigged up three microphones with electronic “gates”. The first mic was
20cm from Bowie, the second 6m away, the third 15m away across the vast,
dark hall. The gates were set to open when Bowie sang above a certain
volume, forcing him to gradually lift his voice from a whisper to a
shout, using the room’s natural echo.
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As
Visconti adjusted the levels, Bowie continued to write the lyrics, then
asked to be left alone with his thoughts and the piano. Visconti
slipped out and walked along Köthenerstraße to meet his lover. From the
Hansa Sound Studio control room, Bowie saw them kiss, by the Wall.
Two hours later, the final lyric was recorded. “Heroes” became
Berlin’s rock anthem, a droning, courageous wall of sound, fired with
deep emotion, hammered by a clanging, metallic rhythm – produced in part
by Visconti hitting a studio ashtray. Bowie called “Heroes”, and his
three Berlin albums, his DNA. Time and again, it would be named one of
pop’s greatest and most original singles.
Of course, there were moments of delicious madness both in Berlin and
afterwards. At his 31st birthday party with Iggy and Eno, at the
Lützower Lampe when the much-loved 60-year-old drag queen Viola was
encouraged to sit on my knee and croon German love songs in my ear.
Bowie went home with the only “real” girl in the place that night.
David Bowie with assistant director Rory MacLean filming Just a Gigolo in 1977. Photograph: Emilio Lari
I had come to Berlin to work as the assistant director on Just a Gigolo,
a film starring Bowie and Marlene Dietrich. As the only native
English-speakers on the picture, we (Bowie, Coco, Hemmings and I)
naturally gravitated toward each other. We spent many evenings together
in Bowie’s Hauptstraße apartment. He would play records and demo tapes
for us and others, explaining how musicians and groups come together
then break up in the pursuit of creative goals, likening the process to
the Die Brücke expressionists; the Beatles and John Lennon; Roxy Music
and Brian Eno; Der Blaue Reiter group and Kandinsky.
He introduced me to Brecht, spoke of “quadrants and quantum leaps,
creation and process” – and even discussed the pitfalls of Warner
Brothers’ $15m offer for a Ziggy Stardust rock musical.
“I am a generalist!” he told me one day on the set, meaning he was a
Renaissance man, skilled in different fields and mediums. “Then why are
you most associated with rock’n’roll?” I asked. “It is only a front,” he
laughed.
Fast forward to Earls Court in London – the final venue of the
European leg of the Isolar II tour. It’s June 1978 and 18,000 fans are
whistling and wailing for the intermission to end. They clap their
hands, stamp their feet and holler for Bowie to return. He has performed
live for 1.5m people in 43 cities over the previous 14 weeks. Behind
the stage, along a concrete corridor, their starman sits in silence,
dressed in snakeskin drapecoat and huge baggy white trousers, watching Coronation Street.
It’s his routine to catch an episode on video during the break: to let
him get his breath, to occupy his mind but not engage it, to help him
hold on to the stratospheric high from the concert’s first half.
In those few months in Berlin, Bowie made his journey from addiction
to independence, from celebrity paranoia to radical, unmasked messenger
who told us, all the fat-skinny people, all the nobody people, that we
were beautiful, that we too could be ourselves.
Rory MacLean’s Berlin: Imagine a City is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
David Bowie on the Set of Just a Gigolo in Berlin, February 1978.
Photograph: Alain Dejean/Sygma/Corbis
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