Mapping “Heroes”: Hans Meertens on Bowie, Berlin and the Art of Connection
This interview is something of an experiment: a combination of video and written conversation. In the video above, you can hear directly from Dutch artist, writer and illustrator Hans Meertens as he introduces his new book, Constellation “Heroes.” Below, you can read our full exchange about the ideas, influences and connections he discovered within Bowie’s 1977 album.
Constellation “Heroes” explores Bowie’s landmark album in the context of his Berlin-era work and the many artistic and cultural currents surrounding it. Meertens is a Dutch artist, writer, illustrator and musician whose lifelong interest in Bowie informs his deeply considered approach to the album:
What first convinced you that “Heroes” could sustain an entire book rather than just a chapter in a broader Bowie study?
There was no single moment of discovery. What convinced me was cumulative: over roughly forty years of listening to the album and reading about it, I had come, like many, to regard it as more than music alone. Its cover and wider visual language, along with the atmosphere and legend of Cold War Berlin, had become inseparable from the way I heard it. When I began thinking about writing on Bowie after completing my book on Iggy Pop, “Heroes” kept coming to the fore. Of all his albums, it may have been the one that had grown most for me over the years. The ferocity and emotional range of Bowie’s singing, the fractured lyrics, and the strange, spacious instrumentals seemed only to gain in force and mystery with familiarity.
During my research, that long-held sense of richness was confirmed and deepened. New connections continued to accumulate, while the album’s separate strands revealed a denser web of echoes, correspondences, and crosscurrents. Each track opened into its own sonic, lyrical, historical and visual territory, bringing the circumstances of its creation, the people involved and the wider cultural context into view. A chapter in a broader Bowie study could have outlined the album’s importance, but it could not have followed those individual routes with the same depth or traced the lines running into and out of the record across the Berlin years and beyond.
Were there any commonly accepted interpretations of “Heroes” (as an album) that you deliberately set out to challenge?
No, not in any deliberate or programmatic sense. I was not setting out, say, to overturn the established critical hierarchy that often places Low above “Heroes”. That ranking is understandable: Low arrived first, and its impact was therefore more immediate and disruptive. Nor was I trying to deny the familiar description of the album’s lyrics as fragmentary and disjointed. That description is largely accurate. What interested me was how much those fragments contain, and what connections begin to emerge when they are examined closely.
More broadly, my aim was exploratory rather than polemical. The book stays close to the songs, drawing on the historical record, contemporary testimony and the wider visual and cultural context. Along the way, it brings together less familiar background material on the songs, the cover and the album’s wider history, while tracing the human and artistic networks that intersect with the record and extend across Bowie’s creative world. Any nuances or challenges to accepted interpretations grew out of that process rather than preceding it.
The song “Heroes” has become one of Bowie’s greatest hits. I find the album version to be a song of desperation, whereas subsequent covers and many of Bowie’s own live performances turned it into something more hopeful and heroic. Do you think the meaning of the song has changed since it appeared on the album?
Yes, I think its received meaning has changed, although the balance within the song has not. The anthemic possibility was always there: the music’s mounting intensity, the scale of Bowie’s vocal, and the defiance of ‘We can be heroes.’ But on the album, that promise is hemmed in by doubt and damage: ‘Though nothing will keep us together,’ ‘I’ll drink all the time,’ ‘Maybe we’re lying,’ and the crucial qualification ‘just for one day.’ The heroism is real, but precarious. It exists as a moment of resistance within a relationship that already seems doomed.
Later performances and uses increasingly isolated that hopeful strain from the doubt and damage surrounding it. At Live Aid, The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, and The Concert for New York City, Bowie himself helped turn the song into a public expression of endurance and solidarity, and in those circumstances, the shift made perfect sense. Covers, sports montages, talent shows, and film climaxes carried it further, until the song became less a story than a ritual of collective uplift. That heroic element came to dominate the song’s public meaning, at the expense of the desperation, dysfunction, and uncertainty that give the album version its force. In the original, heroism is a brief flare within a doomed situation. In much of the wider culture, that doomed situation gradually became little more than the backdrop to an anthem.
Your book places considerable emphasis on imagery, association, and recurring motifs. How did you distinguish between intentional patterns and coincidences?
I do not think intentional patterns and coincidences are always cleanly separable. Bowie could not have anticipated or consciously encoded every connection that later emerged, but his work suggests that he understood how bringing art, literature, film, music, history, people, and images into the same imaginative terrain could open an ever-expanding field of association. He deliberately created the conditions in which connections could proliferate, and the playfulness with which he handled those collisions speaks to the pleasure he took in the process. This was not merely an unintended by-product. It was part of how meaning emerged in his work.
My task was therefore to be precise about the status of each connection. Some are documented through Bowie’s own statements, contemporary testimony, or identifiable sources. Others are strongly supported by musical, visual, or historical context. More speculative readings are presented as possibilities, not as evidence of conscious intent. Some factual constellations are simply fascinating in themselves. Sukita, for example, photographed both the “Heroes” cover and the production of Paul Schrader’s Mishima. Schrader’s earlier Cat People featured Bowie on its title song, while Bowie later invoked Mishima in ‘Heat’ on The Next Day, whose cover in turn reworked the “Heroes” sleeve. Mishima was scored by Philip Glass, who later based a symphony on “Heroes”. That is not a coded message buried in the album, but a real cultural cross-connection showing where one line from “Heroes” can lead. I am wary of Bowie exegesis that turns every suggestive overlap into evidence of conscious design. The wording must make clear whether something is documented, probable, suggestive, or simply one possible reading.
How much weight do you give to Bowie’s later interviews when interpreting music he created decades earlier?
I give later interviews considerable weight as evidence of how Bowie came to understand and value the work, but less as direct evidence of what he intended decades earlier. A statement made in 1977 naturally stands closer to the circumstances in which “Heroes” was created. When he discussed the Berlin albums ten or twenty years later, he was also speaking from everything that had happened since: his subsequent work, their growing reputation, and the place they had come to occupy in his own life.
Memory is reconstructive. We do not retrieve the past as an unchanged recording, but understand it anew from the standpoint of the present. Bowie was no exception, and his own interpretation of earlier work may have shifted alongside its public meaning. That does not make a later recollection less valuable. It belongs to a different moment. That is why I give both the source and the year for every quotation. I generally allow his words to speak within their particular context rather than claiming to know whether he ‘really meant’ them. His choice of language often provides its own framing, whether reflective, ironic, dismissive, or emphatic.
How do you balance biography against close reading? At what point does Bowie’s life illuminate the songs, and at what point does it begin to distract from them?
Biography and close reading inevitably overlap because knowledge cannot simply be unlearned. Once we know something about an artist’s life, it becomes part of how we experience the work. The question, then, is how much interpretive authority that knowledge should be given.
Biography is illuminating when it provides demonstrable context for choices, images, and tensions within the work, or for the circumstances in which it was made. It becomes distracting when a song is treated as coded diary material, or when a biographical fact is allowed to close down the ambiguity of its words and music. The circumstances of a work’s creation and the meanings it can acquire are related, but they are not identical.
That distinction is especially important with Bowie, whose public identity was itself partly constructed through performance and persona and repeatedly reinterpreted over time. We do not have access to a single, transparent reality against which the songs can simply be decoded. The biographical record itself has to be read critically.
When I first heard the song “Heroes” as a young listener, I knew very little about Bowie or Berlin, yet the song already had an unmistakable emotional force. Later knowledge changed and deepened what I heard, but it did not create that response. Biography can bring certain elements into focus. It should not be allowed to explain the work away.
You describe Berlin almost as a character in the story. How much of the album’s meaning depends on its physical and historical setting?
The Berlin attached to “Heroes” is not one thing. It is the physical city of 1977, divided by the Wall, where the album took shape at Hansa. It is also the biographical Berlin of Bowie and Iggy, and the later mythology formed through interviews, anecdotes, and decades of retelling. Lines such as ‘I’ll drink all the time’ acquire an added resonance when heard alongside Bowie’s later accounts of the period. Berlin also enters the work through the German Expressionist idiom of the cover, the German-language “Helden” and, most directly, the title ‘Neuköln,’ while ‘V-2 Schneider’ adds to the album’s wider German frame. Berlin itself is never named in the lyrics, yet these different layers have become deeply embedded in the way the record is heard.
I would distinguish between the album’s immediate emotional force and the historical and imaginative resonance that has gathered around it. The former does not require any knowledge of Berlin. The latter is deeply shaped by the city and its history. The Wall gives the title song a historical setting more specific than the lyric itself ever states. Once known, however, that context becomes part of the listening experience.
When I visited Schöneberg and wandered through Berlin, I found myself trying to imagine the city preserved in the mythology. The Berlin of 1977 was, of course, gone, although fragments and traces remained. Seeing those remnants, or standing in places where history had literally marched, shifted my experience of the present. Location does something. The Berlin Bowie knew had disappeared, but those places had not become neutral. The visit made me realize that the period now survives through physical remnants, the album itself, and the accumulated stories surrounding it. In that sense, “Heroes” has become an imaginative time capsule, a record in which Cold War history, Bowie’s biography, and decades of later projection continue to converge.
My own response inevitably includes some romanticization. What matters is that the distinction between history and projection remains visible. A song may become bound to a particular summer or relationship for one listener. That association is not objectively contained within the song, yet it can genuinely intensify the way that listener hears it. Berlin works in a comparable way at the level of reception, although its historical connection to “Heroes” clearly extends beyond private association. For me, as for so many others, the city has become part of the album’s imaginative afterlife.
What aspect of “Heroes” do you think remains most misunderstood, even among devoted Bowie fans?
I would hesitate to identify any single misunderstanding shared by devoted Bowie fans. What has certainly become simplified is the version of “Heroes” that circulates in the wider culture: the title track as a straightforward anthem, the second side as a sequence of atmospheric instrumentals and the album itself as part of an ‘Eno-produced Berlin trilogy’, though, of course, Eno did not produce it. That persistent shorthand is revealing in itself. It can obscure how violent, unstable and formally peculiar the album is. The first side is hardly a collection of conventional rock songs, while the instrumental sequence is far more varied, dramatic and unsettled than the word ‘ambient’ sometimes suggests. Across both sides, the album repeatedly returns to fractured identity, menace, emotional damage and fleeting attempts at transcendence. The methods change, but the underlying tensions continue. What tends to be lost is not any single fact about “Heroes”, but the disturbing coherence of the album as a whole.
After immersing yourself in this album for so long, has your understanding of Bowie’s broader artistic project changed?
Not fundamentally. Like many longtime Bowie listeners, I had long been aware of the continuities beneath his reinventions: the recurring concerns with identity, alienation, self-invention, anxiety and the longing for connection. I also understood his art as deeply relational. What the research added was a more tangible sense of the scale and persistence of those exchanges. Following individual threads around “Heroes” repeatedly led back to earlier works, forward to later ones and outward to other artists and collaborators, revealing the range of people Bowie sought out, what he drew from them, what they drew from him and the lasting impression he often made. His transformations remained unmistakably his, while the dense web of encounters, collaborations and mutual influence through which they developed became much more visible.
If Bowie had read this book, where do you think he would have pushed back on your conclusions?
Oh, probably all of them. Something like: ‘I agree with every word. Naturally, it’s all wrong.’
What’s your favorite Bowie song, and is “Heroes” your favorite Bowie album?
I love making lists, but over the years I do not think I have ever produced the same Bowie ranking twice. Declaring one song or album the favorite provokes a disproportionate sense of injustice on behalf of all the others, a wholly self-inflicted burden I have finally decided I no longer wish to carry. If I average out all those shifting lists, “Heroes” always lands somewhere in my top six albums, while ‘Station To Station’ invariably ranks among my very favorite Bowie songs. Of the songs I heard at the Bowie concerts I attended, ‘The Motel’, ‘Heathen (The Rays)’ and ‘Moonage Daydream’ had the greatest impact on me.
Where can people find the book?
The book is available from major online booksellers such as Amazon, as well as selected bookstores and specialty music retailers such as Burning Shed. Beginning September 29, it will also be available in North America. As for what comes next, I am not quite done writing about Bowie yet. He is no longer here to make new albums, but there is still much to discover in the ones we think we already know.
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For more on the book and to order a copy, visit the publisher’s page here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Constellation-Heroes/Hans-Meertens/9781789524987