100 favourite songs: #49: "Heroes" - David Bowie

“Heroes” is one of those favourites to which I don’t actually listen all that often, and I don’t really know what it is about the song that so gets me — but get me it does, and right between the eyes. What it boils down to, I think, is that “Heroes” is a brooding, aspirational, literate love song wrapped up in still-fresh-thirty-years-later epic trimmings and an ineradicable melody, and knitted together by a startling unity of vision; then, too, I guess that the treatment it gets in Moulin Rouge doesn’t hurt, either — though obviously that was picking up on something that was already readily apparent in the song itself…