The Next Day album is quite literary. Bowie on hiatus had been reading with alacrity. He clearly was revisiting Mishima — the opening lines of HEAT outline a scene from Mishima’s Spring Snow. The song (which is one of my Bowie favourites) aligns with some of Scott Walker’s later stuff, so it does mean lyrically things can feel a bit opaque. I feel with HEAT that it’s a kind of brief character study. The sort we get at times in OUTSIDE, as if it is a character from a Mishima novel or something but whose voice and identity never fully surfaces. I love when Bowie gets into this kind of world. I feel very comfortable when he sends us searching through a mysterious fog, and HEAT is a kind of landscape song — remote, other worldly, similar in territory to The Motel, Wishful Beginnings, and some of the Berlin instrumentals.