March 1985, Vienna: Austrian rap-pop artist Falco (real name Johann Hölzel) releases on GiG Records the single “Rock Me Amadeus”. By May 1985 - #1 in Austria, where it would stay for 22 weeks (an all-time record for the Austrian chart). By March 1986 - #1 Billboard Hot 100 in the US, where it held for three weeks. It is the first and only German-language song in history to top the American pop chart. Total sales by end of 1986 - over 8 million copies.
Who Falco was
Johann Hölzel was born in Vienna in 1957. At 17 he enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory on contrabass but dropped out a year later. He took the stage name “Falco” after East German ski jumper Falko Weißflog, Kubin-cup winner of 1979. By 1982 he had released his debut single “Der Kommissar” - a hit in Austria and Germany but internationally unnoticed.
“Rock Me Amadeus” appeared on Falco's second solo album Falco 3. Concept - Mozart as the first rock star in history. The idea came to Falco and producers Rob and Ferdi Bolland (Dutch brothers later working with Celine Dion and Status Quo) in September 1984 - after the release of Milos Forman's Amadeus.
Recording
Recording took place at Wisseloord Studios in Amsterdam, November-December 1984. Producers - the Bolland brothers. The studio was one of the most modern in Europe at the time, with a 48-channel SSL E console and a Sony PCM-3324 digital tape machine. Recording budget - around 65,000 Deutschmarks.
“We wanted Mozart to sound like 1985, not 1785. If he lived today, he'd play synthesizers, not harpsichord”, Rob Bolland told Stereo Review in 1986.
Instruments
- Yamaha DX7 - main synth, electric piano and lead
- Roland Jupiter-8 - pads and orchestral bedding
- Fairlight CMI Series II - Baroque harpsichord samples and string stabs
- Linn 9000 - drum machine (the LinnDrum successor with MIDI recording)
- Roland TR-909 - percussion (hi-hats)
- Oberheim DMX - clap and rimshot
Falco's vocal - half recitative in German, half pop chorus in a German-English mix. The famous choir “Amadeus, Amadeus, Amadeus” is the Bolland brothers sung through the Fairlight, then sampled and looped. One vocal chorus became a large-scale part via Fairlight II sampling.
Numbers
- Austria: #1, 22 weeks (May-October 1985) - unbeaten record
- Germany: #1, 8 weeks
- Switzerland: #1, 6 weeks
- Netherlands: #1, 5 weeks
- UK: #1, 1 week (May 1986)
- US: #1 Billboard Hot 100 (March 1986), 3 weeks; 2× platinum
- Canada: #1 RPM, 2 weeks
- Australia: #1, 3 weeks
- Japan: #4 Oricon International
Total sales by end of 1986 - over 8 million copies. The album Falco 3 went 3× platinum in the US and 5× platinum in Germany. An absolutely anomalous result for a German-language record on the American market - no German artist has matched it to 2024.
Video and image
The “Rock Me Amadeus” video was directed by Rudi Dolezal - an Austrian director who would later shoot clips for Queen (“Who Wants to Live Forever”). Video budget - 250,000 Deutschmarks, one of Europe's most expensive clips of 1985. Shot in the Viennese Baroque palace of Hofburg with live extras in 18th-century costume.
Falco's image was a blend of Mozart and rock star: a wig with curls, a modern suit, dark glasses. He changed into 14 different costumes during the four-minute clip. For MTV in 1985 this was the most visually dense video work - a new scene, a new set, a new outfit every 10 seconds.
What the song accomplished
“Rock Me Amadeus” did what seemed impossible: it cracked the American pop chart with a song in German (with English interpolations). Before Falco, the last German-language song in the Billboard Hot 100 was “99 Luftballons” by Nena (1984), peaking at #2. Falco surpassed Nena and became the only German-language #1 in US chart history.
This showed the world industry two things. First - language barriers in pop are crossed via image and production, not via translation. Second - the European synth-pop aesthetic of 1985 could work on American mass markets if producers understood American music culture (the Bolland brothers had listened to American top 40 for years).
What remains
Falco continued working until 1998. He released three more albums, none repeating the success of Falco 3. In 1998 he died in a car accident in the Dominican Republic at age 40. He is buried in Vienna at the Zentralfriedhof cemetery next to Beethoven, Schubert and - symbolically - beside the Mozart memorial grave (the composer's actual burial place is unknown).
By 2024 Spotify shows over 720 million streams of the original “Rock Me Amadeus”. In 2022 Netflix released the documentary Falco: Verdammt, wir leben noch! - a biography including the mechanism of the 1986 American breakthrough. Related era breakdowns - “99 Luftballons” Nena, “Major Tom” Schilling, “Axel F” Faltermeyer.