Falco

Falco

Johann Hölzel

Born: 2-19-1950
Died: 2-6-1998
....in a car wreck.

    Hans birth was actually a miracle. His mother was rushed to the hospital when she was three months pregnant and lost a set of twins. After keeping her overnight for observation she was informed by the doctor that she was still pregnant. Young Hans was actually part of a set of triplets, miraculously his mother was able to carry him to term and he was delivered healthy.
     His parents lived in Vienna at the time. His mother managed a laundry and his father was a master fitter at an engineering plant. From early childhood it was clear that Hans had music in his blood. One of his favourite pastimes was conducting the music on the radio. Hardly able to stand, he would wave one hand in time with the music holding on to the bars of his crib with the other. When he was a little older he whistled and warbled along with hits on the radio.
     For his fourth birthday Hans wanted an accordion. But a music teacher advised his parents to have him take piano lessons as he could still change to accordion later. So they bought him a baby grand instead, and enrolled him in piano lessons. Hans had two lessons a week and his teacher was very happy with her charge. She once told a proud Maria Hölzel her son had a musical ear and great talent, in particular for Beethoven. By the age of five he could play almost 30 popular hits with two hands though he didn't know a single note. When he heard a piece he liked on the radio he would sit down at the keyboard and play it by ear.
     In September 1963 Hans began his schooling at the Piarist's Primary School, a respected Catholic private school in Ziegelofengasse, Austria. In December 1963 there was a Christmas party at Hans' school and children who could play an instrument were sought for the musical section. After initial hesitation, Hans joined in and played the "Blue Danube Waltz." It was his first performance in front of a large crowd. Wild applause broke out before he had even finished the last bar and he had to give an encore, "Vienna Blood," a piece he was to play quite differently many years later. One of his school friends recalls, "When Hans was asked what he wanted to be his answer was 'pop star'. He didn't say 'musician', but, 'pop star'."
     After primary school Hans attended the secondary school in Rainergasse, which he was later to describe as very middle-class. One of the first turning points in Hans Hölzel's life occurred when his father left the home and family in 1968. Alois Hölzel pressured his wife for a divorce but she only consented many years later. Although Hans never let on that his parents' separation troubled him, he really missed his father very much and always longed for a substitute. Alois never understood his son's ambitious career plans and said to him, several years later, "If I'd stayed at home, you'd never have become Falco."
     1971 brought the next stroke of fate for Hans when his beloved grandmother passed away. Even if he did not show his grief, it was a long time before he got over the loss of someone to whom he had been very close. Hans began to lose interest in school and played truant with increasing regularity. School became more and more of a drag: it now seemed pointless to him and he could not understand why he should memorize this or that poem or mathematical formula. Only a few years later Falco expressed his ambivalent relationship to school in his song "Nie mehr Schule (No More School)."
     Maria Hölzel confronted her son with the alternatives: "Either you are going to repeat the year like others do, or you'll have to start working." Without hesitating, Hans replied, "I'm definitely not repeating the year, I'd rather get a job." His mother had many connections and found him employment at the Employees' Pension Insurance Board in Blechturmgasse, with the opportunity of becoming a permanent staff member in the public service at the age of 27 - something that would have pleased his mother.
     The early Seventies saw rapid growth in the importance in pop music of the electric guitar, and especially the bass guitar. Bands such as Deep Purple and Frank Zappa were revolutionizing the music scene. Hans decided to sell his guitar and use the proceeds combined with some extra from his mother to buy his first bass guitar, which then became "his" instrument.
     The first band Hans joined as a bassist, he was 17, was called Umspannwerk (Transformer). At the age of 17 he resigned from his job at the insurance board without really knowing what lay ahead professionally. So he volunteered for national service and used the time to perfect his bass playing. Falco later claimed this was when he first learned to play bass properly.
Having finished his national service, he spent three semesters at Vienna's Jazz Conservatorium in downtown Johannesgasse. However, his heart was not in it: he simply wanted to please his mother. And yet his studies gave him the knowledge of music theory he later needed to star as a musician and confirmed his desire to become a professional musician.
     By the mid to late 1970's punk music was emerging and David Bowie was a cult figure in the genre. Bowie, influenced by such German groups as Kraftwerk and Can, gave Berlin it's sound du jour with "Low," "Heroes" and "Lodger." Hans decided to move to West Berlin for a while and try and get established in the local music scene there. Many years later Falco recalled: "Bowie was one of the reasons why I was in Berlin. I wanted to bump into him somewhere. Bowie was my idol. He always did a lot for German-language pop music. The Hero album was an initial spark for me." He never really settled down in Berlin but, all in all, spent around a year there. Many of his later songs look back at this time.
     By 1978 he joined Vienna artist Wickerl Adam in the Hallucination Company and took to the road in his first tour. It was during this tour that he adopted the name Falco. Hans thought of the name Falco because he was very impressed by the East German ski jumper Falko Weisspflog who was enjoying considerable success at the time. He swapped a "c" for the "k" because it was better for the international market.
     At the beginning of 1979 Falco left the Hallucination Company for private reasons. Shortly afterwards he joined the commercial group Spinning Wheel as the bass player. Spinning Wheel covered songs by people including the Bee Gees and Rod Stewart. It was here that Falco first began to really sing and his charisma and individual style came out. He brought his own touch to these covers and a Rod Stewart song sung by Falco was no longer a Rod Stewart number but a Falco song.
     At the beginning the appearances of Spinning Wheel in discos and hotel bars were less than successful. Only after a while did the band become one of the most successful in Austria. Falco was earning quite good money for the time but increasingly he felt that playing this background music held him back from expressing what he wanted to say.
     In May 1979 Falco put down his first single at Cloud One, in Renée Reitz's studio in Vienna's Grünentorgasse. Accompanied by Spinning Wheel he recorded two tracks, "Chance To Dance" and "Summer" - both immature early works from which Falco eventually distanced himself.
     In 1980 Markus Spiegel, boss of the small Viennese label GIG Records, signed a contract with Falco for three solo LPs and introduced him to the producer and mixer Robert Ponger. In the summer of 1981 Ponger had written a song for Reinhold Bilgeri, another of Spiegel's contracted artists, but Bilgeri passed on it. So Ponger played a recording of it to Falco even though the song didn't have lyrics. Falco was blown away and sensed that this was it. He took the tape home with him and a few days later had written the lyricst: "Drah di net um, der Kommissar geht um" ... (Don't Turn Round, the Inspector's About)
     In fall of 1981 the single "Der Kommissar (The Inspector)" hit the streets with "Helden von Heute (Today's Heroes)" on the B-side, a song with music and lyrics by Falco. By November Falco had reached number one in Austria with Kommissar and two months later his hometown rise from pub musician to star catapulted him to the top of the charts in Germany. Sales exploded. The track was number one in almost all of Europe, in Canada it went gold, and the German version even made it to number 72 in the U.S. Billboard-Charts while the English-language cover version by After The Fire reached #-3.. New York D.J. Afrika Bambaataa was crucial in getting Falco started in the USA and "Der Kommissar" became a hit on the American club scene. Even in Guatemala the song topped the hit parade.
   "Kommissar" sold more than seven million copies worldwide. The "Einzelhaft" album was released in 1982. It was also produced by Robert Ponger and became a huge success. With tracks such as "Helden von Heute, Auf der Flucht (On the Run)" and "Hinter uns die Sintflut (The Flood is Behind Us)," Falco was able to pinpoint the feelings of the early 1980's.
     At the beginning of the eighties Falco looked around for a manager before finding one, the German Horst Bork. The enormous success of the album totally changed Hans Hölzel's life. As was so often the case in Han's life, a severe crisis followed on the heels of a great success and increasingly he tried to overcome such crises with alcohol. Falco recalled: "The alcohol problems began with the success and with the money. Believe me, you've got a problem when your success grows faster than the soul." The fear of not achieving the public recognition he was hoping for with the next album grew incessantly. The arrogance with which he approached journalists was only a protective shield he put on instinctively at times when he was down. But it led many people to hint that his first successful album might well have been a one-off. This put Falco under enormous performance pressure. He tinkered for a long time on individual numbers and wanted to make them over-perfect. In the process he kept postponing the release date of the next album, and Falco's worst fears came true. In 1984 the "Junge Römer (Young Romans)" album, again produced by Robert Ponger, was well below expectations.
     For the over-sensitive Hans Hölzel, the generally negative reviews and slow record sales were hard to take. He was gripped by the fear that he might lose everything he had struggled so long to achieve, and he realized that the next album would decide everything. He cancelled the planned tour, withdrew more and more and drowned his depression with alcohol and drugs. For New Year 1984/85 he flew to Thailand with some friends to get away from it all for a while. This one-month Asian sojourn was very important for Falco, as it brought back the inner calm and stability he needed for his work on the new album.
     Back in Vienna he parted ways with producer Robert Ponger and moved to the Dutch producers, brothers Rob and Ferdi Bolland, who ran the Bullet Sound Studio in Hilversum. At the time a number of critical books were being published about Mozart, a TV series about the composer was broadcast and Milos Forman's Oscar-winning film "Amadeus" was splashed across cinema screens. The name Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was on everybody's lips. And this inspired the Bolland brothers to work the unvarnished story of Mozart's life into a pop song. The result was "Rock Me Amadeus," a song that was to surpass all existing limits of German pop music and set completely new standards. As Falco first listened to the playback he knew he had found the right producers and he recorded his album "Falco 3" in Hilversum in the summer of 1985. The album is radically different in style from its two predecessors with a more commercial orientation and catchier music. It finally shot Falco to international stardom.
     In May 1985 "Rock Me Amadeus" was released as a single and immediately after its release skyrocketed to number one on the Austrian charts where it stayed for six weeks. Two weeks later it was at the top of the German hit parade and by March 1986 it hit #-1 on the American Billboard charts, where it stayed for three weeks. The second single from the album, "Vienna Calling," reached a respectable 18 on the U.S. charts and helped the album achieve Platinum status.
     In early 1986 Falco undertook a short adventure into the film business and played a small role in the comedy "Geld Oder Leber" with Mike Krüger and Ursela Monn in the leading roles. The film was directed by Dieter Pröttel and shot on Lake Wörther. "That was the best-paid holiday of my life," said Falco at the end of filming. Other acting projects were planned but his limited acting talent forced them to be dropped.
     Having worked all spring on his fourth album, "Emotional," again produced by the successful Bolland brothers, Falco went on a festival tour in the summer taking him from Mörbisch via Salzburg to Bregenz. Straight after finishing this hugely successful summer tour Falco again headed for the studio in Hilversum to finish his album which was still missing three tracks. It was released in late autumn. "Emotional" was Falco's fourth album, but the first where, as he said, he was able to communicate everything he had always wanted to say.
     The singles taken from the new album, "The Sound Of Music," "Emotional" and "Coming Home," rose to the top of the German-language charts. With his new album under his wing, Falco set off on his first world tour in autumn. It was to take him to Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and the U.S. The U,S, concerts were planned for January to March 1987 but were postponed and finally cancelled altogether because the promoter considered them too risky.
     On November 20, 1986 Falco was awarded a Golden Bambi as the most successful German-language pop singer of the year. The Mayor of Vienna also presented him with a Gold Service Medal from the City of Vienna making him, at age 29, the city's youngest medal bearer.
     Falco spent most of 1987 largely out of the public eye. The preceding years and above all the last few months had taken their toll. He needed time to work through everything he had experienced and had to find his internal balance once again. At the end of 1987 Falco announced his return with the single "Body Next To Body." It was produced by Giorgio Moroder and featured a duet with the Danish beauty Brigitte Nielsen. The combination was pure scheming, as Falco later confessed: "I never wanted to reach the charts with her, only to get her into bed." The success of the single left a lot to be desired and Falco called it a "miserable record." "But it was worth it for the time with her."
     Falco was looking for a new producer, having split from the Bolland brothers because of "obscene demands and crummy demos." The production duo Gunther Mende and Candy De Rouge seemed just right for Falco's new album. The record was ready in March 1988 and it was originally to appear under the title "Aya," borrowing the last three letters of the single title "Himalaya." But Falco, the eternal perfectionist, was not happy with the result. He dumped the majority of the already finished songs, returned dolefully to Rob and Ferdi Bolland and finished the album with them. Its name was now "Wiener Blut (Vienna Blood)" and contained six songs produced by the Bollands and four by Mende/De Rouge.
     The title track "Wiener Blut" was recorded in "Rock Me Amadeus" sessions but had not made it onto the "Falco 3" album. At that time it had been known as "Medizin (Medicine)" and had totally different lyrics. Falco dug out this old number, created a new lyric and title and recorded it for his latest album in its new guise. The "Wiener Blut" album came out in late 1988, but sales were well below expectations and the scheduled European tour had to be cancelled due to a lack of public interest. In later years Falco was always negative about this album and, of all his work, this was the one he had the least empathy for.
     In November 1988 Falco was at rock bottom, both physically and mentally. His LP was a total flop, his tour cancelled, his alcohol problems out of control and his marriage in tatters. He fled and escaped on a four-month odyssey around the globe, during which no one knew where he was. He wanted to reposition his life and get back on the right track.
    In 1990 Falco attempted a comeback and, in cooperation with Robert Ponger, the producer of his first two records, put down the "Data De Groove" album. For the songs Falco developed an artificial language corresponding to the computer age I mine: I-me-you-I-mine. You yours so alone, to be alone. And so on. But the success Falco and especially Hans Hölzel were hoping for did not eventuate. "It was a very introverted album and I did get a bit carried away with clever word games," Falco said in retrospect.
     Changing labels brought new life into his next release, 1992's "Nachtflug (Night Flight)" was again produced by the successful duo of Rob and Ferdi Bolland. The public received "Nachtflug" well, and it went platinum. And yet, not even this album could reconnect Hans Hölzel with the huge success of his early albums.
     In the spring of 1993 Falco was back on the road for the first time in six years. After years of absence from the stage he was not quite certain about his fan following and decided to play in small to medium-sized concert halls, mostly in Austria, although German, Swiss and even Russian towns were on the tour's program as well. The tour was a big success for Falco and spurred him on.
     In 1996 Falco released the single "Naked" produced by Torsten Börger. It was to be the last release during his lifetime. "Naked" sold well in Austria, but was a flop in Germany, selling just 50,000 copies.
     In the summer of 1997 Claudia Wohlfromm, wife of the producer Torsten Börger, became Falco's manager. She wanted to develop a whole new Falco style, one she thought would fit the new millennium. And Falco didn't stop her. One day he appeared in public with dyed blonde hair and a diamond in the upper right incisor.
     The work on Falco's last album, originally to be titled "Egoisten," only added to his lack of confidence and to his self-doubt. Time and again, the perfectionist Hans Hölzel put off the album's release date, discarded numbers, recorded new ones and became confused about the order of the individual songs. By late autumn 1997 he wanted to drop what was more or less a finished album and start afresh. But it was not to be.
     On February 6, 1998 Hans Hölzel died in a car accident in the Dominican Republic at around 4.40 pm local time. But Falco lives on more intensively than ever in the hearts of his fans.