A point which marked the beginning of Falco's rise from the status of a local bass player to an international star was when he came to a Drahdiwaberl rehearsal one day in 1980 with a song for which he had written the music and words. But Ganz Wien (All Vienna), a derisive track about the then emerging hard drug scene of the time did not really fit into Drahdiwaberl repertoire, and was only used as a stopgap in concerts. This song, clearly Falco's reaction to his own experience, was listed in the Austrian Index and subsequently banned from the airwaves. Whenever the number was played at Drahdiwaberl live performances, Falco moved to the front of the stage with his bass guitar and Stefan Weber moved into the background. The audience always went wild and soon the song became the cult hit of Vienna's new-wave scene. For the first time Falco felt what it meant to be wildly acclaimed and loved by an audience. It was then that he realised that he could easily hold his own as a solo entertainer.
In 1980 Markus Spiegel, boss of the small Viennese label GIG Records, invited Drahdiwaberl to produce the Psychoterror LP. Spiegel was later to describe it ironically as "my greatest work." But much more important for Markus Spiegel was clearly his encounter with Falco: "When I saw Falco for the first time at a Drahdiwaberl concert in the Sophiensälen, Vienna, I realised that I wanted to sign him as a solo artist. Falco made an incredibly charismatic impression on me."
Markus Spiegel signed a contract with Falco for three solo LPs and introduced him to the producer and sound mixer Robert Ponger. In the summer the 1981 Ponger had written a song for Reinhold Bilgeri, another of Spiegel's contracted artists, but Bilgeri had not liked it. So Ponger now played a recording of it to Falco even though the song did not yet have a text. 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 text: Drah di net um, der Kommissar geht um ... (Don't Turn Round, the Inspector's About).
In autumn 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 text by Falco. In November 1981 Falco 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 US Billboard-Charts while the English-language cover version by After the Fire reached third place. The New York star DJ 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. The hit can be heard worldwide.
Kommissar sold more than seven million copies worldwide, although Falco later recalled he had never thought the song would be a success internationally. But he had never had respect for the US market. "Actually, it was a trip on the zeitgeist express, which I didn't jump onto, but rather had to some extent produced myself." And Falco really did excite great interest on the pop scene. It was not only his clever texts, a blend of German, Viennese dialect and English, nor was it just the language of his own that he developed, but above all his individual singing style which made him the first white rapper. Later he liked to describe himself to his closest friends as the "Godfather of white rap."
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 feeling of these days and this put him way ahead of his time. In an interview for the magazine Wiener a year before his death he said: "Einzelhaft was a gut feeling that took off like wildfire. It was my best album."
Falco toured Kommissar around the world in small solo gigs. He did radio station appearances from Canada to Australia and though most of his gigs were playback acts in overcrowded discos and clubs he also played small concerts as part of open-air shows and festivals. His fellow Drahdiwaberl member and later bandleader Thomas Rabitsch recalls: "They sent him around the globe a year long, from one hotel room to the next, and from one radio station to the next. He came back completely changed."
At the beginning of the eighties Falco looked around for a manager before finding one in the form of the German Horst Bork. The enormous success of the album totally changed Hans Hölzel's life. Overnight his fame went through the roof and with his address still in the telephone book, his fans, above all the female ones, began making pilgrimages to the house in Ziegelofengasse. The front door of the flat was only frosted glass and often a group of fans would be standing in front of it able to peer in when the lights were on. Falco asked his mother to find him another apartment and she was happy to oblige. She found her son a beautiful old 150m2 apartment in Vienna's Schottenfeldgasse in the city's seventh district. He was taken with it immediately. He had really suffered from the lack of space in the Ziegelofengasse apartment and adapted the new one to suit his needs while making sure that too much furniture did not rob the rooms of their spaciousness, also having a soundproofed music room installed in the rear part of the lounge.
As was so often the case in Hans Hölzel'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 that kept him from unfettered work. 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 LP, and Falco's worst fears came true. In 1984 the Junge Römer (Young Romans) album, again produced by Robert Ponger, was well below expectations.
The album's tracks had many critics singing Falco's praises but its uncompromising artistry may have placed excessive demands on many of his fans, featuring, as it did, high quality texts and music. One newspaper wrote of the 'best-misunderstood album of the year'. Although it sold close to 50,000 copies in Austria, Junge Römer had a hard time on international markets. The artistic relevance of this album with its smooth dance beats was not recognised until later: today it is a cult album.
Together with the video producers Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, Falco shot the TV special Helden von Heute. The result was an artistically first-class filming of the entire Junge Römer album. The film was made in Germany and the USA and is the first full-length video in the history of German pop music.
Falco wanted to do something about the poor sales of the album and recorded the song Kann es Liebe sein (can be love) as a duet with the beautiful Désirée Nosbusch, a well-known TV and film personality. Falco was never really happy with its production and although the single sold quite well, it was not enough to reverse the trend.
While in his Kommissar days Falco had coolly appeared in a leather jacket and sneakers, with the appearance of his second album he perfected his outfit and became a sought-after media star. He had countless designer suits and dozens of pairs of shoes made for him. He showed up at the Vienna Opera Ball in tails, irritating many people and further incensing his detractors. He also adopted a new style of communication, gesture and body language. This was not just a matter of touching up his image, he was exploring his limits. He always saw himself as a parody of the establishment; this led to misunderstandings in the eyes of many people, who thought he had gone too far. This was certainly the heyday of the classic Falco: he was now acting the way his fans wanted him, arrogant, provocative and distant.
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 realised 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 separated abruptly from his producer Robert Ponger and moved to the Dutch producer 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 summer 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.
Already 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.
On 15 May 1985, shortly after the release of the first single from the new album, Falco was to make his debut in front of a huge audience as the Mayor of Vienna, Dr. Helmut Zilk, had asked him to lead the opening concert of the Vienna Festival in front of the fantastic backdrop of the city's Town Hall. This was something new as previously it had been tradition to invite classical musicians to play this concert. The decision of the people responsible was the right one and the concert was a great triumph, easily surpassing all expectations. More than 60,000 people turned up to experience this unforgettable Falco concert that was also broadcast on TV. "Do you want the total Falco?" the singer asked the crowd during his performance. "Yes" was the reply and they weren't disappointed.
The visuals for the song Rock Me Amadeus were provided by the video producers Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, the team Falco worked with closely throughout his career. Together with them he developed his own visual language and became the first European pop musician who knew how to exploit the symbols of international video-clip culture and helped shaped them on the global scene. Falco played a double role in the video clip: at one point he portrays Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the twentieth century and then he is back as Falco in a tuxedo in the Rococo era, always in the "wrong" century. Bearded bikers serve as "Mozart's" bodyguards in the video which was shot in Vienna's Schwarzenberg Palace. Thirteen years later they were to pay him their last respects as coffin bearers.
In the summer of 1985 the pop group Opus invited Falco to take part in an open-air concert at the Liebenau Stadium in Graz. On the evening before the concert he joined a couple of friends at the Grazer Café where he met the woman who was to become his wife, Isabella Vitkovic. Falco immediately fell head-over-heels in love. She was exactly his type, as he always said with a touch of self-irony: tall, blonde and drawn. Isabella was from a middle-class background and at the time was still married to a man 19 years her senior though she knew she could not go on in the marriage. Hans asked her to move in with him in Vienna and she was happy to oblige. A few weeks later Isabella claimed she had become pregnant on the first night the two had spent together in Graz's Schlossberg Hotel.
On 19 November 1985 the magazine Für Sie wrote of Isabella, "the former Miss Styria was already so crazy about Falco from seeing him on TV that she was determined to meet him. The chance arrived when he was staying at Graz's Schlossberg Hotel in July. Isabella pestered the porter until she tricked the key to Hans' room out of him and waited for him in his suite. ... now he is to be a father."
The pair decided to have the baby. For Falco, becoming a father represented a turning point in his life. Secretly Hans longed for protection and support and he hoped the child would be a haven of peace for him in his wild life.
The huge professional success gave Falco enough impetus to undertake his first major tour in the autumn of 1985. The itinerary included concerts in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Every last ticket was sold out for the concert in Vienna's Stadthalle on 31 October 1985 and it became a real triumph for Falco. More than 11,000 people cheered Falco who changed his stage outfit almost a dozen times during the concert. The highlight of the concerts was always the last encore, his mega-hit Rock me Amadeus, for which Falco appeared on stage in a red fantasy-uniform jacket with golden braid, black trousers and tennis shoes.
The first tour was an enormous success and gave Falco the confidence to be able to handle big venues. The planning had been cautious and apart from the Stadthalle in Vienna, middle-sized halls had been chosen.
Following on from Vienna Calling, a song which was successful across Europe, Jeanny was the third single taken from the Falco 3 album. This song and the video that went with it caused a genuine scandal. The German newsreader Dieter Kronzucker, whose two daughters had been kidnapped in Italy several years before, made Jeanny into a scandal song with a six-minute item in the news programme Heute Journal and called for a radio boycott. Falco had written Jeanny as a love song but now he was accused of glorifying violence, sexual abuse and even thrill killing.
A number of German broadcasters resolved to blacklist the controversial song and its video. The big media debate only pushed up sales and Jeanny topped the charts across the German-speaking countries. Falco was holidaying on the Virgin Islands at the time and on returning said: "All I hear is 'murder', I don't know what they mean. I didn't want to do a track about killing women, I wanted to do a killer song." And for his fans that was what it was. They could not and did not want to understand the censoring imposed by the broadcasters and indeed protested by buying 50,000 Jeanny singles per day.
Over the preceding five years Falco had secured himself a position in pop history which no Austrian pop musician had ever dreamed possible and successors can only fantasize about. It seemed that he had reached the zenith of his success, but in March 1986, something happened that had been previously unthinkable for an Austrian musician and not even Falco had been counting on. Rock Me Amadeus hit number one on the US Billboard charts, the holy grail of pop music, and remained there for three weeks on top of Prince's Kiss. At 29, Falco was the first German-language pop star to top the US single charts, the greatest ambition a pop musician can have, and what everyone dreams of: to be the world number one.
As the news broke that Rock Me Amadeus was the US number one, Falco was in illustrious company in a downtown Vienna bar. Everybody was happy and the atmosphere was relaxed but Hans was growing quieter and more thoughtful. As the others tried to cheer him up by reminding him he was number one, he replied with tears in his eyes: "No, I can't be happy because I'll never manage it again." A few years later he recalled: "I wasn't happy at all when I heard I was number one in America because I knew what a burden that is. It took me almost five years to get rid of some of that burden."
Falco never really managed to free himself from the pressure that was on him from this time on; it increasingly hindered his work.
But it was not only the single Rock Me Amadeus that was successful in the USA, the Falco 3 album held its own in the American top-ten for weeks and climbed to No. 3 even though it consisted of exclusively German-language songs. The Amadeus video was running on "heavy rotation" on MTV. Falco's American record company stopped at nothing with the marketing of the record. There was Falco advertising everywhere: on TV and radio, in cinemas as well as in newspapers and on posters. Even a Falco hotline was set up where fans could direct their questions: 'For a good time call Falco: 1-800-841-1223', was written on over-sized posters.
Falco, however, only made a limited number of PR appearances in the USA. At first he did not want to do any promotionals in the USA because, in his opinion: "If people want to buy the record they'll do so whether or not I come over." Only after prolonged pressure from his record company did Falco fly to America for ten days in May to do the rounds of the journalists in New York and Los Angeles. He gave countless newspaper interviews, took part in talk shows and appeared in various TV programmes. "My primary aim was not to promote the current songs, but to market myself," said Falco after returning from the USA.
Falco's skyrocketing success in the USA only came to a crashing end because he preferred to remain in his hometown. Falco remembers: "I often had the opportunity to move to America. I didn't do it because the things I like most about the American flag are the red, white and red stripes."
The international success was by no means restricted to the USA. Rock Me Amadeus topped the charts around the world from South America to Japan and was number one in Britain, something that meant almost more to Hans than the US number one. After all, England is considered the home of pop.