In 1978, when the singer Johann “Hans” Hölzel, known as Falco, was 21 years old and had half of his life behind him – something he couldn’t have known at the time – it must have been a terrible feeling for him to be in the streets of his hometown of Vienna saw the cinema posters, for example the one with the great John Travolta in the Saturday Night suit. A fear of somehow being in the wrong place or the wrong decade, or both. Or missing an important keyword that he should have simply answered. The itchy discomfort that those people get who feel – the English expression is unbeatably vivid here – “larger than life”, destined for bigger things, too big for life, although at the same time they are relatively stuck in a relatively small life.
Back then, Falco earned his money as a bassist and singer in a dance band, a commercial part, as Viennese musicians call it. He also sold hair products and experimented with wet gel. In addition, he had just joined the city’s infamous rock’n’roll blood vomit shock group Drahdiwaberl, and when he came to the gig in ironed white trousers, the bandleader asked him in the dressing room: “So you want to go on stage?” Falco: “Yes!” – “Are you stupid? You look like a student who’s just going to mass!”
Childhood in Vienna
Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, Vienna was a bit like Berlin. Although not divided into east and west by a wall, it is still dependent on its former size and importance. Vienna had been in the slipstream of history since 1945, and the Hungarian and Czech borders were close. A marginal existence that attracted self-promoters and nostalgics who indulged in thoughts of the imperial past. A cheese-bell climate that was ideal for guys like Falco. A brilliant show-off, weirdo and self-promoter, for whom pop and pop music meant the same thing as the Habsburg court meant to his aristocratic predecessors of the 19th century.
In Vienna, the pivotal point of his being, Johannes “Hans” Hölzel was born on February 19, 1957. His mother suffered a hemorrhage during pregnancy, and Johann was the only child of triplets to survive. He grew up in simple circumstances and his musical talent became apparent early on. As a toddler, he sang hits from the radio by heart and was certified as having perfect hearing at the age of five. Some claim that he never seriously doubted that he would become rich one day, and that as a child, when his teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he “Pop star!” have answered. But children talk easily.
Falco as an office clerk
Hans Hölzel initially attended a Roman Catholic private school, while his father left the family a short time later. The bond with her mother, who now owns a grocery store, strengthened as a result. It was she who urged her son to take up an apprenticeship as an office clerk at the Pension Insurance Agency for the Commercial Economy after he began missing school lessons more and more often and eventually stopped going at all. Office clerk in an insurance company – if there was such a thing as hell on earth for Falco, then this was it. After a short while, he pulled the emergency brake. He played guitar, then bass, and enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. The stay didn’t last long either, because Hölzel dropped out of his studies after just one semester, “to become a real musician”.
Today, the image of Falco that first comes to most people’s minds is probably the opening scene of the famous “Rock Me Amadeus” video by Rudolf Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher: the carriage pulling up in front of the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, like Falco incredibly thin in a black suit and with a bow tie and smeared hair gets out, wrinkles his nose, actually wrinkles his entire face, slowly walks through the line of rococo people as if the reception was a real bother to him. How he starts rapping – “He was a punk and he lived in the big city” — and directs himself left and right with his index fingers stretched out. Practically everywhere people lived back then, Falco was at the top with “Amadeus”, in the crazy summer of 1985, which lasted non-stop for him until the spring of 1986, when it was even at number one in Great Britain and the USA.
“Do I have to die to live?”
It was his big coup, his grand slam, his winning and asshole fist, the thing that even his many enemies granted him. And it was about everything. If that hadn’t worked, for example people would have laughed their heads off at the man with the Mozart wig, which would have been possible – then Falco from Vienna would have slipped sideways into pop history as the guy with the strange Neue-Deutsche-Welle -Hit “The Inspector” and nothing else, aha. He knew that. Falco must have had this in mind when they shot the video in the palace.
“The Austrians in particular were all waiting to see me die, according to the motto: with flags flying to the central cemetery.”said Falco in an interview with “Musikexpress” in December 1986, when the post-Amadeus record “Emotional” was released. “That’s because of the social structure and the Austrian journalists, who could never be friends with the stars like in America or England… you only become human for these gentlemen when you die.”
Surely Falco was in a brilliant mood when he said that. You can find a lot of sayings like this in his repertoire, because if he was already playing the star, then death logically had to be his buddy – ultimately right up to the posthumously released song “Out Of The Dark”, in which he sang it again had: “Do I have to die to live?” Shortly afterwards, when he collided with a bus in the Mitsubishi in the Dominican Republic, it wasn’t a big departure, but more of what is called a “disco accident” in police reports.
Alcohol or mineral water?
In the spring of 1986, at the improvised celebration of becoming US number one, Falco – as has been confirmed several times – was noticeably sad. He asked desperately how things should continue now that the triumph could never be topped – you couldn’t become number one in Rome. He was absolutely right: nothing better came after that, only worse. It simply turned out that Hans Falco Hölzel, contrary to his own assumptions, was not that much bigger than life – suddenly it was exactly the opposite, suddenly his life was too big for him. Is the Ziggy Stardust, the rise and fall, the myth of someone who got burned in the sun, the typical, tragic story?
The character Falco and poor little Hölzel were certainly arrogant and aloof for very different reasons: In 1985, the star was already living in a natural paranoia that everyone was only after his money. He surrounded himself with rich Viennese citizens’ sons because they didn’t have to scrounge from him. He ate at Oswald & Kalb, which his old friends couldn’t afford, and after the concert the chauffeur came and took him to the hotel. And whether Falco kissed a girl there, used cocaine or drank schnapps was in the newspaper three days later.
“Hans was what you call a quarter drunk”says Thomas Rabitsch, former band member in Drahdiwaberl and later part of Falco’s live band. “You’re completely dry for three months, and then once you take a sip, you pass out and don’t stop for the next two weeks. And then mineral water again. The mineral water time was always extremely pleasant because he was a completely clear person who was incredibly easy to work with.”
Falco’s falling star
You shouldn’t forget that the glorification of the 80s as a cool, lacquered and coked-up neon decade was mainly retroactive – in the real 80s you were primarily seen as an arrogant idiot if you walked around like Falco. To test it, you have to put the other German-speaking star of the decade next to it. Nena. Your armpit hair. Your old rocker sweatband.
Late ’70s listeners who were unfamiliar with neither sampling music nor the mass cover versions of the ’90s would have noticed right away that the majority of Falco’s early hits were stolen. “The Inspector” was “Super Freak” by Rick James, “Today’s Heroes” was David Bowie’s “Heroes,” “Young Romans,” a whole Bowie compilation, and the beginning of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, a mumble of “ “boogie” and “beat,” Falco continued to use years later when he couldn’t think of anything else.
“Due to the coincidences of life, since the mid-eighties I have often been out and about in Viennese bars and clubs, where ‘Mr. Hölzl’ put on his bar show with his friends“wrote ROLLING STONE author Ralf Niemczyk. “Musically, he was clearly under the supervision of Robert Ponger (producer of “The Commissioner”) and later the Bolland brothers.”
Niemczyk continues: “But when it came to the basic idea and presentation of the character ‘Falco’ he created, he was unbeatable. I saw him later in 1990, when his star was already on the decline, during an interview about the album ‘Data de Groove’ in his Vienna apartment. Original producer Robert Ponger was back at the start. But the old magic no longer wanted to appear. The booming genres of house, hip hop and techno simply made Falco’s awkward beat baroque look old. He simply couldn’t cope with the styles and fashions of the subcultures anymore. It is part of the tragic fate of the impostor type that they do not recognize when their time is over.”
Moving to the Dominican Republic
The move to the Dominican Republic, to a resort near Puerto Plata, ultimately happened for mixed reasons. Weather, taxes, general gloom, whispers. Hans Mahr, Falco’s advisor and close friend at the time: “It wasn’t a journey into exile, it was a departure. Falco wanted to get away from the world that had criticized him so much because he didn’t want to have to accept the consequences of listening to the criticism and changing. He had bad friends who talked him into it, people who he only sought out because they never criticized him.”
A former sound engineer visited Falco on the island and then no longer wanted to go because he considered the car traffic to be life-threatening. On February 6, 1998, Falco was driving out of the parking lot of a disco near Puerto Plata when a bus rammed him with full force. The pop star died instantly. The autopsy report showed that he was heavily drunk and had also consumed THC and cocaine. “You have to remember that he was in a completely different world there”said Thomas Rabitsch. “He was shot down by the bus leaving the parking lot at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was simply a stupid car accident.”
Falco’s body was returned to Austria after the accident. Over 4,000 fans attended his funeral at Vienna’s Central Cemetery, where members of “Outsiders Austria,” the biker group that starred in the “Rock Me Amadeus” video, carried the coffin.
