Falco: On Record

In 1985, an Austrian bass player named after an East German ski jumper did something no German-language record had ever done before: he took a song about Mozart, recorded under active protest, to number one on the American Billboard Hot 100. Falco never managed it again, and by his own admission never expected to. Falco - On Record is a factual, source-by-source account of how a Viennese conservatory dropout invented, more or less by accident, the commercial template for rapping in a language that was not English and then spent the rest of a short, strange, restless career being simultaneously more famous and less understood than almost anyone else in pop. Drawing on official archives, contemporary chart data, court and press records, this book follows Falco from a working-class Margareten childhood through 'Der Kommissar', the 'Rock Me Amadeus'-phenomenon, the 'Jeanny' controversy, a decade of diminishing returns, and the February 1998 car accident outside a nightclub in the Dominican Republic that ended his life at forty. It also looks past the obituaries, at the producers who built his sound, the hit stage musical assembled from his catalogue, his own uneven history as a live performer, and what later artists have made of a songbook that still won't sit still.