Personalities | Falco | One-Hit Wonders | Rock

‘Rock Me Amadeus’, 1986

Perhaps Austria’s great pop export, Falco (born Johann Hölzl) was a classically trained child prodigy who later fronted a jazz rock combo. His early career mixed a lot of techno-synths with German rap, and he even had a single, ‘Jenny’, banned. ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ played on his classical background, fusing synths with classical strings, and it reached No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. Falco’s subsequent releases yielded diminishing returns, and his career had all but ended by 1988. He died in 1998, in a car accident, aged 40.

Personalities | Swing Out Sister | One-Hit Wonders | Rock

Source: The Definitive Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, general editor Michael Heatley

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