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HOW I FOUND FALCO: PART 5 – THE SOUND OF MUSIK

September 28, 2009 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This is the last in a five-part series of posts about how I discovered Falco. The first part is here, the second part is here, the third part is here and the fourth part is here.

OK, so despite knowing that any reasons I give to explain why I like Falco are likely to be false, I’ve now reached a point where I have to explain why I like Falco. This could be a bit difficult.

Further complicating factors: I don’t speak German, so my understanding of what any of the songs are actually about is limited, and even if I did understand the lyrics, I don’t really have any idea of the social, cultural or political environment which inspired them.

When, in 1985, [Eno] and John Cage were talking about their shared distaste for music that comes too heavily laden with intentions, Eno added, “I have the same feeling about lyrics. I just don’t want to hear them most of the time. They always impose something that is so unmysterious compared to the sound of the music [that] they debase the music for me, in most cases.” 1

Not understanding the lyrics doesn’t have to be a problem and could actually be a benefit. I usually listen to music at work, or on the tube while reading a book. I don’t really want any words entering my brain and distracting me, but I like the sound of human voices. Listening to lyrics in a language I don’t understand seems like a good compromise.

Certainly Falco’s debut single Ganz Wien loses some of its menace when re-recorded in English (although admittedly, the English version isn’t actually a direct translation). Written whilst Falco was in awful, self-indulgent, hairy drugrock outfit Drahdiwaberl; Ganz Wien quickly became a highpoint of the band’s set, and Falco got signed up (I think Drahdiwaberl also signed to the same label, but without Falco). However, in order to get any radio play, he was forced to not only to change the words but also to sing them in a different language after there was an outcry over the original lyrics. Even without knowing any German, it’s obvious he’s saying Vienna is on heroin and “coca-ine” and basically suggesting it’s not a very nice place to live – this theme would be continued throughout Falco’s first album, Einzelhaft:

Listening to the album, it’s quite obvious that Einzelhaft was inspired by Bowie’s Berlin trilogy (Falco, such a Bowie fan, specifically moved to Berlin to “follow the tracks” left by his hero). The first side of Low is the biggest general reference point (bits of Speed Of Life and Breaking Glass seem to appear throughout the album), but the most explicit Bowie reference must be Helden Von Heute, a hugely effective pastiche of “Heroes” which makes no effort to disguise its source of inspiration (the name of the song translates as “Heroes Of Today”). But what stops Einzelhaft from just being a Bowie tribute is illustrated by the song which was released as a double A-side alongside Helden Von Heute:

Borrowing a riff from Rick James, and influenced by Kurtis Blows and Grandmaster Flash, Der Kommissar was originally intended for Reinhold Bilgeri who felt it was “too soft”. Writer/producer Robert Ponger took it to Falco, they reworked it and it became number one throughout Europe.

The surprise success of Der Kommissar introduces the tragic irony at the heart of the Falco story. Falco was intimidated by the success of the record, by the pressure to follow it up with another hit. It paralysed him. There’s a scene the Falco biopic, Verdammt, wir leben noch!, where Falco explains his situation:

Everything that I record now will be compared to Kommissar’s success. Do you know what that means? A blank piece of paper is supposed to become a worldwide smash hit.

This scene might never have actually taken place of course, but it shows the thing Falco feared most. He feared becoming a one-hit wonder.

Unfortunately, Falco’s second album failed to capture the same level of success as his debut, despite it being probably the best record he ever made. Confident, sophisticated, slick European disco, filled with taught strings, funky basslines and excited brass. It also has a fantastic cover:

The Bowie influence is still there, but it’s a different Bowie. The Young Americans Bowie, maybe a bit of the Let’s Dance Bowie. The way he warbles “Never stop this old erosion, FANTASTIC VOY-AAAAAAGE!” at the end is a particular highlight:

To promote the album, Falco travelled to America to make a fifty minute long-form video, which has to rank alongside ABC’s Mantrap as one of the greatest pop follies of all time.
After the relative commercial failure of Junge Roemer, Falco parted from producer Robert Ponger to work with Bolland & Bolland. A pair of brothers from Holland, Bolland & Bolland had released a couple of singles of their own (including In The Army Now, later covered by Status Quo) before setting up a studio in the middle of the Dutch countryside. It was a collaboration which would at least guarantee that Falco wouldn’t have to worry about any more of his records being compared to the success of Der Kommissar.

Again, success came as a surprise. The two other singles released from Falco’s third album – Vienna Calling and Jeanny – while not reaching the incredible success of Rock Me Amadeus, performed well (Jeanny, which tells the story of the abduction and possible murder of a young girl, saw a boost in sales when the German Mike Read had it banned from the radio), but these songs had been written and recorded before global success. In fact, they’d been recorded at a time when Falco wasn’t really doing very well, as a sort of final roll of the dice. Falco’s next album would be the one which would be written and recorded by Falco, the international pop sensation.

The title track from Emotional is very clearly aimed at the American market, and suffers for that fact, but the rest of the album shows that Falco just can’t do it. He can’t just be a normal, sensible popstar. And so the rest of the album, instead of being a dozen versions of the title track (which I’m sure is what the record label were hoping for) bounces around all over the place. There’s an uneasy near-resolution to the story of Jeanny (“I would give anything to see Jeanny again – coming home”); an overwrought tribute to war photographer Robert Capa (“They know! Life is WHITE LIGHT! Slightly out of FOCUUUUUUUUUSSSSSS!”) and an insane, rambling, seven and a half minute fantasy about Kathleen Turner which starts out with Falco on a train to Brazil, mutates into a bit of mid-80s funk, then turns into a gospel chant, after which Falco solemnly tells Kathleen Turner “I’m just talking about, not the first kiss of my life, I’m talking about… our planet!” and finally the whole thing ends with a sort of military marching band thing.

There’s also this:

That’s got to be one of the greatest opening moments in pop video history. It’s fucking brilliant. The video also features something else I love about Falco: excellent finger work, possibly rivalled only by Jarvis Cocker. Fans of the anachronistic Napoleonic wear/sunglasses combo Falco wears at the beginning of The Sound Of Musik video will pleased to know it reappears in the video for Wiener Blut.

The last album Falco made with Bolland & Bolland shows Falco at his insane best.

Full of Fonz-like cries of “Ey!”, rrrrrrrrrrolled rrrrrrrrrrs (“Hit! Them! With yourrrr rrrrrrrrrrrhythm stick!”) and deranged yelps, Dance Mephisto is an exhilarating, slightly terrifying three and a half minutes of lunacy. Another song is about the sinking of the Titanic (in interviews, oddly, it seems like he identified with the ship):

“De! Ca! Dence! For! You! And! Me! DECADENCE!” I love the pointless over-exuberance of that video, it’s so needlessly over-the-top, so unnecessary. Never once did anyone say “OK, that’s enough now”. Just more nonsense poured on top of nonsense. This is what I love about Falco. Forget all that other stuff I’ve written. It’s this. This excess. There’s a scene early on in Verdammt, wir leben noch! where Falco visits a brothel with his friend Billy. Billy tells him that the most beautiful girls in Vienna can be found here. Falco asks if it’s expensive. “Depends what you want” replies Billy. “Everything, Billy, always,” Falco answers. “You know me. Always everything.”

“Always everything”. That’s what pop music should be, surely? And while the rest of the time, in the rest of my life, I might choose nothingness over somethingness, Falco represents a form of everythingness. Always everythingness.

——————-
1 Eric Tamm, Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound, 1995, p81

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HOW I FOUND FALCO: PART 4 – NO ANSWER

September 18, 2009 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This is the fourth in a five-part series of posts about how I discovered Falco. The first part is here, the second part is here, the third part is here and the final part is here.

As Now We’ve Got Europe slipped into a state of dormancy, I was relieved of the pressure of having to listen to a variety of music. Variety has never been something I’ve been a hugely comfortable with, and so this new-found independence was deeply satisfying.

While for most people, a 1GB MP3 player would seem horrendously restrictive, for me it is more than adequate, being capable of holding all nine Falco studio albums with room to spare (the extra space I filled with Amanda Lear and Yello). Armed with this puny, stone-age MP3 player, I’ve spent most of the last year listening to Falco:

(My puny MP3 player appears to have had some sort of nervous breakdown recently, and so is currently out of action. I might buy a new one soon.)

But, what was it exactly that I was listening too? Or rather, what was it exactly that I was hearing?

The honest answer is that I don’t know.

While this may seem like a cop-out, I think it’s actually a lot closer to the reality of aesthetic experience than most people are willing to admit. The conventional (flattering, but fundamentally dishonest) view of aesthetic experience is that we see a piece of art (or listen to a record, or watch a film, or read a novel) and we consider what it means (what it represents, what it is saying, how it has been crafted) and we evaluate it (rationally) according to a (fixed) set of aesthetic criteria and then decide whether or not we like it. This is the basis of the review culture and awards infrastructure; where experts in each field are employed specifically to interpret and evaluate works of art, their opinions given credibility because of their ability to fit each piece within a historical framework.

I think that actually, something approaching the reverse is true. That the process works more or less in the opposite direction. That, almost instinctively, we decide whether or not we like something and then hold that decision up to our rational brain in search of some sort of satisfactory explanation. When the decision corresponds with an easily available explanation, we are happy and convincingly convince ourselves that we either like (or dislike) whatever it is for the reason (or reasons) we have selected. However, on those occasions where there is no readily available explanation, we experience discomfort and have to grasp for something else instead (like “it’s so bad, it’s good”).

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this idea here, arguing that when people are forced to explain their decisions, not only do they give explanations which are false, but it can even change the decision they are likely to make. He describes an experiment by Tim Wilson, where a group of students were shown two different posters. Half the students were told to pick a poster they wanted and were then allowed to take that poster home with them. The other half were told to pick a poster, explain why they chose it, and then take it home with them. A while later, Wilson phoned the students and asked if they still liked the poster they’d chosen. The ones who didn’t have to give an explanation tended to be happy with their choice, while the other group regretted chosing the poster they did:

Now, there’s a wonderful little detail in this – that there were two kinds of posters in the room. There were Impressionist prints and then there were these photos of, you know, a kitten hanging by bars that says “Hang in there baby”. And the students who were asked to explain their preference overwhelmingly chose the kitten. And the ones who weren’t asked to explain overwhelmingly chose the Impressionist poster, and they were happy with their choice, obviously. But who could be happy with a kitten on their wall after three months?

Why when you ask someone to explain their preference do they gravitate toward the least sophisticated of the offerings? Because it’s a language problem. You’re someone, you know in your heart that you prefer the Impressionists but now you have to come up with a reason for your choice, and you really don’t have the language to say why you like the Impressionist poster. What you do have the language for is to say, “Well, I like the kitten because I had a kitten when I was growing up” and so forcing you to explain something when you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary and the tools to explain your preference automatically shifts you toward the most conservative and the least sophisticated choice.

[...]

What it really means is that there is a class of products that are difficult for people to interpret. Some things are ugly and when we say that they’re ugly, they really are ugly and we’re always going to think they’re ugly. They’re never going to be beautiful. But there’s another class of products which we see and we don’t really know what we think, they challenge us, we don’t know how to describe them, and we end up, if we’re forced to explain ourselves, in calling them ugly because we can’t think of a better way to describe our feelings. And the real problem with asking people what they think about something is that we don’t have a good way to distinguish between these two states. We don’t have a good way of distinguishing between the thing that really is ugly and the thing that is radical and challenging and simply new and unusual.

And so, “so bad, it’s good”.

If I had to explain why I thought The Beatles were the greatest band of all time, which I’d never be asked to do (because it’s taken for granted and also because I don’t believe it) I’d know what to say. I could use phrases like “perfect songwriting partnership” and “reinvented rock and roll” and “created the blueprint for today’s pop groups”, and I could pretend they’ve always been as untouchable and well loved and respected as they are today. I could, if I had to, also make the argument that The Smiths were the greatest British band of all time (I wouldn’t believe a word I was saying, but at least I’d know the words). I could list their range of influences, locate them in history, discuss the magnificence of Morrissey’s asexuality and the complexity of his lyrics. If I didn’t want to believe (as I don’t) that Morrissey was the greatest British pop star of all time, I could argue it was David Bowie, this, at least, I genuinely do believe (as did Falco). But even if I do believe it, these words wouldn’t be my own. It’d all just be stories I’d learnt. Lines from a script.

I need to write my own script.

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HOW I FOUND FALCO: PART 3 – VERDAMMT WIR LEBEN NOCH

September 9, 2009 By in PICTURES, WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This is the third part in a series of posts about how I discovered Falco. The first part is here, the second part is here, the fourth part is here and the last part is here.

Realising that perhaps no-one (including, at this stage, myself) would be interested in a club night dedicated solely to Falco, my attention was still divided as I plunged into the Neue Deutsche Welle scene, searching for some sort additional context in which to place Falco’s music. And while I discovered some fantastic stuff (Die Doraus und Die Marinas, Frl. Menke, Markus and DÖF), nothing really stood out.

I downloaded the entire Falco discography (I’ve since bought them all, so no need to worry, legal people). And started listening to them, though with an ear to finding tracks which would work, or at least be tolerated, in a club.

On the night of the club, security was tight. We were expecting tens of people, possibly (we hoped) some people we didn’t even know.

In one corner, we set up a little tribute to Falco. A framed photo and candles.

We also had a memorial book, where people could write their own personal messages expressing their sadness over the tragedy of Falco’s untimely death. This, I thought, might be a bit of a risk. A memorial book in a bar where people have been drinking all night. It will either go missing, or the pens will go missing (I came prepared with three or four Staedtler Stick 430M ballpoints), or people will just draw three-line cocks all over every page. Amazingly, this didn’t happen. Everyone was very well behaved. The book stayed in its corner. I didn’t even have to replace the pen once. And not a single cock was drawn in the book.

I wrote this:

Some of the messages people wrote were heartfelt:

Some were quite elaborate:

Some people didn’t really know who Falco was:

And some people took the piss:

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HOW I FOUND FALCO: PART 2 – EUROPA

September 8, 2009 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

This is the second part in a series of posts about how I discovered Falco. The first part is here, the third part is here, the fourth part is here and the last part is here.

The compilation CD I’d bought, it turns out, wasn’t really a great introduction to Falco’s work. It was a slightly odd selection of songs. A mix of singles and album tracks, taken only from the first three albums. A CD compiled not through any appreciation of Falco’s music, but apparently as a product of licensing agreements and contractual loopholes. The cheap looking sleeve should have been a warning, but at this point I was too ignorant to notice details like that.

Around this time (I think it must have been about five years ago), my taste in music had been gradually moving away from the Hi-NRG disco I’d been listening to for a few years and I was becoming more interested in the music of Europe. An idea was slowly forming in my head. I realised that I’d been short changed by the version of pop history I’d been taught at school. The version of history which goes from the birth of rock and roll through the British Invasion to the experimentation of the last years of the Beatles into hippy, then follows Marc Bolan into glam where it gets made self-aware by Bowie and Roxy, eventually becoming bloated and over-elaborate, being energised by punk, stylised by the New Romantics, before growing too big, stadium-sized, irrelevant, only to rescued by the dance scene etc. It’s a well rehearsed history, which forms a simple narrative, but excludes anything which doesn’t fit.

Unfortunately, everything outside of Britain or the US fails to make the cut in this version of history. It’s a shame, because interesting things were happening everywhere, in countries less chauvinistic than our own. As I soon discovered, the fact is that punk happened everywhere. Disco happened everywhere. There were New Romantics everywhere. The eighties happened everywhere, it just didn’t happen at the same time.

Stumbling across this huge hidden history of pop, it seemed a shame not to let other people know about it. So, Now We’ve Got Europe was launched (the club is currently dormant).

The great thing about launching the club was discovering so much new (and old) music. The trouble was that discovering so much new (and old) music at the same time, meant I couldn’t really listen to anything in great depth, so Falco struggled for my attention, alongside Fancy, Amanda Lear, Elli et Jacno, Matia Bazar, Lio, Ivan Cattaneo, Alaska y los Pegamoides and dozens of others.

Last February marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Falco. The club fell on a night just a few days from the anniversary date, so we decided to dedicate the night to his memory. It was then, preparing for that night, that I really listened to Falco for the first time.

HOW I FOUND FALCO: PART 1 – OUT OF THE DARK

September 7, 2009 By in WORDS Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This is the first part in a series of posts about how I discovered Falco. The second part is here, the third part is here, the fourth part is here and the last part is here.

The guy was dead as hell.

I think it was the Geranium Shop in Worcester Park where I found it. I’d been flicking through the secondhand paperbacks, as I often would on a Saturday afternoon. Among the usual rubbish, I spotted a book called “Vengeance Is Mine” by Mickey Spillane. I thought the cover looked great and the inner blurb sounded brilliant:

I’m Mike Hammer. I’m a – well, let’s say a private eye, working here in N.Y. – and my friend Chester Wheeler is in his hotel room, dead, with my gun in his hand. It looked like a straightforward suicide case to everyone but me. And when I found out the kind of women Chester had been going around with; and when some thugs tried to persuade me to lose interest in the case, I knew I was on to something corrupt. I decided I’d better get to the bottom of it – before anyone else found himself booked for eternity in six feet of earth.

I turned to the first page and read the opening line. “The guy was dead as hell.” Amazing. Another line caught my eye as I flicked through the yellowed pages:

On some people, legs are just to reach the ground. On Velda, they were a hell of a distraction.

As I paid my 50p to the elderly lady in the shop, I felt pleased with myself. Here was a prime piece of kitsch post-war Americana I had in my hands. Firmly in the territory of “so bad it’s good” (it would still be several years until I realised this concept of “so bad it’s good” is a myth). I read the book in a single sitting and wanted more. I searched on eBay and Amazon and went up and down Charing Cross Road until pretty soon I had a bookshelf full of his writing. I read them in the haphazard order I got my hands on them. Then read them again in the order they were originally published. Then some of them I just read again because I wanted to.

There was a power to Spillane’s words, a confidence. Reading them in the early years of the 21st century, in the Wimbledon branch of Costa Coffee during my lunch break from working in Virgin Megastore, I immediately forgot any ironic pretensions I had. The conspicuously 1950s stylistic flourishes which at first attracted me soon began to fade into insignificance. Spillane’s depiction of Hammer’s relationship to the city of New York, in particular, was fascinating (and only revealed itself to me after repeated readings).

These books weren’t so bad they were good. They weren’t bad at all. They were good. It’s just they good in a way which wasn’t obvious at first glance.

And so it was with Falco.

And again, it started in a charity shop in Worcester Park.

My girlfriend, having the advantage of not being born in this country, has always been familiar with Falco’s music. Unfortunately, in Britain (if he is known at all) he’s known only for Rock Me Amadeus. And this would be the 12″ single I bought from the British Heart Foundation shop on that day, maybe five years ago.

Like my Spillane purchase, I bought this because I mistakenly thought Falco was so bad he was good. A one hit wonder. A novelty song. This, I would later realise, is possibly the least interesting thing you could say about Falco.

That could have been that – my relationship with Falco could have ended there, before it had ever really begun – but then I found a copy of this compilation CD in a record shop, and (with the encouragement of my girlfriend, who had always preferred Vienna Calling to Rock Me Amadeus) decided to buy it.

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