Falco – Falco 3 (1985): As might be imagined, Falco 3 is the third album by Austrian dance-pop star Falco and includes his biggest hit song, “Rock Me Amadeus”. The song and this album were released the year after the Oscar-winning movie about Wolfgang Mozart, Amadeus (“Amadeus” is Mozart’s middle name). Amadeus is one of the best movies about music that I have ever seen. Though primarily a costume drama set in the 18th Century, the dialogue and the interplay between the characters have a modern feel to them that helped bring this classical music to life for me. Oddly, I don’t really recall hearing “Rock Me Amadeus” in its original release; I remember the song from a remix version that came out in 1991 – 7 years after the movie. “Rock Me Amadeus” is the only German-language song to hit #1 on all of the American record charts; the original German version of “99 Luftballons” by Nena hit #1 on Cashbox but #2 on Billboard. Nena later released an English version of the song called “99 Red Balloons”; the only English heard in the original song is “Captain Kirk”. Both Falco and Nena were part of the thriving German new wave music scene called Neue Deutsche Welle. Falco had another hit that is also a long-time favorite of mine, “Der Kommissar” (German and English versions of this song were also made) that is not on this album. Falco is the best-selling Austrian musician of all time with 20 million albums sold according to his estate.
