A Viennese rap about Mozart tops the American charts

Falco wrote Rock Me Amadeus in 1985 with the Dutch producers Rob and Ferdi Bolland, riding the wave of Miloš Forman's film Amadeus, which had just swept the Oscars. The song treated Mozart as the first pop star, a punk in a powdered wig with debts and groupies, and Falco delivered it in his own mix of Viennese dialect, German and English over a synth-pop backing. In Austria and Germany it was a hit within weeks.

The American release was a different proposition. A&M issued a remix with an English spoken section reciting dates from Mozart's life, and MTV put the video, shot in Vienna with a Baroque ball and a biker gang, on heavy rotation. It climbed the Hot 100 through the winter and displaced Heart's These Dreams at the top on 29 March 1986, staying there for three weeks. It went to number one in Britain in May.

Falco was 29. He never repeated the American success, though Vienna Calling and Jeanny were hits across Europe, and he died in a car crash in the Dominican Republic in 1998. The record he left is a strange one: the only German-language single ever to top the American chart, and it is about the most famous Austrian of all.