Der Kommissar

The music was written for someone else. Producer Robert Ponger composed the track for the Austrian singer Reinhold Bilgeri, who turned it down because he felt it was too soft. Falco took the partly mixed instrumental and added his own text, and it became part of his 1982 album Einzelhaft. Falco himself did not want it as the lead side. He preferred Helden von heute, his Berlin-recorded tribute to David Bowie's Heroes, partly because the hook of Der Kommissar sounded too close to the bass line of Rick James's Super Freak, from which Ponger had borrowed it earlier in 1981. The record company disagreed and pushed Der Kommissar, and it was proved right: in January 1982 the song reached number one in both Austria and Germany, then topped charts across Europe. In the European video Falco sits in an interrogation room in a white suit, smoking. America took longer. Falco's German-language original never made the Billboard Hot 100, but the British band After the Fire recorded an English version that, after the group had already announced it was breaking up, climbed to number five in the US in 1983, helped by heavy MTV play. Laura Branigan even wrote a new song over the same melody. Falco would only break through in the US and Britain three years later with Rock Me Amadeus. Still, Der Kommissar was the moment a German-language song from Vienna topped charts far beyond Austria.