Dance with life

FALCO - who actually was that man? We knew the product, but not the man Hansi Hölzel, who struggled against his alcohol addiction and died on February 6th  98 in the wreck of his car. "Bunte" prints the last interview.

For almost 20 years, the Viennese video producers Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher (DoRo) accompanied the career of their friend "Falco" Hans Hölzel. In 1985, together with him they invented  his Number 1 hit " Rock Me Amadeus "  in the kitchen of his Viennese flat (oh?). They accompanied him to the top of the world and remained his friends when he was at his lowest. In Vienna, three months before his death, they talked to him about his life - an interview that should have become a document for his comeback with " Out of the Dark " and that became some kind of legacy. In "Bunte", Falco speaks one last time.

 Falco on alcohol: 
Everyone has a poison that has a special kind of effect on him (I really don’t know how to translate this, but this is the general meaning). For me it was alcohol. With alcohol I was like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I am allergic to alcohol and therefore probably schizophrenic (?). If you drink to sth with a champagne glass with mineral water in it, everyone knows that you have a huge alcohol problem. I do not totally avoid a glass of alcohol from time to time,  but I know what happens if I add another three: I change my identity. Lots of stuff then pisses me off. The guy sitting over there. The guy who sits beside me at the bar turns his back on me. He’s not supposed to though, ‘cause he should be talking to me. Experience hasn't helped. It would be presumptuous to say: I’ve done that, now I’ll stop (this is about as close as I can get to the text. It's sth about "being wet and dry" and I'm not sure if you can use those expressions in English. I’m not a very good translator). A lot of things can still happen. I’m only half way through, at most. But nowadays I don't need alcohol any longer. The realisation occurred in the brain, not only with the psychiatrist. I will now take care of my health and I hope I didn’t destroy too many brain cells. Illness in the soul, in the brain, in the body is the worst thing that can happen to me.

  Falco on suicide:
I’ve never considered suicide. I’ve never been one of those who said: Let’s have another bottle, and one day it’ll knock me out. There’s a difference between the age of 40 and 30. That’s why I believe I can't afford those kinds of things any longer. At  40 you have to look into the mirror, and you must like what you achieved. Not in the sense of cash on the Swiss account, but in the way you understand yourself.

 Falco on women:
After three weeks I feel bad without a woman and after four weeks with a woman. It’s  always been like that. For me, women are a question mark (you cannot really say that in English, can you? I like the expression anyway). I don’t know anything about them. I only know that I need them and love them. I’m still looking for the ideal woman, one who has a life of her own. I’ve already had the other kind (?).

 Falco on family:
 I don't have a family, I don’t get on with my father very well. My only family is my mother Maria, and she is now 70 years old. After all, Katharina has been my daughter in my heart for eight years. If she said one day: There’s this Hölzel in the Dominican Republic, and if I’m going to the Caribbean anyway, I might as well visit my ex-father. I would like to be prepared for that day, I wouldn't like to be lying underneath a palm-tree, completely pissed. I don't want her to say: He’s exactly like mum’s always described him.

  Falco on the early days:
My start was in 1981. I started with a Schmäh (sorry, untranslatable. Arno (who's Austrian) says it's sth like a philosophy of life, approaching people without shyness, being funny and courteous. Okay?) that was very successful. I’d wet my hair and wear the striped suit from the (Hallucination) Company. Like each first album, Einzelhaft was the result of 25 years' experience. It came very much from the guts and succeeded ingeniously, where this genius is also chance.
 
  Falco on commerce and image:
What people did not understand, but what inspired my arrogant, präpotent (??? prepotent?) image, is that the figure Falco was a reaction against the establishment. Anything but commerce! Ja net anbiedern (??? sorry. Say: I wouldn't adapt at any cost)! I was the first Anarchist in the German-speaking countries. At 25, I started with the attitude, with the insolence, the coolness of a 40-year old. I always pretended to know how things worked. It’s part of the Falco image to be a Schlitzohr (hm - sth like "cunning and clever", whatever), cool, to know everything.

  Falco on his toughest year:
 1988 was the absolutely lowest point - with a cancelled tour, a shattered family. The first thing to do was to leave for four months and return like a marathon runner (?), ascetic to the max, and to get divorced right away. Since 1989 I’ve been feeling better each year, which probably has something to do with moving away from Vienna.

  Falco on " Rock Me Amadeus ":
With "Rock Me Amadeus" I had a huge hit and was without a contract. That doesn’t usually happen. When a German record company offered me a five-million-Mark contract, I signed. You take five millions if they’re offered to you. In the end it actually harmed me more. Cause with "Amadeus" I wasn’t "hot" anymore, there had already been alcohol excesses. "Amadeus" was the beginning of the end for me.

  Falco on a career in America:
It would’ve been possible to go to America with this Number 1, but I would only have slept with everyone in Beverly Hills and would be dead by now, through cocaine and heroin and codeine and nicotine. I don’t believe I could have made a career like Schwarzenegger, because I didn’t have that unbelievable physical presence. I think I would’ve completely fallen down (?). That's why I kinda saw my PR tour as a tourist trip. Back from America,  I weighed 87 Kilos, drank a  bottle of whiskey a day and was beyond good and bad. This toddler was running around in the flat, and I didn’t know who that martian was, what this child was doing in my life.

  Falco on money:
There’s nothing left of the money I earned with "Der Kommissar", I’ve blown all of that. I earned 6 or 7 million Schilling with "Der Kommissar". Seven million Schilling are in fact 3.5 million in Austria. You buy a house, some furniture, a car, some clothing,  a 150-sqm flat, a Mercedes, a watch - you need all of that, cause you’ve seen it in some kind of film. I'd also seen in a bad film that youi become reasonable at 30. And then I said: I feel like settling (literally: becoming bourgeois, middle-class). Well, that was all I needed. The next day, 450,000 fans returned their records - it was a bit like: We don’t want any money for it, but we don’t wanna hear anything else from him either. He’s really gone mental now.

 Falco on investments:
Investment - well, with me it was this way: I almost went bankrupt. I invested in absolute crap, in a Penthouse that cost 20 million Schilling. An insanity. My way of saving taxes was to invest into stuff I couldn’t get rid of anymore. Idiotic.

 Falco on his life as an artist:
Each artist, Falco, Fendrich, Jagger, wants to behave immaturely (more or less). ‘Now  I’ve written a song, that’s totally crazy. I've given everything I had. Now would someone else please take care of the rest.‘ Ever since I’ve been an artist, I’ve been scared. What got me most over those past 20 years is that our business is all "sound and smoke" (can’t really translate this, it's a fixed expression in German. I’m sure you understand what he meant though). I envy the sculptors, painters, writers, whose work you can look at or hold in your hand. At a concert, as soon as the last note has ended, the audience goes home and that's it.

 Falco on his colleagues: 
I love people like Udo Jürgens, Peter Alexander, who’ve always been good-hearted, whom I used to call Schlagerfuzzis (woah, don’t ask me to translate this. Schlager is that terrible German music and fuzzis are… geeks or nerds, sth like that *lol*), grannie’s idols (hehe...), whom I regularly insulted and who, with the experience of men who know what it’s all about, just said: ‘That’s okay, go on if you must.’ And: ‘he didn’t mean it that way. He really is talented, but he doesn’t even know.’ (I know that was a very long sentence J)

  Falco on his last album:
"Out of the Dark" is autobiographic - and again it’s not. It’s about drugs, or more precisely cocaine. I wrote the text from the point of view of a desperate man who's possessed by the drug, without being addicted myself.