Songoftheday 11/6/14 - Womit spielen kleine Mädchen Heute hier und dort und da, ob in Tucson Arizona Toronto Canada...

Falco - "Vienna Calling"
from the album Falco 3 (1986)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #18 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 8

Today's Song of the Day comes from Austrian musician Falco, who heralded fellow countryman Wolfgang Mozart in his #1 US pop hit "Rock Me Amadeus". For his next single he stayed with that ethnocentric theme with "Vienna Calling", a dance-pop song penned by Falco with his Dutch producers Bolland and Bolland, and also it's also sung in German, it included enough appropriated English words to catch on again in Anglophile countries...

"Vienna Calling" became Falco's second and final top-40 pop hit in America in June of 1986. It also reached #4 on the dance club play chart in Billboard as the "double-A" side of "Rock Me Amadeus". Internationally, the single was a big success, reaching the top-10 in England, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, New Zealand, and his native Austria.

The third single from the set, the dark-lyric ballad "Jeanny", went to #1 in the German-Austrian-Swiss central Europe charts, as well as Norway. However in the US his promoted single "The Sound Of Musik", from his follow-up album Emotional, got into the top-20 on the American dance chart. Falco would nab another #1 hit in Germany with "Coming Home (Jeanny Part 2)" at the end of the year. He even got a top-10 hit in Austria with a Giorgio Moroder-produced duet with actress Brigitte Nielsen, "Body Next To Body". After a four year break from the charts after hitting the top-10 with "Weiner Blut" in 1988, he returned to prominence in Europe with the song "Titanic", which went to #3 in Austria. He scored another pair of top-10 hits, but sadly was killed in an automobile accident in 1998. A song he recorded for his comeback, "Out Of The Dark", was released, and landed in the top-3 in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Falco would posthumously place a number of singles on the charts after that, most recently with "The Spirit Never Dies (Jeanny Final)" in 2009 (#3 in Germany and Austria).

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...and here's Falco performing "Vienna Calling" with an orchestra live...

Up tomorrow: a former family soulster has questions about a robot.