“Quiéreme Mucho” (Also known as ‘Yours’) is a criolla-bolero composed in 1911 by Gonzalo Roig with lyrics by Ramón Gollury and Agustín Rodríguez. The song was inspired by Roig’s wife, Blanca Becerra, and premiered in Havana in 1911 without much success. In 1917, it was included in the sainete El servicio militar obligatorio and performed by Becerra and Rafael Llorens to critical acclaim. Roig published and sold the rights to the song in 1921, and the first recording was made in the US by singer Tito Schipa in 1923. In 1982 Julio Iglesias created a version which charted in the UK. It peaked at No. 3.
“99 Luftballons” is a song recorded by Gabriele Susanne Kerner, better known as Nena, a German singer and songwriter who rose to international fame in 1983 as the lead vocalist of the band Nena. In the same year the band re-recorded this song in English as “99 Red Balloons”. “99 Luftballons” became a number one hit in West Germany and the Netherlands in 1983 and went on to major international chart success the following year, an English version hitting No. 1 in the UK and the original German version hitting No. 2 in the US. Nena’s re-recording of some of the band’s old hit songs as a solo artist, produced by the co-composer of most of them, her former Nena band colleague and keyboard player Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen, rekindled her solo career in 2002. Combined with the success of the Nena band years, she has sold over 25 million records, making her the most successful German pop singer in chart history.
“Vamos A La Playa” is a song by the Italian duo Righeira from their 1983 debut album Righeira. It was written by Johnson Righeira, the duo’s lead vocalist and producer Carmelo La Bionda. The earliest versions of “Vamos a la playa” tracks back to New Year’s Eve in 1981, when Righeira and some acquaintances visited a music studio in Florence belonging to a mutual friend. According to Righi, he came up with the signature phrase “Vamos a la playa, oh-o-o-o-oh” while he was playing on a keyboard in the studio. The song’s melody was recorded via an old analog synthesizer. The original 1981 demo tape version of “Vamos a la playa” was inspired by the 1960s and was intended to be a post-atomic beach song with electric elements. The song became the duo’s first number one single, topping the charts in Switzerland, while also reaching number 53 in the UK. Despite its ostensibly innocuous beach theme, the song actually talks about the explosion of an atomic bomb.
“Pie Jesu” (original Latin: “Pie Iesu“) is a text from the final couplet of the hymn “Dies Irae”, and is often included in musical settings of the Requiem Mass as a motet. The phrase means “pious Jesus” in the vocative. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s setting of “Pie Jesu” in his Requiem (1985) has also become well known and has been widely recorded, including by Charlotte Church, Jackie Evancho, Marie Osmond, and others. Performed by Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston it was a certified Silver hit in the UK in 1985 reaching No. 3.
“Rock Me Amadeus” is a song recorded by Austrian musician Falco, for his third studio album, Falco 3 (1985). The single was made available for physical sale in 1985 in German-speaking Europe, through A&M. “Rock Me Amadeus” was written by Falco along with Dutch music producers Bolland & Bolland. To date, the single is the only German language song to peak at number one of the Billboard, which it did in March 1986. It topped the singles charts on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United Kingdom, where his “Der Kommissar” failed to make the charts, the song hit number one in May 1986, becoming the first single by an Austrian act to achieve this distinction. It was Falco’s only number one hit in both the United States and the United Kingdom, despite the artist’s popularity in his native Austria and much of Europe.
