With ‘Axel F,’ Harold Faltermeyer Gave ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ Its Signature Sound

What kind of music goes best with comedy? Even if you’ve never seen The Benny Hill Show, you know its silly, sped-up theme song. For years, funny movies would incorporate swinging jazz or playful orchestral tunes. Then, in the late 1970s, John Landis had the idea to tap acclaimed Oscar-winning composer (and friend) Elmer Bernstein to write a no-winking serious score for Landis’ outrageous Animal House. The juxtaposition worked perfectly, the onscreen hijinks accentuated by Bernstein’s soaring strings — almost as if the movie was pretending to be classy while the characters were thumbing their nose at the pomposity. Soon, other movies, like Airplane! (also scored by Bernstein), were doing the same thing, proving that what initially seemed like a bizarre notion for music in a comedy could actually be brilliant. 

But times change, and one trend gets replaced by a new one. By the mid-1980s, several hit comedies contained a hit single. Think of Caddyshack and “I’m Alright,” National Lampoon’s Vacation and “Holiday Road,” or Ghostbusters and the Ray Parker Jr. title track. But then, an action-comedy came out a few months after Ghostbusters that went in a different, seemingly puzzling direction. An Eddie Murphy vehicle with a synthesizer instrumental as its theme song? An odd choice — until the world fell in love with Beverly Hills Cop and “Axel F.”

If you were alive at the time, you remember that “Axel F” wasn’t just heard in the film. It was all over the radio. Soon, it was used in sports arenas. Like the opening keyboard riff from, say, Van Halen’s “Jump” or the Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius,” “Axel F” was made for the 1980s, an era in which the synthesizer fully took over pop music. Suggesting the increasingly high-tech world in which people lived — Video games! Personal computers! — synth music could be bright and peppy or dark and dystopian. Or, in the case of “Axel F,” it could sound like stylish workout music. Synth-pop felt hip and cutting-edge, and Beverly Hills Cop capitalized on the moment. Not that it made it any easier on Harold Faltermeyer, who came up with “Axel F” to convince people a keyboard instrumental was a good idea.

Faltermeyer, who’s now 71, grew up in Munich in the former West Germany, dropping out of school at 17 so he could study music. “The rest of my family said that this was the end of the family because they were all doctors and professors who just did music as a hobby,” he recalled. “But my dad knew that there was a talent that he had to support. He was a war child and didn’t have the opportunity to study music so I think that was part of his enthusiasm towards my career as a musician.”

After getting work in a recording studio, he met Giorgio Moroder, the legendary music producer and film composer. Impressed with Faltermeyer, Moroder invited him to help with arrangements for his score for Midnight Express. “Both him and I had close to zero experience with scoring,” Faltermeyer said. “It was more or less (trial) and error. … It earned Giorgio an Academy Award and myself a first recognition in the industry.”

The score featured the synth-heavy, disco-driven music that was becoming Moroder’s trademark. About a year later, the two men would collaborate again on Donna Summer’s epochal 1979 album Bad Girls, with Faltermeyer co-writing her Grammy-winning smash “Hot Stuff,” a canny mixture of rock and disco. Faltermeyer continued to help out on Moroder’s film scores, but eventually he started being hired to do his own composing. This is how he found himself working for Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, up-and-coming film producers who tasked him with scoring Thief of Hearts, their first movie after they’d hit paydirt with 1983’s Flashdance, which had a score by Moroder. Faltermeyer quickly grasped how demanding Simpson and Bruckheimer were as bosses. “For two weeks I was just having fun in the studio,” he said later, “then all of a sudden I got a call from Jerry Bruckheimer saying, ‘When will I get the music? I need it tomorrow.’ I realized that I was on the frontline. Bruckheimer and Simpson didn’t want 100 percent, they wanted 200 percent.”

Thief of Hearts bombed, but Bruckheimer and Simpson liked Faltermeyer enough to bring him back for their other 1984 release, Beverly Hills Cop, the movie that would cement Murphy’s superstardom. He’d already proven he could make the leap from Saturday Night Live to the big screen with 48 Hrs., but now the stand-up sensation was getting his first solo star vehicle, a fish-out-of-water comedy in which a smart-aleck, street-smart Detroit detective heads to Beverly Hills, all types of culture clashes and hilarity ensuing. The producers asked Faltermeyer to come up with a theme for the film, and they were so unhappy with what he turned in they nearly fired him.

“(T)he interesting thing about that song is that, first of all, nobody wanted to have it,” Faltermeyer recalled in 2014, later adding, “Nobody liked it, and it mostly has to do with the fact that, at that time, to score a comedy was always done with an orchestra … with the cartoonish kind of themes … (T)he idea of doing an electronic score — and doing that with one of the most successful comedians we had in America at that time, Eddie Murphy — so the studio was nervous. Everybody was nervous. The only guy who was really not nervous was Marty Brest, the director, because he had a very clear view of what he wanted to have. He wanted to have, like, the aesthetic of groups like Yazoo or Afrika Bambaataa, these kind of things. That’s what he wanted to have. Very minimalistic, no paddings.”

Under that direction, Faltermeyer tried a couple different versions of his instrumental, neither of which pleased anyone. He decided to give it one last go. “I played them the first couple of bars of ‘Axel F’ and I still see as it would have been yesterday,” he said in that 2014 interview. “I see Bruckheimer looking at Simpson, Simpson looking at Bruckheimer.” It was the film’s co-editor, Billy Weber, who spoke first: “Nah. It doesn’t work.” Faltermeyer thought he was sunk, but then Brest asked to hear the song again. According to Faltermeyer, the director said, “I have to tell you, guys. I think that this is the most perfect cue I ever heard for this movie. I think it’s great. I love it, and we should go for it.” And that was it.

Like many instrumentals, “Axel F” is more attitude than narrative — more about conveying an ephemeral feeling than nailing down anything specific. What does it have to do with Eddie Murphy’s cop character Axel Foley? As a piece of music, it was hard to say. Is there anything inherently funny about the song? On its own, I don’t think so. But in the context of the film, with Axel outsmarting the uptight Beverly Hills detectives trying to rein him in, the track’s sleek keyboards and drum machine (all played by Faltermeyer) had an impish quality — an air of playful mischievousness that embodied Axel’s irreverent attitude. And the more you heard “Axel F,” the more that catchy song became synonymous with the movie and its main character’s ethos. 

What is funny about the tune is that Faltermeyer admitted in that 2014 interview that “‘Axel F’ was never a song, ‘Axel F’ was always a patchwork.” Essentially, it was Frankensteined together from separate music cues in the film that he had been screwing around with. “It was a collage of different things because they needed the song the next morning, and I couldn’t make something from scratch,” he told Dazed. “So I took all the tracks I had made for the entire movie and cut them together. I worked all night till 8 a.m.” 

Even if a synth-pop instrumental was an unconventional choice for a movie theme song, Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” had been a hit the year before. Both tracks overtly nodded to hip-hop — a then-nascent sound that would soon rule the culture — and took inspiration from the genre’s mix-and-match aesthetic, as well as breakdancing’s growing popularity. And, seriously, that opening keyboard lick sounded amazing.

Beverly Hills Cop was the highest-grossing film of 1984, and the soundtrack went double platinum. “Axel F” peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard pop charts, bested by another song on the soundtrack, Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On,” which got as high as No. 2. Faltermeyer co-wrote and co-produced that track as well, and he co-produced Patti LaBelle’s soundtrack contribution, “Stir It Up,” which just missed the Top 40. This was the golden age of hit soundtracks accompanying hit films, and Faltermeyer’s success on Beverly Hills Cop made him an in-demand composer. In short order, he wrote the scores for Fletch (another comedy) and Top Gun, arguably the defining movie soundtrack of the 1980s. Reuniting with Simpson and Bruckheimer for Tom Cruise’s breakthrough blockbuster, Faltermeyer penned the epic “Top Gun Anthem,” the film’s synth-driven instrumental theme, while his old friend Moroder co-wrote the mega hits “Danger Zone” and “Take My Breath Away,” the latter winning Moroder his third Oscar. (He’d also taken home an Academy Award for “Flashdance… What a Feeling.”) 

Faltermeyer only ever received one Oscar nomination — for co-writing Bob Seger’s Beverly Hills Cop II track “Shakedown,” which went to No. 1 — but he continued his work as a film composer, not just on the Murphy sequel but also pictures like The Running Man and Tango & Cash. In addition, he was a sought-after music producer, having a hand in records like Pet Shop Boys’ excellent Behaviour. Faltermeyer also put out his own album, 1988’s Harold F, which of course featured “Axel F.” But as pop music’s trends continued to shift and evolve, his synth-pop aesthetic eventually stopped sounding like the future — it started to sound like the dated past. 

“There was a fallout against the synth sound,” Faltermeyer recalled in Dazed, “and I moved back to Germany to concentrate on other projects. One day you’re out of fashion and then you become fashionable again. People always take elements of the past and merge it with the future. This will always happen.”

His musical approach might have fallen out of fashion, but “Axel F” kept being adopted by new styles. The house group Clock covered the song in the mid-1990s, hitting the Top 10 in the U.K. A decade later, Erik Wernquist (recording under the name Crazy Frog) delivered his own Eurodance version of “Axel F,” which topped the charts across Europe and currently inspires TikTok dances. “I wasn’t sure about it,” Faltermeyer told Dazed about hearing the initial Crazy Frog demo, “but my kids came in and said, ‘Oh, this is cool,’ so I said, ‘It shouldn’t hurt, go ahead.’ I didn’t hear anything about the song for about a year and then I got a call from the BBC saying we had outsold Coldplay four times over and reached number one from nothing. That made me laugh.”

When Beverly Hills Cop III opened in 1994, Nile Rodgers had come aboard to write the score. Faltermeyer and Hollywood had parted ways by that point, although he was lured back to score the 2010 buddy-cop comedy Cop Out, with director Kevin Smith hiring him specifically to get that retro-‘80s sound. “A majority of the temp score for this film contained cues from my previous work,” Faltermeyer said at the time. “In one way, that’s a composer’s dream, in another way, that’s a composer’s nightmare.”

But in recent years, he’s enjoyed a renaissance simply because the films he worked on so long ago have remained in the pop-culture consciousness, producing sequels. In 2022, Top Gun: Maverick was the biggest film in the world, and Faltermeyer helped compose the soundtrack, his now-iconic “Top Gun Anthem” joined by new instrumentals like “Main Titles (You’ve Been Called Back to Top Gun),” which echoed the earlier track while adding a more emotional undercurrent. And now there’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, the first movie in that franchise in 20 years. Rap superstar Lil Nas X just released his tie-in single, “Here We Go!,” which samples “Axel F,” slowing down its deathless keyboard riff, which was dreamed up just as the hip-hop movement was in its early stages. A true full-circle moment. 

It’s disorienting to have Faltermeyer’s music back out in the world after so long. When I hear “Axel F,” I always think of Jazzercise and cheesy sports montages. It oozes ‘80s from every pore. But that sonofabitch is still one hell of an earworm. 

“When I start composing, I tend to go wild with my fantasies and come up with all sorts of crazy shit,” he said in 2010. “There’s no limit in musical styles whatsoever. I have found in most instances that initially exaggerating the composition, then bringing it back to ‘normal’ creates the desired emotion. However, what sometimes happens through the ‘bring back to normal’ process — there is a remainder of some ‘spikes’ which didn’t join in. I think that makes for the variety of colors in my scores and listeners thus easily interpret all sorts of tension and intention.” 

What do you feel when you listen to “Axel F”? Do you see Eddie Murphy’s smiling face? Do you remember driving around in the 1980s blasting the song in your car? Can you hear the disparate sonic fragments stitched together to make the track? Do you even know Harold Faltermeyer wrote it? 

“I am still very proud of being able to create such a popular piece of music without any lyrics or star,” he said in that Dazed interview. He deserves to be. 

It must be an odd thing to be famous for instrumental music, the tunes you create more recognizable than you’ll ever be. During his heyday, Faltermeyer mostly avoided the limelight and stayed out of trouble. (“I bought some sports cars and touched the dark underbelly of Hollywood,” he told Dazed, “but I never drowned.”) But the work he did on films like Beverly Hills Cop lives on. You probably couldn’t pick the man out of a lineup, but you sure know what he sounds like.