German producer Frank Farian, the man behind the successes of the disco group Boney M. and the duo Milli Vanilli, has died at the age of 82 in his apartment in Miami (USA), his family announced on Tuesday.
He was born on July 18, 1941 in the small town of Kirn (West Germany) and is considered the most internationally successful German producer, having sold more than 800 million records.
Frank Farian, whose real name is Franz Reuther, started out as a chef before founding the rock group “Frankie and the Shadows” in 1961, with which his musical career began.
He later gained fame with the success of Boney M., a 1970s disco group he founded from scratch, for which he wrote several hits and recorded the male vocals himself in the studio, with the four members of Boney M performed a show on stage in their sparkling costumes.
The songs “Daddy Cool”, “Ma Baker”, “Sunny” and “Rasputin” have become cult titles.
Frank Farian achieved another musical coup with the duo Milli Vanilli, which broke into the pop landscape in 1988 with the hit “Girl You Know It's True”.
But this success took a scandalous turn when, at the end of 1990, the producer admitted to the press that the voices of the singers, two mixed-race people with good looks, did not correspond to those that we heard on the album and at all their concerts were performed in playback .
The deception brought the two stars, the French Fab Morvan and the German Rob Pilatus, a descent into hell. The duo will notably have to return their Grammy, the highest music award in the United States.
The documentary entitled “Milli Vanilli”, broadcast on the Paramount+ platform, recently unraveled the story of this group, the perfect scapegoat for a music industry that is primarily guilty of this deception.
Producer Frank Farian, who refused to speak in the documentary, criticized her Bavarian accent for Pilatus and French for Morvan, according to the producer's assistant and ex-lover, Ingrid Segieth, who testifies in the film.