The German pop music producer and former pop singer Frank Farian is dead. He died at home in Miami at the age of 82, his agency Allendorf Media said, citing his family. Farian entered the pop business in the mid-1970s and soon became one of Germany’s most internationally successful music producers. The bands were among his greatest successes Boney M. and Milli Vanilli.
With the duo he also produced one of the biggest scandals in pop history: in 1988 he recorded beautiful songs with good singers in the studio. But it wasn’t them who appeared as Milli Vanilli, but Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus – because they looked better. They were number one on the US charts for weeks and were even awarded a Grammy. Then it turned out that the band’s songs had been recorded by other singers and that the two band members had never sung themselves. When the hoax came out, they had to give up the Grammy. Farian was annoyed about his “milli-vanilli mistake” for a long time. Because he didn’t need that at all.
Farian, born Franz Reuther, began his career in a cowshed in Saarland. The mother made ends meet for three children on a pension of 180 marks and still saved a guitar for him. Using a tape recorder and a single microphone, he and his band recorded his first record in 1963. Boney M.’s first songs, which he initially sang himself, were created in a small studio in Offenbach. Hits like “Daddy Cool”, “Rivers of Babylon”, “Rasputin” and “Ma Baker” are pop history. Farian sold at least 100 million records under the name Boney M.
At the end of his life, Farian owned three of his own studios in Miami, where he also lived: “Joy in life and joy in work” were important to him, he told the German Press Agency on his 75th birthday. He doesn’t have any other wishes, except one: “At some point I want to fall over in the studio and that’s it. But not right now.”