In a "better late than never" entry that I noticed in January but for some reason never put here.
Frank Farian, German producer notorious for his lip-sync acts, dies at 82
Farian, who had some successes as a pop singer in his native Germany, adopted the pseudonym "Boney M." for a dance music act he assembled. Boney M. consisted mainly of Black Caribbean women, and though Farian sang on the records (perhaps most famously in America "Rasputin" and the Christmas chestnut "Mary's Boy Child / Oh My Lord"), he likely recognized how incongruous it would be having a white German easy listening singer fronting such a group and instead hired a more charismatic frontman, Aruban dancer Bobby Farrell, to lip sync to Farian's lyrics. (Farrell would get to perform the songs in certain live performances, and would eventually wrest control of the Boney M. name after Farian swindled him out of his royalties; Farrell died in 2010.) During this time, Farian also produced Eruption, another Caribbean-born Eurodisco act whose lead singer, Precious Wilson, did sing lead on record. (They had one hit in America with a cover of "I Can't Stand the Rain.")
Farian is perhaps most infamous for Milli Vanilli, which took the formula he had used with Bobby Farrell to an even greater extreme. Though Farian did not sing on these records, he relied on American session vocalists Charles Shaw and Brad Howell to record vocals while two dancers, Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, would lip-sync. It turned out that, unlike Farrell, Pilatus and Morvan could not speak English nor emulate the records they had allegedly recorded live—and after a notorious incident in which the group's backing track began skipping during a live concert exposing the ruse, Milli Vanilli's reputation was effectively ruined, and the planned next album was released under the brand Try'n'B, this time crediting the actual vocalists.
Farian was able to salvage his career and had some minor success with the groups No Mercy and La Bouche, who had dance hits into the 1990s.
Farian died January 24.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240123171645/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/arts/music/frank-farian-dead.html
