Boney M. and Milli Vanilli creator Frank Farian has died

THE German producer Frank Farianthe man behind the success of the famous disco band Boney M. and of their twin Milli Vanilli, died at the age of 82, in his apartment in Miami (USA), his family announced today.

Born in the small town of Kirn (western Germany), on July 18, 1941, he is considered the German producer who has recorded the most hits on the international stagewith over 800 million record sales.

Frank Farian, whose real name was Franz Reuter, started as a cook before founding a musical group in 1961, Frankie und die Schatten, with which he began his musical career.

He later found fame with the success of Boney M., the 1970s disco band he created from scratch and for which he wrote some of the songs and recorded the vocals himself in the studio.

The tracks “Daddy Cool”, “Ma Baker”, “Sunny” and “Rasputin” have become timeless, cult hits.

Frank Farian also managed to shake up the waters of the world music scene with their duo Milli Vanilli, who disrupted the pop landscape in 1988 with the hit 'Girl You Know It's True'.

But this success took a scandalous turn when the producer, in the late 1990s, admitted to the press that the singers' voices were not the ones heard on the album and that in all their concerts they sang play-back.

Following the revelations, the duo, French Fab Morvan and German Rob Pilatus, were forced to return their Grammy.

Entitled “Milli Vanilli” a documentary aired on the Paramount+ platform, recently told the story of this band. Frank Farian, who declined to comment as part of the documentary, blamed the two band members' accents, Pilatus' Bavarian and Morvan's French, as described in the film by the producer's assistant and ex-lover Ingrid Segieth.