Boney M. founder and hit producer Frank Farian dies

His songs are classics of pop music and the soundtrack of a generation. Whether “Daddy Cool” or “Rasputin”: Farian has been creating danceable world hits for decades like on an assembly line.

Farian founded and produced successful groups such as Boney M. and Milli Vanilli. It was the big pop scandal of the 90s when the producer admitted that Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus from Milli Vanilli had not sung on any of the duo’s songs.

The man in the background

Farian was born Franz Reuther in Kirn an der Nahe in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Success was not something he was born with. “I never knew my father; he died in the war before I was born. The people in Kirn helped a young mother with three children, and I am very grateful for that,” Farian told dpa on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This humanity – and of course his mother – shaped him. At 14, young Franz moved to live with relatives in Saarland and learned to be a chef.

From 1961 Farin worked as a rock and pop singer. In the mid-1970s he made people cry with his sad hit “Rocky”. After that he hardly appeared himself. That was over at some point. It was only as a man in the background, as a producer, that his mega success began. For example with the group Boney M.

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Farian sang the first track “Baby Do You Wanna Bump” (1975) in the studio himself. Because he couldn’t perform the polyphonic song solo on stage, he looked for faces to present the song. Two band members sang live, two others moved their lips. Highly successful: hits like “Rivers of Babylon” or “Ma Baker” are pop history. A similar project went wrong with Milli Vanilli. When it became known that the duo was not singing on stage, there were massive protests and criticism, especially in the USA. A film about it (“Girl You Know It’s True”) was recently released in cinemas. This is “less than 80 percent” true, said Farian in a newspaper interview.