Farian had to con Pilatus and Morvan into taking the gig, promising that he’d eventually record them singing for real, even though he knew he was never going to do that. Farian didn’t think those singers had star quality, so he hid them from the public, and he hired Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, two astonishingly good-looking men, to act like the real singers of Milli Vanilli. But with Milli Vanilli, the big lie quickly became too big to sustain.įarian had recorded Milli Vanilli’s debut single “ Girl, You Know It’s True,” a cover of a track from the Baltimore group Numarx, with a crew of Black American session singers who were living in Germany. They made music for clubs, and Farian figured that nobody in that realm was worried about anything resembling artistic integrity or musical talent. Just like Boney M before them, Milli Vanilli were an extremely silly dance-pop project. More importantly, Milli Vanilli got big in America, one of the few places on the planet that hadn’t really bought into the whole Boney M thing. Milli Vanilli got extremely big in an extremely short period of time. When Milli Vanilli happened, things were different. In the high disco era, you could get away with that kind of fakery.

The members of Boney M weren’t really the musicians making the Boney M records Boney M frontman Bobby Farrell was simply lip-syncing Farian’s own vocals. Farian, the German music-biz huckster, had already hit one jackpot with Boney M, the campy disco project that became hugely popular throughout Europe in the late ’70s and early ’80s. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.įrank Farian must’ve felt like the dog that caught the car.

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