Boney M were a successful German disco group of the late 70s, known for wild onstage costumes, frontman Bobby Farrell's bass voice and signature dancing style, and their hits, which included
Baby Do You Wanna Bump,
Daddy Cool,
Ma Baker, and
Belfast.
However, it was an open secret that Boney M was masterminded by producer
Frank Farian. Farian wrote Boney M's songs and performed all of the male vocals (and many of the background female vocals) in the studio. Farrell and the rest of the band merely mimed Farian's heavily manipulated vocals when appearing on television. Hmm, a German dance band lipsynching someone else's vocals...sound familiar?
That's right, Farian was also responsible, ten years later, for
Milli Vanilli, who sold 30 million singles and 11 million albums before being revealed as lipsynchers. Interestingly, while no one seemed too upset by Farian's behind-the-scenes participation in Boney M, the
"unmasking" of Milli Vanilli created a
media sensation, eventually resulting in the
revocation of the group's Grammy. A Milli Vanilli biopic is allegedly
in the works, written by
Catch Me If You Can scribe
Jeff Nathanson and directed either by Nathanson or, gulp,
Brett Ratner. [NSFW?]
In between Boney M and Milli Vanilli, Farian also formed
Far Corporation. Featuring members of
Toto, the band charted in the UK with a truly dire cover of
Stairway To Heaven. An interesting piece of trivia, though: since Led Zeppelin never released "Stairway To Heaven" as a single, this was actually the first version of the song to ever chart.
After Milli Vanilli, Frank Farian founded the dance band La Bouche, who had two huge club hits in the 90s with
Be My Lover and
Sweet Dreams. Farian was also behind No Mercy, (not to be confused with
these guys or
these guys), who also had two big mid-90s dance hits:
Please Don't Go and
Where Do You Go. The latter was actually a cover of
an earlier La Bouche song; presumably it wasn't too hard to get the rights...
Still an active producer, Frank Farian was recently the subject of a successful and
critically acclaimed "jukebox musical" called
Daddy Cool, which featured the music of Boney M, Milli Vanilli, and other Farian projects.
-Boney M was also known for their reggae covers: Rivers Of Babylon was a cover of an earlier song by The Melodians; their version of No Woman No Cry was sampled in Naughty By Nature's follow-up to O.P.P., Ghetto Bastard.
-This performance of Boney M's Rasputin in front of a, um, "reserved" Russian audience has to be seen to be believed. It's another entry in the Disco Songs About 19th Century European History micro-genre, a tradition that includes Dschinghis Khan's formidable Moskau and, arguably, Abba's Waterloo.
-Totally random and surprisingly straight cover of Daddy Cool by Placebo.
-My FPP was inspired by the discussion in this great post. And also inspired by the fact that I've only made one other FPP, meaning the MeFi Tags on my profile started with "self-love"...
posted by Ian A.T. at 3:27 PM on January 15, 2010 [6 favorites]