Obituary of Boney M creator Frank Farian

German musician and producer Frank Farian, the father of European disco, has died in the United States. The creator of the group Boney M and other popular groups of the 1970s–1990s was 82 years old.

Frank Farian, born Franz Reuther, was the same age as the Beatles and, naturally, as a teenager he did not escape his passion for rock and roll, especially since he lived in Germany, in Kirn. In the country where the American military contingent was stationed, there were more than enough fashionable hits on the radio – and young Reuter (the pseudonym Frank Farian appeared only in the 1960s), who wanted to become a cook, listened to them while learning to cook.

As a result, he received a chef’s diploma, and at the same time learned to play the guitar.

His first band, Frankie Farian und die Schatten, played the most straightforward version of rock ‘n’ roll and even performed in the same German clubs as the Fab Four a few years earlier. However, they could not keep up with the experiments of The Beatles, and Farian chose the path of a pop singer with an eye on television shows. For 12 years, close business ties connected him with the Hansa studio, the Mecca of German pop music. And in the mid-1970s, producer Farian finally defeated Farian the singer.

The first high-profile project for which Frank Farian was responsible for the sound was the group Gilla, in which Gisela Wüchinger worked as a vocalist. Fascinated by Wühinger’s voice, Farian decided to take on her career, for which he attracted the full power of Hansa. One of the first singles was the disco hit of all time “Lady Marmalade”, in which the text has been changed. The original was sung on behalf of a girl with reduced social responsibility, but Gisela sang as if about how she loves to take her teddy bear to bed. The company’s PR people focused on the ambiguity of the lyrics, and as a result, the song was banned on several radio stations, which, naturally, attracted even more interest to it.

Gilla’s next hit was the song “Johnny”, in the creation of which Italian composer Toto Cutugno took part. Perhaps, “Johnny” – Gilla’s most famous song, and it was also the first world hit “L`italiano”, after which his career rapidly took off. In fact, it was during this period, in 1975–1977, that the Italo-German disco fist was formed, which also included Giorgio Moroder, who launched Donna Summer into orbit, and the creator of the group Dschinghis Khan, Ralph Siegel. It was they who created European disco in the form in which they loved it, and most importantly, almost completely allowed it in the USSR. In the USA the situation was different. It is known that labels paid bribes to local radio stations so that they would not play European bands and thus support local artists.

American disco was born in underground gay clubs, among black DJs and dancers. Italian and German producers led him to a more commercial sound and came up with images for soloists who, despite their skin color, had almost nothing in common with America. And often these soloists did not sing, but simply opened their mouths to the soundtrack.

Frank Farian assembled his main group, Boney M, from immigrants who moved to Germany and England from the Caribbean. But for the first single Boney M “Baby Do You Wanna Bump” All vocal parts, both female and male, were recorded by the producer himself, who used the Jamaican song “Al Capone” as the basis of the song.

Thus, he formulated one of the unspoken principles of pop music of the 1970s and 1980s: all music is created by one person in the studio, and who is performing on stage is a secondary matter.

Forming the style of Boney M, Farian worked a lot with a variety of Caribbean styles, but the basis of the sound was clear direct drums and typical disco violins.

In the golden cast of Boney M, the main female vocal parts were performed by Jamaican singer Liz Mitchell, and the second most important character in the show, dancer Bobby Farrell, most often used Farian’s pre-recorded voice at concerts. Combined with Frank Farian’s voice, Farrell’s charisma embodied the very essence of European disco.

Boney M were the most famous disco group in the USSR. The reasons are the absence of a ban on the publication of their music, ten concerts in Moscow in 1978 with accompanying television broadcast and the presence of a song in the repertoire “Rasputin”considered Frank Farian’s most famous song.

In general, within the framework of the Boney M project, Farian fully revealed himself as a songwriter, writing, without exaggeration, dozens of deeply catchy hits. At the same time, by arranging existing tunes such as “Sunny” by Bobby Hebb or “Kalimba de Luna” by Tony Esposito, Farian became a full-fledged co-author, thanks to whom the song received a second wind.

Frank Farian applied approximately the same principles when working with the British group Eruption, although in this case all the public’s attention was focused on the lead singer, Precious Wilson. In the 1980s, Farian added to his list of victories with a pompous cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven”, which, in his band Far Corporation’s interpretation, lost all its magic, but still reached number eight on the charts in the original’s homeland. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Frank Farian’s name was most often heard in the context of the scandal surrounding the Grammy-winning phonogram duo Milli Vanilli (For more details, see “Kommersant” dated November 8, 2023). In the 1990s, new hits from the restless German again tore up the dance floors – performed by the La Bouche and No Mercy projects, which followed new disco trends, but retained the studio DNA of Farian’s best songs.

He had no idea what it meant to “quit the race.” In the year of his 80th birthday, “Rasputin” became a TikTok hit, and the number of physical media with recordings of his projects sold approached 900 million. His dream was a billion, but it was not destined to come true. He died at his home in Miami, presumably due to a heart condition for which he was operated on in 2022.

Igor Gavrilov