German music producer and hitmaker Frank Farian dead at 82

Acclaimed German pop music producer and former pop singer Frank Farian, who shaped the country's sound for decades, has died at his home in Miami.

Farian was 82 years old. The Allendorf Media agency announced his death on Tuesday on behalf of his family.

Farian produced major pop music classics since the 1970s and helped shape the soundtrack of an entire generation, including with hits like "Daddy Cool" and "Rasputin."

He created the hit vocal group Boney M, writing most of the group's songs, and helped create and launch Milli Vanilli to international stardom. He also created hits for bands like No Mercy and Eruption.

Farian signed the duo Milli Vanilli to a contract and arranged for studio performers to sing on the recordings instead of the performers themselves.

Milli Vanilli, made up of childhood friends Robert "Rob" Pilatus and Fabrice "Fab" Morvan from Munich, scored a major global hit with the disco tune "Girl You Know It's True" and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide by the end of the 1980s.

The first Milli Vanilli album went six times platinum in the United States in 1989, and the duo won a Grammy for Best New Artist.

Revelations in the 1990s that the duo didn't sing themselves and had lip-synced the songs during performances shocked the music world and became a major scandal.

Although Farian appeared to churn out gold records and celebrated regular success on the music charts, he once said that the secret of his own success remained indecipherable.

When he mixed a song, he thought of his time as a chef: "It's always about the ingredients. You can say you're going to be a musician, but a lot of it is luck. You can't plan success."

A 2023 film portrays the story of Milli Vanilli but, although Farian was involved in the documentary as a co-producer, he had little control over the content dismissed the portrayal as "less than 80%" true.
"It's not the truth I experienced. That's why I'm a bit distanced from it," he told the Saarbrücker Zeitung newspaper in December.

Farian was born Franz Reuther on July 18, 1941 in the small town of Kirn an der Nahe in western Germany. He described his early childhood as difficult, but credited his mother with overcoming difficulties for the family in the tumultuous aftermath of Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II.

"I never got to know my father, he was killed in the war before I was born. My mother was my personal 'Trummerfrau,'" Farian told dpa, using a widespread term for women tasked with clearing rubble in post-war Germany.

"She cleared all the obstacles out of the way and made everything possible for me, even though we had no money."

At 14, the young Franz moved in with relatives in the Saarland and was trained as a cook, a profession he chose "because I was always hungry and thought I'd always have something to eat".

He recorded his first record with his band Die Schatten (The Shadows) in a former cowshed in 1963. From Saarland, he moved to Rosbach near Frankfurt and later to the United States.

He scored solo hits with "Baby Do You Wanna Bump" in 1975 and the pop ballad "Rocky" in 1976, but soon gave up performing himself in favour of working as the man in the background behind other successful groups.

"The success was a huge surprise. I always thought I wouldn't make it. It didn't look like it at first," Farian once told dpa.

His career brought him international success. In an interview with dpa, he described a tour with Boney M to Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union as a particularly moving experience.

"I often think about how we danced on Red Square," he said. "My father died in Russia and I am a celebrated star there. You can't dream of that."