The career of producer Frank Farian had a polarising effect. To fans of the music he made – and, having sold hundreds of millions of records, there were a lot of them – he was a dependable bringer of uncomplicated pop joy. Like another Munich-based artist-turned-producer, Giorgio Moroder, Farian was seeking escape from a career singing schlager, the oompah-infused brand of MOR pop huge throughout central and northern Europe and, like Moroder, he called on the services of the city’s crack session musicians, who became known as the Munich Machine. But unlike Moroder, his productions were never wildly futuristic or groundbreaking or critically acclaimed. Also unlike Moroder, Farian never quite left the world of bubblegum pop behind. The breakthrough hits he made for Boney M in 1976 and 1977, Daddy Cool and Ma Baker, were essentially bubblegum reblown for the disco era. They were beautifully arranged and produced, the songwriting absolutely laden with bulletproof hooks (literally every melody that appears on Daddy Cool from the bassline to the string arrangement to the call and response verses is a hook; Lady Gaga sampled one of Ma Baker’s on Poker Face), but not records anyone was going to claim would “change the sound of club music for the next 15 years”, as Brian Eno famously said of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love.
To his detractors, Farian was little more than a cynical hoaxer, who specialised in flogging the public artists who didn’t actually perform on the records bearing their names. In truth, that was fairly common practice in the world of 70s pop (if you look up White Plains’ 1970 hit My Baby Loves Lovin’, you can find a promotional film and a Top of the Pops appearance with what appear to be completely different bands performing it; neither Alvin Stardust nor the Rubettes’ Alan Williams sang their first big hits) and it wasn’t always the case with Farian’s productions: Precious Wilson, with whom Farian scored a couple of late 70s hits as Eruption, had a fantastic voice. But it was true of his two biggest artists. Milli Vanilli were forced to hand back their best new artist Grammy when the deception was uncovered; neither Bobby Farrell nor Mazie Williams sang the vocals they mimed to in Boney M.
And yet the accusations of deception never seemed to affect Farian. Milli Vanilli’s career vanished overnight – one of the “singers” fronting the band, Rob Pilatus, died of a drug overdose in 1998 – but Farian was back within a few years, selling millions of records again, this time with a boyband called No Mercy. If you bothered looking at the credits on Boney M’s 1979 album Oceans of Fantasy, it was clear that neither Farrell nor Williams had anything to do with it beyond appearing on its cover: it still went platinum across Europe and spawned a string of hit singles.
Farian was certainly capable of making records that pandered to the lowest common denominator, just as he was entirely capable of making genuinely fantastic disco tracks that required no special pleading. At one extreme there’s Boney M’s awful Hooray! Hooray! It’s A Holi-Holiday!, a Top Five hit that’s essentially the children’s song Polly Wolly Doodle set to a mid-tempo dancefloor chug. At the other, the thrilling concoction of high-drama orchestration and Afrobeat-influenced brass on He Was a Steppenwolf, from their 1978 album Nightflight to Venus or the same year’s supremely funky Dancing in the Streets.
Boney M’s oeuvre doesn’t really seem cynical in retrospect, simply because, in retrospect, it seems so weird. Farian had a thing about unlikely cover versions. Hearing Boney M’s debut single Baby, Do You Wanna Bump? – a hit on the continent, but not the UK – is a strangely disconcerting experience: it sounds like, of all things, Gangsters by the Specials, because it’s based on the same old ska record, Prince Buster’s Al Capone. Boney M covered Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, Iron Butterfly’s In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida and the Yardbirds’ Gregorian chant-inspired signpost en route to psychedelia Still I’m Sad. They covered not one but two mid-60s freakbeat anthems. Five years before the Creation inspired the name of Alan McGee’s record label, Boney M scored a Top 10 hit with a version of their 1967 single Painter Man. A year later they were back in the charts with a version of the Smoke’s My Friend Jack, despite the fact that the 1967 original had been banned by the BBC for being a glaringly obvious paean to the Summer of Love craze for taking sugarcubes dosed with LSD.
I asked him about all this when I interviewed him in 2005, in the otherwise deserted dining room of a London hotel. Farian frowned. They were just songs he liked, he said: the kind of music he actually listened to while his label was forcing him to record schlager: “Now I had a group that was real big in the world, I can do some songs I liked – it was a little bit to compensate for myself.”
Their own material was scarcely less odd, such as Rasputin: then, as now, a profoundly unlikely topic for a Euro-disco song. It was made weirder still by its assessment of the Siberian mystic’s activities – which included encouraging Tsar Nicholas II to take command of Russian forces in the first world war, thus hastening the demise of the Romanovs and the rise of communism – with the fabulously understated line “it was a shame how he carried on”. Then again, Rasputin wasn’t as unlikely as Belfast, a Euro-disco song about the Troubles, which reached the Top 10 a few months after the IRA exploded seven bombs in London’s West End. (“I think this was not the right theme for Boney M,” offered Farian when I brought it up. “Too serious.”)
It’s music that has never been subject to the kind of critical revisionism afforded Boney M’s big 70s Europop rivals Abba, which means it’s easy to forget how huge and ubiquitous it was. You seldom, if ever, hear Rivers of Babylon or Brown Girl in the Ring today – even on oldies radio – but in 1978, the double A-side became the second biggest-selling single of all time in the UK: 46 years on, it remains one of only seven singles to sell over 2m copies in Britain. “Abba was always a bit more normal,” shrugged Farian when the subject came up, although it’s perhaps worth noting that Knowing Me Knowing You or The Winner Takes it All also seem a bit more artful and have a little more emotional heft about them than Brown Girl in the Ring or Daddy Cool.
But if Farian’s work seems highly unlikely ever to be acclaimed in the same way as the songs of Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, nor is it ever likely to vanish entirely into the mist of history. We live in a world where the most unlikely stuff from the past can get a new lease of life thanks to online virality, blithely unbothered by old-fashioned notions of critical acceptance. In 2021, Rasputin was back in the charts, thanks to a sudden burst of popularity on TikTok and a dance remix wise enough to keep the song almost entirely unchanged. You wouldn’t bet against something similar happening again in the future.