Frank Farian, the German music producer who founded the disco band Boney M, has passed away at his home in Miami at the age of 82, his reps announced Tuesday.
Born Franz Reuther in 1941, Farian worked with a string of music icons throughout his career, including Stevie Wonder, Meat Loaf, and of course, Boney M, the group behind 1970s hits including “Daddy Cool” and “Rasputin.”
In 1990, he found himself smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest scandals in the music industry when he was forced to admit that Milli Vanilli, the R&B group he’d created years earlier, had been lip-syncing to someone else’s vocals. The bait and switch came to light at the height of the group’s popularity after the tape jammed during a live performance of the song “Girl You Know It's True” in 1990.
From there, it was all downhill and the group was forced to return their Grammy for Best New Artist.
But Farian defended the lip-syncing in an interview with The Washington Post amid the ensuing backlash, saying, “It was fantastic new music, people were happy, so what’s the problem?” He said Milli Vanilli had been a “project” that involved one “visual” component and “one part recorded.”
In 2022, Farian revealed in an interview with Bild that he’d nearly died due to an issue with his heart valve—but he’d been saved by doctors giving him a pig heart valve.
“Today I enjoy a good meal and am just happy that I’m still alive,” he said at the time.