TProducer Frank Farian's career has had a polarizing impact. For fans of the music he made – and there were a lot of them, as he sold hundreds of millions of records – he was a reliable source of simple pop joy. Like fellow Munich-based artist-turned-producer Giorgio Moroder, Farian is seeking an escape from a career singing Schlager (an oompah-infused brand of MOR pop that was a big hit in central and northern Europe). , like Moroder, sought the services of musical organizations. The urban crack session musicians who became known as the Munich Machine. However, unlike Moroder, his work was never very futuristic, groundbreaking, or critically acclaimed. Also, unlike Moroder, Farian never completely left his bubblegum pop world. His breakthrough hits for Boney M in 1976 and 1977, “Daddy Cool” and “Ma Baker,” were essentially Bubblegum reimagined for the disco era. They're beautifully arranged and produced, and the songwriting is absolutely loaded with bulletproof hooks (literally everything that appears on Daddy Cool, from the bass lines to the string arrangements to the call-and-response verses). The melody is a hook (Lady Gaga sampled one of Ma Baker's songs on Poker Face), but as Brian Eno famously said about Donna Summer's I Feel Love It was a record that no one was claiming would change the sound of club music for the next 15 years.
To Farian's detractors, he was nothing more than a cynic who specialized in flogging mainstream artists who didn't actually appear on the records that bore his name. In fact, it was a fairly common practice in the world of '70s pop music (just look up White Plains' 1970 hit “My Baby Loves Lovin'”, which featured promotional films and appearances on Top of the Pops). There was also a band playing (and it looked completely different), but neither Alvin Stardust nor Alan Williams of the Rubettes sang their first big hit) and that's not always the case with Farian's work. There wasn't: Precious Wilson, who wrote some of Farian's late 70's hits as Eruption, gave a great performance. voice. But that was also true of his two biggest artists. Milli Vanilli was forced to relinquish her Grammy Award for Best New Artist after her deception was exposed. Neither Bobby Farrell nor Maisie Williams sang the vocals they imitated on Boney M.
Still, the accusations of deception had no effect on Farian. Milli Vanilli's career disappeared overnight – one of the band's frontman “singers”, Rob Pilatus, died of a drug overdose in 1998 – but Farian was revived within a few years and He sold millions of records again, this time with a boy band called No Mercy. . If you take the trouble to look at the credits for Boney M's 1979 album Oceans of Fantasy, it's clear that neither Pharrell nor Williams had anything to do with the album beyond what's on the cover. . The album remained platinum throughout 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 had the ability to make truly great disco tracks that required no special pleading. An extreme example is Boney M's terrible hurray. Banzai! “It's A Holi-Holiday!” is a Top 5 hit that is essentially a mid-tempo dance floor chug version of the nursery rhyme “Polly Wolly Doodle.” The other is “He Was a Steppenwolf,'' from the 1978 album “Nightflight to Venus,'' and “He Was a Steppenwolf,'' from the same year's ultra-funky “Dancing in the Streets.'' It's a thrilling blend of high-drama orchestration and Afrobeat-influenced brass.
Boney M's work seems less cynical in retrospect. Simply because it looks very strange in retrospect. Farian had an opinion on the unlikely cover version. Have you heard Boney M's debut single Baby, Do You Wanna Bump? A hit on the continent but not in the UK, it's a strangely disconcerting experience. It sounds more like Gangsters by the Specials than anything else, since it's based on the same old ska record, Prince Buster's Al Capone. Bonnie M sings Neil Young's “Heart of Gold,” Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?,” Iron Butterfly's “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” Then, on his way to psychedelia, he covered the Yardbirds' Gregorian-inspired guidepost, “Still I'm Sad.” They covered not one but two of his mid-'60s freak beat anthems. Five years before The Creation inspired the name of Alan McGee's record label, Boney M had a Top 10 hit with a version of his 1967 single “Painter Man.” A year later, they returned to the charts with a version of Smoke's My Friend Jack, but the 1967 original was criticized as an overt tribute to the Summer of Love boom, which was fueled by the consumption of LSD-laced sugar cubes. Despite being banned by the BBC.
I asked him about all this when I interviewed him in a deserted dining room of a London hotel in 2005. Farian frowned.They were simply songs he liked, he said: the kind of music he was actually listening to when the label was forcing him to record. schrager: “Now that we have really big groups in the world, we can play some of our favorite songs. It was just a little bit to supplement ourselves.”
Their own songs were also not as strange as Rasputin's. At the time, and even now, the theme was completely unthinkable for a Eurodisco song. The film is a surprisingly understated story about the activities of a Siberian mystic who encouraged Tsar Nicholas II to take command of the Russian army in World War I, hastening the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of communism. It got even weirder when I evaluated it. “It was unfortunate that he continued.” Then again, Rasputin couldn't be more likely than “Belfast,'' a Eurodisco song about the Troubles, which reached the top 10 a few months after the IRA detonated seven bombs in London's West End. It wasn't that there wasn't. (“I don’t think this was an appropriate subject for Boney M,” Farian said when I mentioned it. “It’s too serious.”)
Because this music hasn't been influenced by the critical revisionism of Boney M's '70s Europop rival Abba, it's easy to forget just how huge and ubiquitous it was. Nowadays, you rarely hear Rivers of Babylon or Brown Girl in the Ring, even on oldies radio, but in 1978, this double A-side was his It became the second best-selling single. forever In the UK: After 46 years, the song is still one of only seven singles to have sold more than 2 million copies in the UK. “Abba was always a little more normal,” Farian shrugs, but “Knowing Me Knowing You” and “The Winner Take It All” have a little more art and emotional weight. It is perhaps worth noting that there also appears to be a Brown Girl in the Ring or Daddy Cool.
But it seems very unlikely that Farian's work will be celebrated in the same way as the songs of Björn Ulvaeus or Benny Andersson, and it's certainly unlikely that it will disappear completely into the mists of history. I can't say. We live in a world where, thanks to online virality, the most unlikely things of the past can be given new life without worrying about outdated notions of critical reception. In 2021, Rasputin skyrocketed in popularity on TikTok, returning to the charts thanks to a clever dance remix that kept the song largely intact. You wouldn't bet on something like this happening again in the future.
