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.
