Frank, you know it’s true – or not?
Foto: IMAGO/Christian Offenberg
Who is Dieter Bohlen? Everyone knows the self-proclaimed “Poptitan” with his long-running show as a TV brutalist and mega-producer, but hardly anyone knows Frank Farian, the actual German hyper-producer – even if he is currently somewhat remembered in the cinema as the inventor of Milli Vanilli. Matthias Schweighöfer plays him in “Girl You Know It’s True”, the feature film about the two dancers from Munich who were briefly world famous – first as singers and then as convicted non-singers. Frank Farian had composed, arranged and produced their music – with the real singers in the studio, whom he considered unpresentable in the new age of music television in the late 80s.
He cast Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus for the videos and TV shows, who then delivered a top-notch playback performance. But they were too successful with it – when they got the Grammy in 1990, everyone went crazy and she and Farian outed each other. A competition of revelations. Anyone who wasn’t blindsided would have already suspected that a big game of expectations and temptations was being played here, in which something like authenticity was of secondary importance. During the disco era of the 70s, Frank Farian had already developed Boney M. in his studio and brought it into the international charts – that was the blueprint for Milli Vanilli, and the sick voice with which Bobby Farrell seemed to sing in “Daddy Cool”. , was his own.
As if this were all a magical plan, in 1962 he founded a beat band called Frank Farian & Die Schatten – could it be more symbolic? And the pop song “Rocky,” a number one hit under his name in 1976, can be heard today as if Farian’s helper approach of turning fake bands into chart breakers was incorporated into the text. It’s about the fate of love. The woman is hesitant: “Rocky, I’ve never loved before / I don’t know if I can handle it / Because there’s more to it / Than a flirt and a few rings,” but is reassured by the man: “Cheer up, baby / Lean on me / It’ll work out somehow / If you help me a little / Love isn’t a problem.” And neither was global success, that was apparently Farian’s philosophy in the studio.
The master of the mainstream was into soul rock like Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and Sam Cooke was one of his idols. He was able to study how this music worked in the 1960s, when the unknown beat musician entered the discotheque business and achieved success for the first time. Yes, Frank Farian, a child from the Saarland province who learned to be a chef after secondary school, had the funk, you have to admit that. He tapped it and made the music of Boney M. and Milli Vanilli bigger than life. And himself bigger than Bohlen: He produced tons of chart-topping stuff, including Meat Loaf, Angelo Branduardi, Terence Trent D’Arby and Barclay James Harvest, and is Germany’s most successful pop musician with 800 million records sold worldwide. You could also say: He knew what people at the fair wanted to hear while driving bumper cars.
He died on Tuesday in Miami at the age of 82. Matthias Schweighöfer plays him in “Girl You Know It’s True” as a not-so-unlikable guy. Which isn’t surprising: Farian co-produced the film.
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