Live music is always tricky for live TV events. You have to make sure the performers behave themselves and perform the song that was agreed upon. You can allow the performance to overrun for a minute or two but any longer, the whole show could be off-kilter.
Some shows like Top of the Pops in the UK and American Bandstand in the USA use pre-recorded backing tracks but that isn’t always a sure thing. One of music’s biggest scandals in recent memory was due to a bad backing track. This is the story. This week the Beat Marches On to the 21st July 1989, when Milli Vanilli’s backing track starts to skip and unveils a scandal.
It was at a Club MTV tour performance in Bristol, Connecticut when the backing track failed. Live on the channel, Milli Vanilli was mid-way through their breakout hit ‘Girl, You Know It’s True’ when all of a sudden, the backing track started skipping, and all the fans could hear was ‘Girl You Know its-Girl You Know its-Girl You Know its…’. The duo, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus thought the jig was up, they had been found out and they rushed off the stage, embarrassed by the mishap. They were hiding in their tour bus thinking that the rug had been swept from under their feet.
The truth is that it didn’t, not at that moment anyway. Some people had theories about it but nothing concrete. At those types of concerts, most of the acts had backing tracks that they had sung along to. Most of the audience just thought that’s what the pair was doing. Although it was rare for the backing track to go wrong it was a known thing throughout music history.
The questions started to arise when the pair were being interviewed and they spoke. Fab being from France and Rob from Germany, both had thick accents from their respective countries. So thick that you would be able to tell when they sing.
In the winter of 1989, a session singer admitted in an interview with New York Newsday that he was the ‘real’ Milli Vanilli singer. Charles Shaw was paid $150,000 to retract that statement by the architect of the band, Frank Farian.
Farian, the brainchild of Milli Vanilli, first found fame in the 1970s with the disco group Boney M. In Europe and the UK the group was very successful, ‘Rivers of Babylon’ was one of the top singles sold in the UK ever. The producer did the same thing with this band as with Milli Vanilli, hired people to ‘perform’ the song while he hired session players to record the songs.
Looking to break into the US market, Farian hired a new group of musicians to sing on a track he had been working on. A cover of a Baltimore R+B group Numarx’s minor hit ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ and hired Morvian and Pilatus as the faces of the group.
The pair had no idea what they were getting into, they were struggling models and wanted to be singers. On the premise that they were going to sing Farian signed them to be the singers of Milli Vanilli, but it wasn’t until after they signed the recording contract that the singers had to lip-sync to the already recorded songs. Having spent the advance on the contract their only way out was to pay it back or to play ball.
The rouse worked, maybe too well as the first single was a hit, and so was the second song ‘Baby Don’t Forget My Name’ and the third ‘Blame It On The Rain’ in all the duo had five top five hits in the USA from the first album ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ or titled in Europe ‘All Or Nothing’.
The success warranted a Grammy nomination in 1990, over six months after the Club MTV incident. They won their nomination for ‘Best New Artist’ and the acceptance speech is when more people started raising questions due to their accents as the awards were on national TV in America.
Whether it was guilt from winning an award that they didn’t contribute to or just because they felt they weren’t taken seriously enough when the process started to record the next album, they gave Farian an ultimatum, let us sing or we are out. Not to take this lightly the record producer held a press conference and told the truth about everything. The duo didn’t sing but were lip-syncing and are now no longer part of the group.
Now that Farian had pushed the duo under the bus, their world had collapsed around them. Fans were angry and the Grammy board was embarrassed, so much so that they asked the duo to give back the Grammys, which they did at a press conference. Arista Records who claimed they knew nothing of the scandal, dropped the pair and offered refunds to purchasers in America. There are a few doubters as to how much the label knew.
The aftermath of the announcement didn’t work in anyone’s favour. Frank did record another record with the session musicians, this time letting them be the faces of the group. Dubbed as The Real Milli Vanilli the follow-up, ‘The Moment Of Truth’ didn’t sell well and didn’t chart in the UK or US. Morvan and Pilatus did finally get to sing on an album they released called Rob and Fab but it sold less than 2000 copies.
The years after the scandal took its toll on Rob and Fab, the failure of their album and the mark on their record meant the work dried up. Struggling with drug addiction, Rob tried to get clean, but it wouldn’t stick, checking into rehab ten times. In 1998, a decade after the release of the Milli Vanilli album Rob died of a drug overdose. Fab did get his act together and in the 2000s recorded a solo album and has been a part of some other projects. He also DJs private events.
When the scandal rocked the music world everyone was quick to judge the fake singers for their part but not the mastermind Frank Farian. He was hailed as a genius and didn’t get any of the blame for what happened. He pulled the wool over the eyes of everyone and ran all the way to the bank. Leaving the two boys with nothing.
It wasn’t the lip-syncing that was the issue. Going back to that Club MTV night, not many people who were there cared they were lip-syncing. Most of the acts at the performance were. The issue was the people Farian fooled, the Grammy board, the record label, etc. As time has gone on and the technology has got better, people have been more accepting of lip-syncing. You have to ask if it happened in 2023, then would there have been the same reaction?
The Beat Marches On is a music blog written by Jimmy Whitehead. Jimmy has been blogging for six years specialising in Sports (especially American Football). If you want to follow Jimmy on Twitter: @Jimmy_W1987
The Beat Marches On has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/The-Beat-Goes-On-Blog-107727714415791 and a Twitter page: @TheBeatGoesOnB1
The websites used for research were:
The Fall of Milli Vanilli and 5 More Lip Sync Disasters – Flypaper (soundfly.com)
The Truth About Milli Vanilli’s Lip-Sync Scandal (grunge.com)
Milli Vanilli’s Lip-Syncing Scandal: 30 Years Later (people.com)
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