Get the latest gossip

Frank Farian: Boney M’s mastermind was one of pop’s greatest oddballs

He never got the reappraisal that Abba did, but with covers of 60s psych, songs about the Troubles and an unerring knack for hooks, the late German songwriter leaves a daring legacy

Milli Vanilli’s career vanished overnight – one of the “singers” fronting the band, Rob Pilatus, died of a drug overdose in 1998 – but Farian was back within a few years, selling millions of records again, this time with a boyband called No Mercy. A year later they were back in the charts with a version of the Smoke’s My Friend Jack, despite the fact that the 1967 original had been banned by the BBC for being a glaringly obvious paean to the Summer of Love craze for taking sugarcubes dosed with LSD. It was made weirder still by its assessment of the Siberian mystic’s activities – which included encouraging Tsar Nicholas II to take command of Russian forces in the first world war, thus hastening the demise of the Romanovs and the rise of communism – with the fabulously understated line “it was a shame how he carried on”.

Get the Android app