Frank Farian lets out a long sigh. Germany’s most successful producer and songwriter looks pretty good for 64. In a certain light, he resembles a more avuncular version of Robert Plant — but he also looks exhausted.
”I tell you,” he says, in thickly accented English, ”I worked a lot in my life, but I never had so much work as I have now. I have three new artists in the studio, and also this musical.”
The latter has brought him to London. Titled Daddy Cool, it will attempt to do for Farian’s back catalogue what Mamma Mia did for Abba’s, shoehorning songs made famous by Boney M, the disco act he devised in mid-1970s Frankfurt, and Milli Vanilli, perhaps the most infamous manufactured pop artists in history, into a surprisingly gritty sounding storyline. Due to open at London’s Shaftesbury Theatre in April, the world’s most anticipated musical apparently comes at a price of £3million.
Mention of the plot causes Farian to let out another sigh. ”It changes a lot at the moment,” he says. ”We’re still writing it. The basic idea is two gangs in London, one of them led by Daddy Cool. Then there is the secret love, a little bit Shakespeare. Then at the end we have a little carnival. The two gangs realise the fight is over, so they celebrate together at the Notting Hill carnival. I saw the Abba musical and I loved it, but my music was a little more black. I can’t make a comedy, it doesn’t go with our songs. It’s different from Abba, but I think we have more show, and the budget is a little bigger.”
These words should be enough to strike fear into the show’s male lead, former So Solid Crew rapper Harvey, particularly if he’s seen the cover of Love for Sale, a 1977 album featuring Boney M’s solitary male, Bobby Farrell, naked save for something best described as a futuristic golden thong.
But at the very least, Daddy Cool is a distinct improvement on Farian’s last attempt to marry Boney M’s music to drama: an early 1980s TV movie lost to the mists of time, but which Farian says was called Boney M Lost the M. ”What was the plot of that?” He shakes his head. ”It was a very low-budget film.”
If Boney M Lost the M sounds peculiar, it’s nothing compared with the musical output Farian masterminded for the quartet. They have never undergone the critical rehabilitation afforded their competitors Abba, which means their oeuvre’s more outré aspects have been dwarfed by the memory of their two biggest hits: 1978’s double A-side Brown Girl in the Ring / Rivers of Babylon and the Christmas number one Mary’s Boy Child — still, respectively, the fifth and 10th best-selling singles in British chart history.
But what of the album track He was a Steppenwolf, which gamely attempted to condense Hermann Hesse’s 1926 novel of fantastical psycho-drama into six minutes of dancefloor action? Or their earlier hit single Rasputin, a balalaika-heavy disco track in which the last czar was described, perhaps erroneously, as ”Russia’s greatest love machine”? It was followed by Belfast, a Euro-disco attempt to address sectarian violence in Ulster, which reached the top 10 a few months after the Irish Republican Army exploded seven bombs in London’s West End.
”A friend of mine from Germany wrote that song with different lyrics, but Marcia [Barrett, Boney M singer] came up with the idea … we have sung about Ma Baker, we have sung about Rasputin, let’s do a song about a real problem, Belfast, which was very bad at the time. But it was not a big hit. I think this was not the right theme for Boney M, too serious. I think this was a little mistake.”
Then there was the matter of Boney M’s cover versions, surely the most unlikely selection of songs ever to be considered for a disco-cum-reggae-cum-bubblegum-pop make-over: Neil Young’s Heart of Gold, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, Still I’m Sad by The Yardbirds and Two of Us by The Beatles. They also seemed to have a thing about dimly remembered British freakbeat and psyche-delia: they had hits with both The Creation’s revered 1966 flop Painter Man and My Friend Jack, a 1967 single banned by the BBC because it was about taking acid on sugarcubes.
Farian says his choice of material had much to do with frustration at his own singing career: by the mid-1960s, his label had forced him to abandon rock in favour of German oompah pop or schlager, which he eventually gave up to become a producer. ”I was a fan of all the artists we covered. I said, right, I have a group that is real big in the world, and I can do some songs I like. It was a little bit to compensate for myself.”
They sold unbelievable quantities of records — Farian estimates his total worldwide sales at £800million — but Boney M’s hits dried up in the early 1980s, despite Farian’s attempts to reactivate their career, first by recording a double album called Boonoonoonoos at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studios in Jamaica, then trying, of all things, a prog-rock-influenced concept album, 10 000 Light Years, in 1984. ”I was tired of songs like Rasputin, so I thought, let’s go a little bit closer to Pink Floyd. That was the beginning of the end.”
Farian went on to further success with soft rock supergroup Far Corporation, boy band No Mercy and pop-techno act la Bouche, and to worldwide notoriety as the Svengali behind Milli Vanilli, who were forced to hand back their Grammy after it was revealed that Farian and ”a fat guy who used to be Wilson Pickett’s drummer, called Brett Howard” had sung all the vocals on their debut album.
Boney M, however, seem to hold a particular place in his affections, perhaps because their output smacks of a lost era of pop that seems rich, strange and innocently devoid of rules. His thoughts turn back to his competitors in the market for nostalgia pop musicals: ”I know the two boys from Abba and also the singers. We did shows with them and I have a lot of respect for these people. But Abba was always a little bit more normal,” he chuckles. ”With Boney M, always a big show.” — Â