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They demanded to sing on their next album I respected that and there was no reason to think that it was anything other than that.”
#Who sang one in a million you professional#
They just didn’t want anyone in the studio with them because it’s a creative professional distance a producer wants to have. “Other producers would do their work and send it in. “It wasn’t out of the question,” the Arista A&R manager at the time, Richard Sweret, told Billboard. They were able to keep a music label rep from traveling to Germany by saying they wanted to retain creative direction. Somehow they were able to keep up the facade.
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The real singer was secretly brought in at night Linda said they were kept a distance from the guys so that they wouldn’t get too close. “They’d make appearances, then go down to the basement, but they never sang a note or went into the studio.” “ would come in and go down to the basement where the pool was and hang out for a couple hours,” Jodie said. But when they got to the studio, it was just Linda, Jodie and another singer, Joan Faulker. Sure enough, soon there was a record deal, so they figured there was a group. Then Frank said Arista was involved and he was talking to Clive Davis,” Linda said. “There was no real plan… we were just recording stuff real fast, to get enough together for a four-song EP for the American market. Linda and Jodie were also brought back in for more vocals. Had Farian realized how popular the group would become, he may have realized the dancers’ accents - with Pilatus’ mother tongue of German and Morvan’s of French - would be an issue. “I was already paid $12,000 for doing and he said, ‘Keep your mouth shut and you can do the whole album.’ I’m thinking, ‘That’s studio work for me.’” “Farian came back after the song hit the charts in England and said he had to have two faces for the project,” Shaw continued. (He was able to hang onto that secret for 25 years, according to Shaw.) He had done the same thing with his 1970s disco-funk group Boney M., with a singer who was actually just a dancer, lip-syncing to Farian’s own vocals. Photo: Ian Cook/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images Morvan and Pilatus were present in the recording studio but didn't sing one noteĪt the time New York-born, German-bred Pilatus and Guadeloupe native Morvan were living in a housing project in Munich - poor to the point they stole food to survive - when Farian came along and offered each of the dancers $4,000 to become the faces of the duo Milli Vanilli, named after the nickname of Farian’s girlfriend.įarian wasn’t new to the game. The musicians behind Milli Vanilli: Brad Howell (R) and John Davis (2L), who sang the vocals, Gina Mohammed (3L), Ray Horton (L) and their producer Frank Farian (2R) posing at the control board in a recording studio in 1990. Farian played it and I said, ‘This song ain’t new.’” “I had been dancing to the Numarx version on the weekends in American clubs in Hamburg. “When he played the record for me, I already knew the song,” Shaw told Billboard. He started recruiting singers in 1988 - sisters Linda and Jodie Rocco sang backup and Charles Shaw rapped on the track. So he set out to assemble a team to recreate a new version, taking the original hip-hop track and mixing it with a bit of Eurodance, according to Billboard. German record producer Frank Farian was in a disco in his native country when he heard the song “Girl You Know It’s True” by the Baltimore band Numarx - and immediately knew it could be a bigger hit. "Girl You Know It's True" was already hit before Pilatus and Morvan were cast But now their name is pretty much synonymous with the biggest lip-syncing scandal in pop culture history. In a time before social media watchdogs and when lip-syncing to live performances was commonplace, Milli Vanilli got away with their ruse for longer than they might have today.