Milli Vanilli
BY
Graham Sclater
It is common knowledge in the music business that
session musicians were used instead of the band
members on a huge number of recordings during the
sixties and early seventies, mostly due to time and
cost restraints Thos, in their very early days. This
could sometimes include the lead vocalists which was
not as common but nevertheless still happened.
However, this reached new heights in the late eighties
and early nineties with a German-French duo from
Munich. Their debut album All or Nothing released in
Europe was renamed, Girl You Know It’s True, for theUS
market. The album achieved international success and
won a Grammy for the Best New Artist in 1990.
The duo became of one of the most popular pop acts in
the late 1980s and early 1990s selling millions of
albums. Their television appearances across the world
relied totally on lip-synching or playback, which involved miming to their hits. The group were Milli Vanilli and their members were Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus who both had a great image and looked every bit pop stars with their clothes and dance moves.
Pilatus and Morvan met during a dance seminar in Munich in 1988 and built a bond due to their experiences growing up in European cities. They went their separate ways but reunited when they looked at finding work as backing singers. It resulted in them recording an album for an indie German label which sold very few copies. Their world was about to change when they were discovered by songwriter and music producer Fran Farian whose work with Boney M and other artists put him on the world stage. He invited them to his studio in Frankfurt to listen to a demo. That song was, Girl You Know It’s True.
Farian asked them if they could sing it and in January 1988 he signed them to his company with a requirement to record ten songs a year. But again, there was a problem. He didn’t consider their voices to be good enough so he replaced their vocals with studio session singers – Charles Shaw, John Davis and Brad Howell, Jodie and Linda Rocco during March and April of that year, and they were all paid a going rate for their work.
Farian decided on the name Milli Vanilli and by May 1988 Pilatus and Morvan were touring Spain, France and Italy, lip-syncing to the pre-recorded tracks. Their image thrilled crowds wherever they “performed,” and their success grew. By the summer of 1988 they were popular across Europe. Their album All or Nothing, with songs mostly written by Farian was released in Europe later that year and achieved great success.
vocalists but were never going to sing any of the songs themselves. He paid each of them a £20,000 advance and that along with their success and fanatical fans, was enough for them to continue to appear on television and shows albeit lip-syncing to the session vocalists.
All or Nothing was repackaged for the US market as Girl You Know It’s True and was immediately a major success with three of the tracks reaching the Top Five in the Billboard Hot 100. The album spent 41 weeks in the Billboard Top 200 and 78 weeks in the charts overall.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s they sold literally millions of records but once again the success was not to last. Although the records were well recorded and the songs honed to perfection it was discovered that they had not sung on any of the hits or tracks on the album. The media backlash was something unheard of and everyone involved was castigated for attempting to cheat the paying public and culminated in the band returning their coveted Grammy Award.
Milli Vanilli were able to perpetrate their façade for such a long time due to television studios being unable to replicate the quality and effects of the recorded sound. Whilst lip-syncing is still common in both television, and even in live shows, it is considered to be taboo.
They did record a comeback album in 1998 but its release was shelved due to the death of Pilatus at the age of 32.
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