Story of the scandal-plagued duo that’s not been told before gets airtime in new Paramount Plus film “Milli Vanilli”

by Nick Krewen

Special to the Star

Thirty-three years after the revelation of one of pop music’s more explosive scandals, Fab Morvan is finally getting to speak his truth.

If Morvan’s name is familiar, he was one of the two original “frontmen” — along with Rob Pilatus — of Milli Vanilli, a Munich-based pop duo that took the world by storm with its 1989 debut album, Girl You Know It’s True.

As radio embraced such chart-topping and Top 10 hits as the title song, “Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” “Blame It On The Rain,” “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” and “All or Nothing,” Pilatus and Morvan — two handsome, muscular and athletic models whose dreadlocked and braided personas seemed custom made for the MTV era — became superstars in very short order, touring North America and collecting awards as if they were candy.

The album quickly sold millions globally — including one million copies here in Canada — and their careers were humming along nicely until it was confirmed that Morvan and Pilatus weren’t the singers on the project: that distinction belonged to U.S. vocalist Brad Howell and American rappers Charles Shaw and John Davis.

That’s when the meteoric crash began, as hostility replaced adoration and the original duo were castigated for lip-synching their live performances.

In an ironic twist, the man who Julius Caesared them was the one who initially hired them: German producer Frank Farian, who had sold tens of millions of albums with German disco funk sensation Boney M. (“Rasputin,” “Rivers of Babylon.”)

Farian held a press conference to confirm everyone’s suspicions after reportedly refusing Morvan and Pilatus’s demand for extra money to carry on the charade.

These events are all chronicled in the new 142-minute Paramount Plus documentary “Milli Vanilli,” directed by Luke Korem and currently streaming on the channel. During a Zoom call, Morvan said he couldn’t be more thrilled about the project.

“Listen, I’m happy we got to this point,” said Morvan, now 57.

“It took 30 years, unfortunately, but that’s the way it is. And I’m glad that Luke and (producer) Brad (Jackson) came to me with a proper approach, which was the human approach: they went to everyone in the chain, every member that took part in this play.

“And when you look at everyone telling the story, you realize that the person at the core of this plan was Frank Farian: hiding people from each other; separating them so that he could achieve his perfect plan and execute his formula to the best of his ability.”

It should be noted that Farian did the same thing with Boney M., singing the leads himself on the record while Bobby Farrell played the frontman. Substituting models in videos for the actual artists was a bit of a mini-trend in club music during the early 1990s with C+C Music Factory — Zelma Davis visually, Martha Wash vocally for “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” — and Ya Kid K for Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam.”

However, Morvan claims that Farian also exploited their naïveté, forcing them to sign a contract on the spot, tempted by a pile of Deutsche marks that lay on the table in front of them.

“Sign it now before you leave the room if you want to get that cash that is on the table,” Morvan recalled being told.

“We were never told that maybe you should get an attorney or management to look over this contract.”

Morvan said the offer was too good to resist and they trusted Farian.

“You look at the cash on the table and you have no money, and it’s like, ‘We have to pay rent, we want to buy some new clothes, we want to work on our hair.’”

At that time, the Paris-born Morvan and the Munich-born Pilatus were fast friends who had met at a party and started dancing in local TV shows. Keenly aware of Farian’s successful reputation, they thought they were headed to the big time.

After they found out they weren’t going to sing on their own album, they thought working on one single would end their contractual obligation to Farian.

“It ended up being more, because we signed for three albums,” Morvan said. “And in order to repay this man, we went with Girl You Know It’s True.”

When the album became a surprise European hit, it attracted the attention of U.S. giant Arista Records and its owner, Clive Davis, and Milli Vanilli found themselves trapped on a metaphoric locomotive that was hastily gathering speed before it ran off the rails.

Burdened with keeping the secret and given virtually no direction on how to handle stardom, Morvan said the duo began medicating themselves to cope.

There was a scare that almost let the cat out of the bag during a July 21, 1989 show in Bristol, Connecticut, when the Oberheim synthesizer that replayed the vocals hiccupped.

When the truth was finally revealed, “We were vilified,” Morvan recalled. “But what happened to the label and the producer? They disappeared, unscathed, and went about their business as usual. Nothing happened to them while we got blacklisted.

“Frank Farian continued to buy his boats and live his life in Miami: million-dollar homes and living good and not being bothered by anyone whatsoever.”

Milli Vanilli withered daggers from public and the courts as several class-action lawsuits were launched by disgruntled fans who felt deceived by the duo’s actions.

They also had to return their Grammy and a few other awards.

“We lost everything,” Morvan said. “People saw an opportunity to make money by suing the label, by suing us, and in the process of all that we got dried up (financially).”

Things were so dire financially that Morvan took up teaching French at a private school.

In the interim, Farian issued a second album in Europe called The Moment of Truth with “The Real Milli Vanilli” in 1991. It enjoyed modest success.

Rob & Fab released a self-titled dance pop album in 1993. It tanked at just 2,000 copies sold.

It was the last straw for Pilatus, who was found dead at 33 on the floor of a Frankfurt hotel room from an accidental overdose of alcohol and pills.

Morvan, however, took his descent from stardom as a life lesson.

“I had to go back to the basics, but I believe that going back all the way down taught me a few lessons in resilience, in believing in myself, and music never left my side,” said Morvan, who lives in Amsterdam with his partner and their four children.

“Together with music, I was able to reinvent myself and then in the future you’ll hear some new stuff. You can already go to my Spotify and see my social media and see me perform. I never stopped. With this wave of awareness, I’m going to use it properly, because we live in a different world now.”

The documentary gives him closure, he added.

“There was a human side to the story I think that was never told and people were pointing the finger at Rob and Fab as being the corporate, the ones who organized everything, which is ludicrous,” he said.

“The closure for me is that now the world knows. The world has finally been exposed to the truth. In an hour and 40 minutes, there is only so much you can cover and there are many layers to the story, but I think that Luke Korem and Bradley Jackson really did their best and really were good at touching on some of the elements that had to be covered.

“With this, the tables have turned. And I’m going to take it a day at a time.”

The documentary “Milli Vanilli” is now streaming on Paramount Plus.