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Dancer and frontman of the Euro-disco group Boney M
Manufactured pop groups have been a curse, a guilty pleasure and an occasional delight ever since The Monkees started aping The Beatles in the mid-Sixties. Assembled by the German producer, songwriter and singer Frank Farian, a veritable one-man pop industry whose machinations unravelled when his fabricated duo Milli Vanilli won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1990, Boney M fell squarely into the curse category. Yet this ersatz, exotic-looking, Euro-disco group sold over 100 million records and topped the British charts with "Rivers of Babylon"/"Brown Girl in the Ring", 1978's biggest-selling single, and "Mary's Boy Child" - the Christmas No 1 in 1978.
Bobby Farrell was the wild-haired, often bare-chested, in-your-face, gyrating, flamboyant frontman and showman of the group but, when they appeared on television to promote Top Ten hits such as "Daddy Cool", "Ma Baker" and "Rasputin", he actually lip-synched to Farian's heavily treated deep vocals or the speaking voice of Bill Swisher, an American friend of the producer. Bizarrely, when the quartet played live concerts, Farrell seemed perfectly capable of delivering the required parts, alongside the female lead vocalist, Liz Mitchell, and occasional lead and background singer Marcia Barrett - who both really did sing on the records - and Maizie Williams, who also only sang live.
"It was understandable because Frank Farian is a white German and the music of Boney M was West Indian, American, African rhythms," said Mitchell in 2002.
Farrell participated in this charade from 1975 until the end of 1981, when he was fired by Farian and replaced by Reggie Tsiboe. The sum total of his documented contributions to the six Boney M albums whose covers he adorned were a rap on the Caribbean-flavoured "That's Boonoonoonoos (Train to Skaville)" medley and a spoken introduction to the ghastly proto-Michael Jackson message song "We Kill the World (Don't Kill the World)", the group's last UK Top 40 entry in 1981.
He was...