To those of you accustomed to today’s practice of lip-syncing on TikTok it might come as a surprise that there was a time when this was badly frowned upon. So it was quite the scandal when the general public realised serial offender Frank Farian had been doing just that – hiring two attractive performers and having them lip-sync to the tracks he had recorded himself. So much so that millions of buyers of the records of Milli Vanilli successfully filed for fraud and were reimbursed. Albeit Farian had been doing the very same thing for almost two decades by that point, namely with his first big project: Boney M.

Farian had released a song under the pseudonym, but he soon figured out that no one wanted to see him perform – so he hired four artists from the Caribbean Islands as a front and had them perform in Germany’s discos, clubs and country fairs. The breakthrough came when they were invited to “Musikladen”, a popular music programme of the time in Western Germany.

With the original Boney M, at least two of the female singers added their actual voices to the tracks. Some versions of the band are still touring to this day, although after 1986 the actual line-ups began to change all the time, with different people acquiring the rights to the name for other countries.