The Puppetmaster of Rosbach

Boney M.’s gigantic success in the 1970s is actually a dark chapter in pop music history. At its center: producer Frank Farian. An ARD documentary tells the story.

What this documentary about the world of pop music is really about becomes clear the moment you consider what to call the people involved. Announce the film as the story of Liz Mitchell, Marcia Barrett, Maizie Williams, and Bobby Farrell, and interest might evaporate fast. Those four made up the incredibly successful group Boney M.—yet the project is far more strongly associated with the Frank Farian brand than with the people who actually stood on stage. The Saarland-born producer invented the project in the mid-1970s and scrapped the concept ten years later, once the hits dried up.

Boney M. Disco. Power. Legend. (editors: Timo Großpietsch, NDR; Petra Felber, BR; Simon Broll, HR; Jutta Krug, WDR) peers behind the scenes of global smashes like Daddy Cool, Ma Baker, and Rivers of Babylon. The song Rasputin staged a comeback a few years ago as a pop-music meme powering a TikTok trend—22 billion views, as corporate manager Charlotte Stahl notes at the outset—decontextualized from the band’s own history. Writer and director Oliver Schwehm unfolds decontextualization itself as the precarious, defining principle of Boney M.

Schwehm had already taken an interest in Frank Farian’s business practices a decade earlier, in his documentary Milli Vanilli: From Fame to Shame. The globally successful duo—peaking around 1990—was undone by a performance that exposed what had long been suspected and partly applied to Boney M. as well (though it drew far less scrutiny at the time): Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan moved their lips to other people’s vocals. Back then the two were punished as the guilty parties, their careers destroyed, while the puppet master Farian moved on to his next venture. Pilatus spiraled and died in 1998 of an overdose of alcohol and drugs in a hotel room.

Twelve years later, so did Bobby Farrell—the only man in Boney M.—who died in 2010 in a hotel in St. Petersburg. Boney M. Disco. Power. Legend. thus also tells a kind of prehistory of Milli Vanilli, depicting racist and sexist conditions of production inside the German pop industry of the 1970s and 1980s. The transfer and combination of diverse cultural influences is essential to pop music, a form built on techniques like sampling, remixing, and covering. In the Frank Farian version, that reciprocity curdled into a ruthlessly one-sided project in which the joyful appreciation of mutual exchange gave way to malicious exploitation. A nightmare of pop, its faders controlled by one man in a stuffy villa in Rosbach, Hesse.

The film narrates Frank Farian as a mama’s boy and postwar kid driven into the music business by his passion for rock ‘n’ roll. There he lands a hit with the unloved genre of German Schlager (Rocky), only to realize soon enough that people “listen with their eyes”—that his appearance would never make him the pin-up object of desire on which pop culture runs.

That commercial hit gave him the capital to design his longing for “Black music.” Through an agency in Hanover he cast Mitchell, Barrett, Williams, and Farrell, of whom only the first two were also enlisted to sing on the studio recordings (the male voice came from Farian himself). This probably says less about individual ability—all four went on to perform solo under the Ex-Boney M. label after the group ended—than about the producer’s selfish calculus. He treated his stage performers like instruments, the film states at one point. The goal was to manufacture an image of African American glamour and lend Boney M. cosmopolitan flair.

Schwehm tells this story from multiple perspectives. The director quotes sparingly from the late interview he conducted with Farian—who died in 2024—and instead opens his film with Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett (Maizie Williams was not available for an interview). When the family histories of the four Boney M. members come up, he takes a detour to Britain, where migration from Jamaica—Mitchell’s and Barrett’s homeland—shaped the second half of the twentieth century much the way Turkish migration shaped West Germany.

Among Farian’s ignorant marketing ideas were cover photos in which the four stage figures were meant to serve up visions of sexism and racism—posing half-naked in chains, for instance. Here too Boney M. Disco. Power. Legend registers resistance: costume master Dagmar Engelbrecht says of her work in an interview, “I didn’t want anything to do with slavery.”

The power imbalance between the white producer and his Black singers and dancers showed up in the dismal pay. A Bravo home feature—the youth magazine had long put only white artists on its cover—could not take place at the homes of Mitchell, Barrett, Williams, and Farrell, because the stars, despite their enormous success, were still living in unimpressive one- and two-room apartments. “The accounting was never fair,” states Farian’s childhood friend Hans-Jörg Mayer in the film—a naval serviceman who functioned as a kind of scout for international music, bringing records from around the world back to the travel-averse producer, who helped himself without compunction.

Touring held little interest for Farian, partly because the celebrated band might have slipped out from under his control as invisible studio mastermind. And yet—as tour manager Bryan Miller recounts in the film—Boney M. were better live than ABBA, and Cold War pioneers to boot. Boney M. was the first Western band to play Moscow in 1978, paving the way for lucrative, prestige-laden appearances by the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd concerts in the Soviet Union.

The conflict over Boney M.’s exploitation as a stage quartet comes into sharpest focus in the figure of Bobby Farrell, who voiced his fury over the unequal treatment with increasing frequency and was eventually replaced by Reggie Tsiboe. Among the film’s many eloquent archival clips is a seemingly unbelievable, open confrontation between a visibly agitated Farrell and one of Frank Farian’s lawyers on the late-era East German youth program Elf 99 in 1990 (archive producer: Thembi Linn-Hahn).

Schwehm also demonstrates sensitivity and care by interviewing Vanessa Breton-Mora, Farrell’s daughter, who grew up without either parent. Here the editing by Helmar Jungmann creates a touching moment: after we see Breton-Mora beaming as she takes smartphone photos at an event, the film cuts to historical Super 8 footage of Bobby Farrell smiling into the camera. A connection recovered across the decades, inside a shrewdly told film. Oliver Schwehm succeeds in illuminating—for the first time and in all its complexity—a dark chapter of globally successful German pop music.