John Davis, lead singer of Milli Vanilli, at a performance in Eisenach, Germany, in 2018.
John Davis, one of the shadow singers of the pop duo Milli Vanilli, has died this Wednesday at the age of 66 due to the coronavirus.
The artist voiced the hit 1989 album
Girl You Know It's True
alongside fellow bandmates, but all of them were featured only as backup singers.
The credits went to Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus.
The album became a worldwide hit, selling 11 million copies and even winning the Grammy Award in 1990 for Best New Artist.
That same year justice was served: record producer Frank Farian confessed that the duo was
lip syncing
and the award was withdrawn.
More information
A hidden fraud for two years
Success, shame and death: what remains of Milli Vanilli 30 years after the scandal at the Grammys
Born in South Carolina, Davis moved to Germany, where her voice, though not her identity, became known around the world as Milli Vanilli.
It was the doing of Farian, who admitted that he had hired Davis to cover up Morvan and Pilatus' lack of “vocal quality”.
The news brought the end of his career, one of the most embarrassing episodes in pop history, and Pilatus died of an overdose in 1998 at the age of 32.
The band The Real Milli Vanilli;
Brad Howell, John Davis, Ray Horton, and Gina Mohammed, in the early nineties.
Getty
Following the scandal, Davis and his original bandmate Brad Howell formed The Real Milli Vanilli. His only album,
The Moment of Truth,
from 1991 (again supervised by Farian), spawned three
singles
, one of which,
Keep On Running,
reached number four on the German charts. In later years, Davis remained in Germany and acted alongside Morvan in their collaboration project
Face Meets Voice
.