Fab Morvan's first job was as a global pop star.
The second, as a waiter.
In between, he starred in one of the biggest pop scandals when it was discovered that his group Milli Vanilli did not sing his songs.
It was the only time an artist has had to return a Grammy.
Now a film tells the story and does so, as the times dictate, in the format of a journey of improvement.
“I want Milli Vanilli to show that if you fall you can get back up,” he says.
It has taken Morvan 35 years to get to that state of mind.
“After the scandal, I spent two or three years without leaving my house,” he recalls.
“I would go out at night to do the shopping and if someone looked at me or smiled at me I assumed they were laughing at me.
If I heard laughter I would run away because I was convinced it was because of me.
“I lived in a prison.”
Morvan visited Madrid to present
Milli Vanilli
, which opens in theaters today, and is grateful that the film is so understanding of him and Rob Pilatus, his partner in the duo.
“The film makes you put yourself in our shoes, makes the audience understand our pain, our shame, understands the golden cage in which we were trapped.
I like that they explain how we came up with the aesthetic: the hair of Jesus Christ, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Dean...,” he explains.
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Rob Pilatus, Fab Morvan and Frank Farian were the face and brains of a musical project that generated millions of euros in profits and won many awards.
There was only one small problem: it was all a lie.
Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus met in Munich in the mid-eighties.
They were both dancers and dreamed of being pop stars like the ones they saw on MTV.
But it was their sense of aesthetics that made them stars of the German city's nightlife scene: huge shoulder pads, top hats, lycra pants, combat boots and waist-length dreadlocks.
“All the clothes were huge, nothing fit us, but one day we looked at the women's section and thought it was much cooler.
The tight clothes looked great on us, they seemed more expensive, more designer.
I wanted to look like Grace Jones, because I grew up with her and she seemed like the most amazing person on the planet.
She was a superstar, she was wild and she was black, like me,” she recalls.
The night in 1990 when Milli Vanilli collected a Grammy award that they had to return.CBS Photo Archive (CBS via Getty Images)
One day they met producer Frank Farian and he suggested they be part of a musical project.
All they had to do was sign on the dotted line.
“We didn't have a manager.
The contract was in German and at that time I only spoke French.
I remember that there were two sheets of paper: one that they gave us to sign and another that we didn't even read.
I didn't know that the rest of the pages were also the contract.
And every time we asked when we were going to record they told us: 'We'll let you know.'
At one point they explained to us that we were not going to be part of 'that aspect of the project'.
They were improvising as they went.
That strategy had worked out very well with Boney M,” he says.
Farian had made a splash in the late seventies with Boney M, in which he provided the voice and a Caribbean dancer provided the image: his reasoning was that no one wanted to see a pale, red-haired German singing
discofunk.
Boney M sold one hundred million records.
Why wouldn't it work for him again with Milli Vanilli? “It was a crazy idea,” Farian admitted to the
Los Angeles Times
.
“I thought it would only be played in clubs, that nothing would happen, but when the song became a hit it was too late and I was ashamed to clarify the truth.”
One thing led to another and, suddenly, Milli Vanilli had three number 1 hits in the United States, worldwide sales of eight million copies (the 11th best-selling album of 1989) and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist.
The more they succeeded, the more difficult it would be to explain the truth.
The higher they went, the more resounding the fall would be.
“It was very difficult to act for thousands of people who idolized us,” Morvan admits today.
“Do you know how he did it?
I put guilt in my pocket.
I gave them every last drop of sweat, I gave them all of me.
He thought that if he made all those people happy, when the moment of truth came they would say.
'Did you know?
This guy made me happy, I'm going to give him another chance.'
He was young, he didn't know what he was doing.”
The singer Fab Morvan, half of the successful Milli Vanilli, photographed for ICON in Madrid.DAVID EXPOSITO
The singer Fab Morvan, half of the successful Milli Vanilli, photographed for ICON in Madrid.DAVID EXPOSITO
Fab Morvan was 23 years old when he moved in with Rob Pilatus in a house with a pool in Los Angeles.
“I knew that all of that was going to end at some point, so I wanted to enjoy it as much as possible while it lasted.
I wanted to live my dream.
We had parties every night.
We used to go to the clubs with two limousines.
We were in one, the other was empty.
When the party was over we would fill the other limousine with 20 or 25 girls and take them home.
It was paradise... We were children.
We loved music, women, life,” he explains.
They also loved being pop stars.
In an interview with
Time
, Pilatus said that it was more difficult to sing a Milli Vanilli song than one by the Beatles.
“We started taking drugs and Rob took too many,” Morvan admits.
“He did everything in a big way.
Before each concert he ran five kilometers.
He always ran faster than anyone.
He always wanted to win.
He didn't want to lose.
There came a time when we had to take medication.
“There was a lot of work, a lot of pressure, a lot of gossip.”
As soon as they started giving interviews, rumors arose: their strong European accents had nothing to do with the American pronunciation of the album and, in the case of Morvan, the dissonance was even more shocking because he barely spoke English but in the songs he rapped with South Carolina accent.
And then came the Grammy nomination.
“We didn't want to win it,” he admits.
“A Grammy?
If we didn't sing!
Grammy Awards rules stipulate that you have to sing.
That night all the spotlights were on us.
We did not know what to do".
When he went up to the stage to pick it up, Morvan was unable to say anything.
Pilatus did seem euphoric.
But the pantomime was unsustainable, the gossip spread and Frank Farian decided to tackle the problem at its roots: he traveled to New York and uncovered the farce at a press conference.
Milli Vanilli became a worldwide joke.
No one questioned Farian or the record company, which denied all knowledge of the deception.
“They knew it,” Morvan clarifies today.
“Of course they knew it.
And they didn't care."
In the United States, 25 class-action lawsuits were filed demanding the return of money, concert tickets and merchandising
products
.
The record company's vice president described Farian as “a creative genius” during a press conference in which he also declared: “Are we ashamed?
"I don't want to say that the ends justify the means, but we have sold seven million records."
It is estimated that Arista earned 46 million dollars (at exchange rate and inflation, more than one hundred million euros), of which Fab and Rob received two million.
But they had been the visible face of success, so they would also be the face of ridicule.
The singer Fab Morvan, half of the successful Milli Vanilli, photographed for ICON in Madrid.DAVID EXPOSITO
“We were very naive because we thought that the people at the record company were our friends,” he laments.
“Everyone disappeared suddenly.
People didn't even want to look at us.
We become lepers.
“We were a joke for everyone.”
They believed that many of their fans would continue to support them if they started a career with their real voices.
They were wrong.
Morvan embarked on a healing journey, but Pilatus fell into self-destruction.
For an adopted child who had grown up in a white German neighborhood and had been
bullied
(he was nicknamed Kunta Kinte at school), feeling adored by millions of people and losing everything at once was unbearable.
“Many artists want to be loved,” says Morvan.
“When we achieved fame it was wonderful to be adored and loved, but when love disappeared... not only did love disappear but it turned into hate.
People were very angry.
The comments were very cruel.
At that moment I stopped knowing how to feel in my own body.
If no one likes you, you will end up not liking yourself.
“I didn’t like myself.”
The first step to forgiving himself was to quit drugs.
“Luckily I never got as involved as Rob, he was hooked.
When I went to detox and spoke to the psychiatrist I understood that if he didn't stop taking cocaine he would end up hooked and then I would get into crack.
But Rob…he wanted to go back to those times of fame and adoration,” he explains.
On April 2, 1998, Rob Pilatus was found dead in the Kent's Cube hotel in Frankfurt due to an overdose of tranquilizers mixed with alcohol.
He was 32 years old.
“It was very hard.
He was the only person who could understand everything that happened to us.
It was like having my arm torn off.
On my journey, I had to start by forgiving myself for not trusting my instincts, for knowing that all of this was wrong but going ahead with it anyway.
Then I had to forgive our producer, Frank Farian, because he took advantage of our kindness.
And once I managed to forgive I freed myself from anger, from resentment, from fear, from worrying about what others say.
Year after year, the trauma was cleared,” he explains.
If he could go back, would he change anything?
“If I knew all the pain it was going to cause, plus Rob's death, I would never have gotten into the project.
Not for fame, not for money.
“I would have studied engineering.”
Today Morvan works as a DJ, is preparing a musical project and gives inspirational talks.
Watching the film and knowing that many people will understand his part of the story is serving as a final catharsis.
And on a cultural level,
Milli Vanilli
explains that that scandal revealed the drastic changes that were happening in the pop industry.
The scandal unleashed a string of opinion articles that questioned the machinery of the pop industry, in which anything went.
“At that time, technology was changing, MTV greatly enhanced the image of artists, marketing was new,” Morvan analyzes today.
“
Boy bands
didn't pay as much attention to the voice as The Temptations, for example.
The voices, suddenly, were not the main thing.
And the audience of the previous generation, who had grown up with the rock of the sixties, did not understand it.
They didn't understand that singing was no longer the only important thing.
Without realizing it, Milli Vanilli affected the development of pop music.
We call pioneers.
Or precursors.”
Today, indeed, singing is not as essential to being a pop star as it was 50 years ago.
Autotune
makes anyone sound good and many artists use it in their concerts, when they don't directly play back their own songs
.
“Look, yeah, let's talk about it.
Now you can get in a studio for half an hour, sing worse than shit, and then
autotune
makes you sound great.
What is the difference with what Milli Vanilli did?
Ok, we didn't sing, but if a machine makes it so you don't have to sing... it's the same thing.
Today, if you have the right physique but don't know how to sing, you can still be a pop star,” she argues.
The paradox of Milli Vanilli is that if they had sung their songs it is likely that today many fewer people would remember them, in the same way that most of the fashionable groups of 1989 have fallen into oblivion. And of course, if they had sung their songs no one would make a movie about them.
Because if enough time passes, any infamy can become iconic, celebrated and even claimed as a spectacle in itself.
In fact, on May 17,
Disco Ibiza Locomia
, a film about the group (curiously, a contemporary of Milli Vanilli) that also caused a sensation with the voices of others, opens in theaters.
“It is the power of the image,” says Morvan.
“Look at Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean... you recognize them by their silhouettes.
You also recognize Milli Vanilli by their silhouette.
We did it.
I don't know how, but we did it.
Magic".
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