Fab Morvan Takes Back His Voice
Sitting on a bench in Central Park on a recent summer day, Fabrice Morvan, the surviving member of Milli Vanilli, was contemplating his future. “It’s wide open,” he said, gesturing toward a ball field in front of him.
“There’s ‘Monsters,’ ” Morvan went on, referring to the recent Netflix drama about the Menendez brothers, which featured the Milli Vanilli hits “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Blame It on the Rain.” “Thanks to ‘Monsters,’ those songs, among others, went to the top of the charts again worldwide.” The show, he explained, had introduced the music to a younger audience, which was unaware of, or unconcerned by, the thirty-six-year-old lip-synching scandal that plagued the band.
Morvan, who lives in Amsterdam with his Dutch partner, Tessa Van Der Steen, and their four children, is performing in the United States this summer, as part of the “I Love the Nineties” tour. He has not toured the country since the fall of 1990, when it was revealed that he and Rob Pilatus, the other half of the pop duo, were not, in fact, the singers on Milli Vanilli’s recordings. The German producer Frank Farian, who masterminded the scheme, had instead used the voices of five session singers—Brad Howell, Charles Shaw, John Davis, and the sisters Jodie and Linda Rocco. Farian had made a Faustian bargain with Rob and Fab, who were young, impoverished Black dancers, from Munich and Paris, respectively: I will make you famous, if you will maintain the lie. The lads reluctantly agreed to play along by lip-synching at their live performances. The secret might have been kept (Farian had pulled off a similar stunt in the seventies, with the Euro-disco group Boney M.) if Milli Vanilli hadn’t won the Grammy for Best New Artist, in March, 1990. When, in a Pygmalion-esque plot twist, the real singers threatened to go public, Farian admitted the truth, in a press conference in New York. Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was revoked.
“We went from being kings to being laughingstocks,” Morvan said, crossing his legs on the bench to reveal socks with a “Star Wars” motif, worn with black Vans. His famous long hair was piled on top of his head. For years, the scandal had followed him, “like it was my shadow,” he said. “I cut my hair off. Everywhere I went, I didn’t know if people were smiling or smirking.” He called it “ludicrous” that he and Pilatus were blamed for the deception, while Farian and Arista, the group’s label (headed by Clive Davis, who recently died), walked away with millions of dollars.
Arista claimed to have been fooled by Farian, but did the executives know? “They knew everything that was going on,” Morvan said.
After Pilatus died, of a drug overdose, in 1998, Morvan said, “I resolved to work on myself and write songs and learn how to play guitar.” He also worked on his singing. The day before his visit to the park, he had performed on “Good Day New York” and again on “Good Night New York,” and he sounded almost as good as the fake him.
In recent years, the Milli Vanilli story has been retold in no fewer than three feature films: Luke Korem’s 2023 documentary, “Milli Vanilli”; Simon Verhoeven’s 2024 bio-pic, “Girl You Know It’s True,” and a new documentary, “Surviving a Scandal,” coming to Hulu in January. Morvan tells his version in his forthcoming memoir, “Blame It on the Game”; his narration for the audiobook was nominated for a Grammy. In these revisionist narratives, Rob and Fab are victims of the connivers who concocted the scheme. “They’re still making money off my back, because they’re using my likeness,” Morvan said. He gets nothing from the songs.
Korem’s doc was tested on a focus group of Gen Z-ers, for whom lip-synching is the lingua franca on TikTok. “The response was ‘O.K., so what did they do wrong?’ ” Morvan said. Maybe Rob and Fab were deepfake pioneers? “Trailblazers,” he allowed, “in a way.”
Morvan was supposed to have performed as Milli Vanilli at Donald Trump’s sixteen-day Great American State Fair. (Before Farian died, in 2024, he gave Morvan permission to use the name.) His reasoning, he said, was “There’s going to be Vanilli fans there. Let’s celebrate the fact that I’m still here and they’re still here.” Eventually, like many other artists on the bill, Morvan decided to cancel. But earlier, when a flyer for the concert series went out, one of the original session singers issued a statement: “Others using the name ‘Milli Vanilli’ that appear on the advertisement should be considered a tribute band with no association vocally or musically to our sound or songs.”
“How ridiculous,” Morvan said, outraged at being dismissed as a counterfeit version of a famously inauthentic group. “They’re background singers!” ♦