Wild 'bout Daddy Cool
Tra la la la la,
There's a brown girl in the ring,
Tra la la la la la,
Brown girl in the ring,
Tra la la la la,
She looks like a sugar in a plum.
Boney M. (the period is officially part of the name) was a West German Disco group formed in Munich in the mid-1970s by producer Frank Reuther aka "Frank Farian". Initially a studio project with Farian himself on lead vocals, eventually he drafted four performers from The Caribbean to make live appearances and appear on the album covers. Two of them, Marcia Barrett and Liz Mitchell, also handled vocals on the studio recordings, but Maizie Williams and Bobby Farrell were only used in live appearances, while Farian was still the male voice of the group's records.
Hugely popular in Europe, they were well known for their hit singles "Daddy Cool", "Ma Baker", "Belfast", "Sunny", "Rasputin", "Mary's Boy Child - Oh My Lord" and "Rivers of Babylon" (their only American hit). After the band initially dissolved in 1986, Farian would go on to form Milli Vanilli, which similarly used group members to front for vocals recorded by studio singers.
Since the band's initial breakup, various versions of the group have recorded, toured and sued each other for the rights to use the name.
Bobby Farrell died of heart failure at age 61 on the morning of December 30, 2010 in a hotel in Saint Petersburg, Russia... the same date and city of death as Grigori Rasputin 94 years earlier, oddly enough.
Frank Farian passed away on January 23, 2024 at age 82.
Discography
- 1976 - Take the Heat off Me
- 1977 - Love for Sale
- 1978 - Nightflight to Venus
- 1979 - Oceans of Fantasy
- 1981 - Doonoonoonoos
- 1981 - Christmas Album
- 1984 - Ten Thousand Lightyears
- 1985 - Eye Dance
Principal members
- Marcia Barrett - lead and backing vocals (1975-86) from Jamaica
- Bobby Farrell - dancer, lead vocals (1975-81, 1984-6; died 2010) from Aruba
- Liz Mitchell - lead and backing vocals (1976-86) from Jamaica
- Reggie Tsiboe - lead and backing vocals (1982-6) from Ghana
- Maizie Williams - dancer, live vocals (1975-86) from Montserrat
Ra ra, Rasputin, Russia's greatest trope machine:
- Artistic License – History: Both "Rasputin" and "Ma Baker" run with the popular myths about their respective subjects, rather than historical fact.
- As the Good Book Says...: "Rivers of Babylon" has its main lyrics based on Psalm 137, with the bridge taken from Psalm 19.
- Ascended Meme: The commonly-heard mondegreen of "what about Daddy Cool?", rather than the actual line of "wild about Daddy Cool", was eventually adopted by the group in live shows.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: "Daddy Cool" was released in the Soviet Union as "Calm Father".
- The Casanova: "Rasputin" portrays the Mad Monk as a master of seduction, able to make any Russian woman (possibly even the queen herself) fall in love with him.
- Christmas Songs: Their Cover Version of Harry Belafonte's "Mary's Boy Child", mixed with the Farian original "Oh My Lord", was a huge European hit in 1978, and three years later they did a whole Christmas album.
- Dance Sensation: The first Boney M single was "Baby Do You Wanna Bump", a cash-in on the dance craze The Bump which was huge in European discos at the time.
- Fading into the Next Song: Thanks to the shared drumming theme (borrowed from Cozy Powell's "Dance with the Devil"), "Nightflight to Venus" seamlessly fades into "Rasputin" on every album they are featured in.
- Historical Biography Song: "Rasputin" is one of the best known of these, but they also wrote "Ma Baker."
- The Immodest Orgasm: There's one in "Daddy Cool".
- Limited Lyrics Song: The title of "Baby Do You Wanna Bump?" is pretty much the extent of its lyrics.
- Location Song: "Belfast", a protest song about the then-ongoing religious conflict.
- One-Man Song: Two well-known songs are in this manner. "Rasputin" is about the infamous Russian monk while "Daddy Cool" was about a ladykiller.
- Protest Song: "We Kill the World (Don't Kill the World)", basically a Green Aesop song (with some anti-nuclear proliferation bits too), complete with a children's chorus.
- The Queenpin: "Ma Baker" was based on sensationalised news reports of Kate "Ma" Barker being the ringleader of her crime syndicate during The Roaring '20s.
- Shaped Like Itself:
- The woman in "Daddy Cool" is "crazy like a fool."
- "Rasputin" notes that the man could preach The Bible like a preacher... Which he was.
- Spoken Word in Music:
- "Ma Baker" does this three times. It starts with a clip of Ma Baker during a stick-up, then in the middle of the song is a news bulletin from the police asking for any information on Ma Baker's whereabouts, and this is followed by a second clip of Ma Baker.
- The bridge in "Rasputin" features this as the titular man's antics have led to increasingly louder demands to do something about this outrageous man.
- That Russian Squat Dance: Mentioned in "Rasputin". The eponymous man is said to dance the Kozachok "really wunderbar" in it. And Farrell performed it on stage for the song.
- Truck Driver's Gear Change: "Young, Free, and Single" upshifts from G minor to A minor for the last two choruses.
- Unbuilt Trope: Music critic Chuck Eddy has noted that the second half of "We Kill the World (Don't Kill the World)" could be taken as a satire of/homage to "We Are the World", except it predates it by four years.
