In his home country, Frank Farian was dubbed Mr German Hit, and with good reason. As a performer but mostly as a producer, he sold an estimated 850 million records globally and accrued hundreds of gold and platinum discs – dizzying figures for a man who was not a household name outside of his native Germany.

His success lay in his ability to conceive and control pop products from behind the scenes. Farian, who has died aged 82, was the pop mastermind behind Boney M, who dominated the UK charts in the late Seventies. Two of their releases – the double A-side Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring and 1978 Christmas Number One Mary’s Boy Child – are in the top 20 biggest-selling UK singles of all time but only two of the four members sang on the records, with Farian himself providing the vocals for frontman Bobby Farrell to mime to.

A decade later, Farian repeated the feat on the other side of the Atlantic with pop R&B sensations Milli Vanilli but the American public were less forgiving of his manufactured pop formula.

Producer Frank Farian at the 2008 European Music & Media Night in 2008 in Berlin, Germany (Picture: Florian Seefried/Getty Images)

When it emerged that the duo did not – and indeed could not – sing their hits, there was a vicious backlash. Milli Vanilli are the only act ever to have a Grammy Award revoked. Farian was nonplussed, saying later “this music – it’s just for dancing! What was the betrayal? Did anyone in America believe that the Village People or The Monkees really sang themselves?”

Farian may have cut his teeth with the easy listening pop genre Schlager – from the German word meaning “to hit” – and later the equally plasticky, functional but supremely catchy Eurodance but he took the business of hit-making seriously.

A former chef, he defined the recipe of a hit tune for Der Spiegel: “The ingredients have to be right. You need a fantastic interpreter, you can’t do it without a good voice. And the song has to be catchy, with a good melody and a memorable chorus.”

Boney M’s catalogue is often dismissed as disco pop fluff but many of their singles were inspired by atypical source material and subject matter, from Biblical psalms (Rivers of Babylon), Jamaican folklore (Brown Girl in the Ring), Russian history (Rasputin) and the Troubles (Belfast) to covers of cult Sixties psych pop nuggets (Painter Man and My Friend Jack).

Boney M - Bobby Farrell, Marcia Barrett, Maizie Williams and Liz Mitchell - in 1984. (Picture: Getty Images)

Having failed to forge his own pop career, Farian was living vicariously through his charges and gained sufficient traction for Boney M to receive a rare invitation by the Soviet politburo to play a series of ten concerts in Moscow in December 1978 – with the proviso that they did not perform their scurrilous hit Rasputin.

Frank Farian was born Franz Reuther in Kirn, West Germany. His father died in combat during the Second World War prior to his birth, leaving his schoolteacher mother to bring up three young children. Reuther went on to train as a cook but set his sights on a pop career, adopting the stage name Frankie Farian and forming a group called Die Schatten (The Shadows). The stars did not align and their 1964 single Shouting Ghost was a flop.

Farian was signed as a solo artist and plugged away at a career as a Schlager singer, eventually spending four weeks atop the German charts with a cover of Dickey Lee’s 1975 country pop tune Rocky. A year later he scored an unexpected hit in Belgium and the Netherlands with Do You Wanna Bump?

This credible disco soul remake of Prince Buster’s ska standard Al Capone was released as Boney M, with a name inspired by an Australian detective show and a band comprising Jamaican-British singers Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett, Aruban singer/dancer Bobby Farrell and British dancer Maizie Williams swiftly assembled to front the release, rocking a space age disco aesthetic in the vein of Earth, Wind & Fire. The eccentric but infectious hits flowed, and Farian attempted to repeat the formula to diminishing returns with British soul band Eruption, who actually did play on their records.

His next collaborators were already time-served musicians, and not so pliable. The Far Corporation, shortened from Frank Farian Corporation, featured Toto members Steve Lukather, David Paich, Bobby Kimball plus vocalist Robin McAuley and scored a UK top ten hit with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, though they failed to chart with subsequent releases.

Farian’s rock folly continued with a production credit on Meat Loaf’s 1986 album Blind Before I Stop but he hit paydirt with his next Frankensteinian creation, hiring dancers Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan to mime vocals provided by the less marketable Brad Howell and Johnny Davis. Milli Vanilli’s debut single Girl You Know It’s True went six times platinum in the US, somewhat tying the participants to the deception, which was rumbled when a backing track skipped at a high profile MTV concert. When Pilatus and Morvan begged to be allowed to sing on their records, Farian choose to blow their cover rather than accede to their pleas. Pilatus died, aged 32, of a heart attack in a hotel in Frankfurt.

Farian, undeterred, had moved on to new projects, including Nineties Eurodance duos La Bouche and Le Click, Latin boy band No Mercy and the Daddy Cool jukebox musical which premiered in London and Berlin in 2006 but only played for a few months. By this point he was living a quieter life in Miami, though reportedly still making music behind closed doors.

He is survived by three daughters and a son with his ex-partner Chinya Onyewenyo.

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Scotsman Obituaries: Frank Farian, German record producer behind Boney M and Milli Vanilli