The Faces of Milli Vanilli Didn't Actually Sing on Any of the Group's Records

Although lip-syncing still happens occasionally, these days, it's much more common for an artist to actually write and record at least some of their own music. There was an era in pop music, though, when groups were put together much more to sell a look than anything else, and Milli Vanilli is a perfect example of that trend.

The group had a number of hits in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it turns out that the group's members didn't actually do any singing on those records. Here's what we know about the singers who were instrumental to the group's success.

Producer Frank Farian founded the group while working on a single, and he decided to make Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus the faces of the band. The two were excellent dancers but didn't excel in the vocal department, so Frank simply decided that they should lip-sync other artists. The group's single "Girl You Know It's True" was a hit, and they won Best New Artist at the 1990 Grammy Awards.

Later that year, though, it was revealed that they didn't actually do any of their own singing. Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howell were the men actually singing on all of the group's most famous tracks, and the group was ultimately forced to return their Grammy following the scandal. Fab and Rob them receded from the limelight, and each of them dealt with the scandal differently.

Fab ultimately moved to The Netherlands with his partner, while Rob died of a drug overdose when he was just 33 years old.

Following the lip-syncing scandal, John and Brad released some music under the name The Real Milli Vanilli, but their recordings were never made available in the U.S. As it turns out, the group's success was based at least in part on the combination of image and vocals that Frank had helped coordinate.

While much of the heat of the scandal fell on Fab and Rob, it seems clear that Frank and the rest of the people on the business side of the band are more to blame for the lip-syncing scandal and its fallout.

Since this drama played out in the early 1990s, there have been several attempts to tell the story of the group.

Among them was a documentary released in 2023 and a narrative feature released in 2024. While neither one of these films was a sensation upon its release, they both made more people aware of the fascinating tale of a band that was almost entirely fabricated.

It takes a lot to make a group tremendously successful, and part of success in music comes from authenticity. Unfortunately, while there may have been plenty of talent at work in Milli Vanilli, the group simply couldn't survive the backlash that came when it was discovered that they weren't who they claimed to be.