*It was 34 years ago today when Milli Vanilli, performing on the Club MTV tour at a stop in Bristol, Connecticut, got caught lip-synching their megahit “Girl You Know It’s True.”
Thousands of fans were in attendance to see Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan perform at Lake Compounce water and amusement park on July 21, 1989. They were mid performance on “Girl You Know it’s True” when the track suddenly began skipping, repeating, “girl you know it’s, girl you know it’s, girl you know it’s” over and over again, causing the duo to tuck tail and run off stage.
“I knew right then and there, it was the beginning of the end for Milli Vanilli,” Pilatus said of that mortifying moment in a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Watch below:
The pair managed to crank out several more hits after that disastrous performance, including “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Blame It On The Rain.” They even won a Grammy for Best New Artist (over Soul II Soul!) and performed during the ceremony in February 1990. Watch below:
But in the months ahead, the dominoes began to fall on the whole lip-sync operation, as one of the real singers on the track came forward to reveal the truth.
“The Oprah Winfrey Show” caught up with the album’s real vocalists Charles Shaw, John Davis, Brad Howell, Jodie Rocco and Linda Rocco in 2014 and revealed the intricate trickery it took to fool the entire industry. Click through below to watch on YouTube:
Frank Farian, German producer and creator of the group, tried to deny reports that neither Fab nor Rob sang on the recording, but eventually he was forced to hold a November 15 press conference admitting that the two were just window dressing, and that studio vocalists actually sang all of the tracks on the group’s debut album.
You’d think that would’ve been the end of it. But Rob and Fab held their own presser five days later to tell everyone that they could really could sing, but “were told not to” by the producers.
Eventually the real singers behind Milli Vanilli began doing performances of “Girl You Know It’s True.”
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