MOSCOW – Boney M performer and frontman Bobby Farrell was found dead in his hotel room in St Petersburg yesterday, the day after a show in the city where the band rose to stardom in the Soviet era, his agent said.
“He did a show last night as part of Bobby Farrell’s Boney M and they found him this morning dead in his hotel room,” agent John Seine said by telephone from the Netherlands. Farrell was 61.
“He did not feel well last night, and was having problems with his breathing but he did the show anyway,” Mr Seine added.
The cause of his death was not immediately clear, said Sergei Kapitanov, representative of St Petersburg’s branch of Russia’s investigative committee.
Farrell was famous for dancing and lip-synching for the disco band that rose to prominence in Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union with songs like Ma Baker, Rivers of Babylonand Rasputin.
Boney M was put together by German singer-songwriter Frank Farian who also produced most of the vocals for the group, which stormed to the top of the charts in the late 1970s with a string of disco hits.
Farrell, who lived in Amsterdam, was more a dancer and showman than he was a singer when he headlined Boney M in the 1970s.
Their version of By the Rivers of Babylonsold nearly two million records in Britain alone in 1978, keeping it at No 1 for five weeks.
Alphonso “Bobby” Farrell left his home on the Caribbean island of Aruba at 15 to work as a sailor, then drifted to Norway and Germany to pursue a career as a DJ.
He was chosen in 1974 to front Boney M, a group that had 38 top-10 hits, including Brown Girl in the Ringand Mary's Boychild.
In 1978 the group was the first western music group invited by a Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, to perform in the Soviet Union.
The original group of Farrell and three women broke up in 1986 and Farrell continued on his own or with various female back-up singers, maintaining his flamboyant style and glittering costumes. – (Reuters)