Boney M. – Sunny

Bobby Hebb wrote it to get past a killing. Boney M. took it to No.1 with a frontman who isn’t on the record.

By February 5, 1977, when Boney M. performed Sunny on West German television, the song was fourteen years old and had already been somebody else’s hit. Bobby Hebb wrote it in 1963, after his older brother Harold was stabbed to death outside a Nashville nightclub, as a deliberate turn toward a brighter day. His own recording climbed to No.2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in August 1966 and stopped there. Hundreds of versions followed. The one that finally reached No.1 came from a German producer and four performers from the Caribbean, and the man at the center of the screen that night does not sing on it.

Keep watching: Boney M. – Daddy Cool · Cher – Sunny

The group existed because a record needed faces. Frank Farian had made a dance track called Baby Do You Wanna Bump largely by himself and credited it to an invented name, Boney M. To perform it he assembled a lineup: Liz Mitchell and Marcia Barrett from Jamaica, Maizie Williams from Montserrat, and Bobby Farrell from Aruba. When Daddy Cool went to No.1 in West Germany in 1976, Farian moved quickly to build an album around it, Take the Heat off Me, and Hebb’s song was one of the covers he reached for. Stefan Klinkhammer arranged it, Mitchell sang the lead, and Hansa released the single on November 22, 1976.

It outran the original almost everywhere it went. The single topped the charts in West Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and France. In Britain, where Hebb’s record had peaked at No.12, the Official Charts Company ranked the Boney M. version at No.3 in April 1977. A soul song written in grief had gone further across Europe as a disco record than it ever had in its first form.

Saturday Night on ZDF

The broadcast on this page comes from Disco, the ZDF pop show hosted by Ilja Richter, which by 1977 was a Saturday-evening fixture: forty-five minutes of chart acts and comedy sketches, with some performers singing live and others miming to their records. The February 5 edition, the show’s seventy-fifth, also carried Chicago with If You Leave Me Now, George Harrison with This Song, and Showaddywaddy. Boney M. head the running order. What the cameras show is the arrangement the group ran on. Farian had decided early that he would make the records with Mitchell, Barrett and his own voice; Williams’s voice was not used in the studio, and a tryout with Farrell had not worked. On stage there are four of them. On Sunny there is not even a male lead part for anyone to sing.

The Man Who Wasn’t on the Record

Roberto Alfonso Farrell was born in Aruba on October 6, 1949. He left the island at 15 to work as a sailor, drifted through Norway and the Netherlands, and was earning a living as a DJ in Germany when Farian picked him. In 1978 Farian confirmed what had been rumored, that Farrell made no vocal contribution to the group’s records. It changed very little, because singing was never what audiences had come to him for. He was, as the Associated Press later put it, “more a dancer and showman,” and he was the part of Boney M. that could not be done in a studio. He left in 1981, came back, and after the original group ended in 1986 toured for years as Bobby Farrell’s Boney M. He was found dead in a hotel room in St. Petersburg, Russia, on December 30, 2010, the morning after a show. He was 61.

The record has been remixed and reissued in 1988, 1999, 2000 and 2015, and it turned up again in 2020 in the second season of The Umbrella Academy. Through all of it Sunny has been carried by people it was not written about. Hebb wrote it to face away from a death. Mitchell gave it the voice that Europe bought. And Farrell, who never sang a note of it, is the reason people remember it as something to watch. This clip is the plainest record of how Boney M. worked: three voices made the single, four people made the performance, and the fourth is the one the eye follows.