Alpine brass band faking the music on their albums for years and should give back their 13 German music awards

 

BERLIN — A Germanlanguage folk group famed for their Alpine brass band sound and cheerful style have been faking the music on their albums for years and should give back their 13 German music awards, their former producer said on Wednesday.

But the manager of the seven-man “Kastelruther Spatzen” said it was common practice for folk music bands to use studio musicians for their albums, adding that the band listed studio musicians’ names on albums.

“The success of this band is based on a giant fraud,” ex producer Walter Widemair said, saying that only the lead singer’s voice was genuine on the albums.

The scandal recalls the Milli Vanilli lip-synching duo of the early 1990s.

German producer Frank Farian turned two young Munich models, Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan, into the group known as Milli Vanilli.

They won a Grammy Award in 1990 that was later stripped away when it emerged that they were only lip synching songs performed by others.