with their downfall.

I know a lot of people like to replay that clip of the DAT getting stuck on "Girl you know its-girl you know its-girl you know its-" and all that... but that was not their undoing. In fact, the tape was fixed, they came back out and finished their performance and the audience didn't give a shit.

It was later, when they were fighting with Farian over money and pressuring him to let them sing on the records that he just decided they were becoming more trouble than they were worth, so he pulled back the curtain and exposed them.

But really, it should not have been that big of a deal. In Europe (Germany in particular) they are very used to the idea of groups not singing on their records. Farian's first splash as a producer came in the 70s with the disco supergroup Boney M:

http://youtu.be/7peS5jw1nIU

Boney M had loads of hits worldwide for 5 or 6 years and it was fairly well known that apart from the vocals of lead singer Liz Mitchell, Farian himself sang all the vocal parts, including the female ones.

Silver Convention, Amanda Lear, etc... Europe was used to that shit and didn't care. The problem was that Milli Vanilli had gotten really big in America and had received an American Music Award and Americans are super-serious about shit like this (or at least, used to be) so everybody clutched their pearls and made a big scandal over it (and Black Box and C + C Music Factory too)