Passion Fruit

Passion Fruit was a Dutch/German pop, europop, eurodance and bubblegum group formed in June 1999 which initially counted with Manye Thompson, Viola Schubbe, Carla Sinclair and Mario Zuber fronting the project. Their first single "947052" became a huge hit, reaching the Top 20 charts in 14 countries. A few months later, around October 1999, the original line-up of the group ended up disbanding and leaving, so the production team of Passion Fruit found new replacement members for the project: Maria Serrano Serrano, Nathaly Van Het Ende and Deborah St. Marteen became the official faces of Passion Fruit. The debut and only album of Passion Fruit, "1371996", was released on April 2000 now with the new members fronting the band. However, on the night of November 24, 2001, two of the three members were killed in a plane crash while they were on tour promoting the album. The trio had just given a concert in Leipzig, Germany and had taken off to Zurich, Switzerland. Between the three girls, only Deborah St. Marteen managed to survive. Pop singer Melanie Thornton was also a passenger on this same flight and she was not among the survivors. In December 2001, the record company decided to donate all the royalties from Passion Fruit's last single "1373754" to help the survivors of the accident and the victims' families. The vocals of Passion Fruit are credited to Leticia Pareja-Padron for lead vocals and Kenneth Clemmons for rapping, which means that both line-ups were only lip-synching to the voices of the two studio singers on stage and music videos.