"Old Master"
Melody Maker: April 7, 1984
by Mickey Senate


This morning, Dieter Meier looks like a diplomat gone to seed and painted by
a Fauvist.  His celebrated suavity has taken a knock from a rather
trasparently obvious hangover.  The square jaw and trim moustache are offset
by sprouting stubble and bloodshot eyes.

But it's from the neck downward that he really starts to scream.  A scarlet
necktie looms out of an eggshell blue pinstripe shirt that disappears into
luminous green trousers.  Pow!  I reach for the sunglasses, reminded of an
obscure Chinese proverb -- "Five colours mixed make people blind."

Not surprisingly, his colleague Boris Blank fades into the background.  Just
a standard off-the-peg dark-flecked "new wave" suit for him.  You couldn't
pick him out of a crowd of techno-pop musicians.  But the background is fine
for Boris; as far away as possible.  In an ideal world he'd never leave his
Zurich studio.  He declines to speak English, leaving the chat to Meier.
Occasionally, the Yello singer will translate a question for him, and the two
ferry a point back and forth in Swiss German with its curious sing-song
lilt, a bit like the most impenetrable Somerset accent of all time.

Well.  Why are we here, Dieter?  You don't have any new product out, do you?

A deep sigh and a little whinny, saddened and amused simultaneously.  "I
myself would fell a bit used," he says, getting serious, "and on your
behalf, too, if I thought that the whole background of this conversation was,
like, 'OK: off you go, hammer out your article, sell the fucking product.'  I
think it's much nicer to meet people and talk about music -- or whatever
-- without this immediate pressure to sell, sell, sell.  One needs publicity,
sure, whether one is a politician or an opera singer, so people can make up
their minds whether they like you or not... but that's not the same thing, I
don't believe, as hard-sell advertising."

He's so offended by the idea that he manages to avoid bringing up current
Yello activity for the rest of the interview.  It's only later that I happen
to hear that the duo are shortly to relase a mini-LP recorded at New York's
Roxy upon the occasion of one of their very infrequent live showings.  Yello
are also to produce Grace Jones' next record.  And, more intriguing yet, they
are apparently about to be given their very own record label under the wing
of... no, I'd better not say just yet.  Just take it as read that steps are
being taken to ensure Yello's immortality.  They are going to be a lot more
famous rather soon.

Somehow, Yello have tottered into vogue.

Boris Blank's experiments with sound collage, taping noises and sticking
them together, was a process born out of necessity.  Neither he nor his
partner, "conceptual artist" Meier could play anything, although Dieter liked
to goof around with a broken, one-stringed guitar.  Boris progressed
gradually from cassette recorders to Revoxes until he fell in love with
studio technology and Yello perfected their own systems of music-making,
anticipating the development of machines like the Fairlight and the Synclavier
which "sampled" real sounds.

When that hardware became commercially available Yello had the drop on
everybody else because they'd been working their own parallel system for
years.  The Fairlight just gave them a few short cuts.  In fact the
Fairlight, now happily adopted, has become such an intrinsic part of their
group that they have the habit of referring to the thing as "him".

"The Fairlight, he was really the big man," says Meier of their Roxy show.
It must have been a singular event.  Two Swiss chaps playing for a black
hard-core disco audience.

Why are there not more Yello concerts?

"Many reasons.  Boris' means of making music is very much comparable to a
painter working over all the possibilities of an empty canvas.  It's
labourious, done step-by-step.  On the records he plays about 98 percent of
the sounds himself.  With two of us, it's very hard to get that depth of sound
live.  And we would never like to go on stage -- as a lot of bands do -- with
a backing tape and just stand there shaking our asses, y'know?  There's a
lot of... let's call it cheating in this game.  Tapes are okay if it's made
clear that that's what's going on, but it's not our style.

"Of course, if you use the Fairlight or its equivalent it begins to get
difficult to say what's live.  Say Boris has spent a whole day working to get
a particular bass sound.  Right, he programmes it into the Fairlight, presses
a button on stage and boom!  (Meier sings a bass line.)  Now is that live or
isn't it?  Of course, we used some of those tricks at the Roxy.  Had to,
really, because I wasn't touching an instrument."

Extreme in their refusal to repeat themselves, Yello played all new material
at the New York show.

"We're not interested in reproducing what we've done.  It doesn't make sense
for us.  It's as if you would say to Cezanne 'That's a nice picture, paint it
again!  On stage!  Back at the beginning we once tried to re-record a piece
that we'd done with two 2-track machines, bouncing the music back and forth
between them to get extra tracks... of course it was nearly all tape hiss,
but somebody liked the song and wanted us to redo it, professionally, in a
real studio.  Didn't work at all.  The passion was gone.  There was no soul
left.  It turned into a completely different thing.  From that moment on,
it became group policy to never even try to do the same thing twice."

Curious how deceptive images can be.  Meier's talk is full of words like
passion, heart, soul.  From his photos and indeed from some of Yello's music
I'd visualised him as a supercilious parodist.  A smart-ass, not to put too
fine a point of it.  Standing above pop, raising the cynic's lukewarm
eyebrow.

"No, no, i don't want to stand above it," he says warmly.  "A certain kind of
irony and playfulness is in our music.  I would go so far as to say that any
interesting music would have to have a measure of irony and playfulness in
it.  Any art whatsoever, in fact.  Wouldn't you?"

Yes, or probably, but it's a question of degree.  A surfeit of irony,
cynicism or simple sneering usually just masks an inability to say something
from the heart.  It's a way of avoiding the issue.

"Good point, Michael.  But if you're going to bare your soul or your heart you
have to be really sure that you're ready to take the knocks you may get for
it.  It's important for an artist not to go beyond his capacity for taking
kicks and punches because it's really dangerous for his health and is, I
would say, the biggest factor in driving him towards drugs and drink.  For a
lot of people it's the only way to survive the pain incurred by making
oneself that naked."

And this from the fellow who coined the phrase "You Gotta Say Yes To Another
Excess."  Still, I find him a more sympathetic character in this sensitive
mode.

He reallly does look a bit ravaged this morning, though.  A lot of lines in
the face.  How old is Dieter Meier, I wonder to myself and ask: "Do you
subscribe to the viewpoint that pop is exclusively a young man's game?"

"No way," he says.  "No way, no way."  (He says this five or six times more.)
"The fact that there are more young people involved is mostly a reflection on
the fact that the category itself is still young.  In the future you'll see
70 and 80-year-old pop singers, just as you now see 70-year-old classical
pianists or 80-year-old blues singers..."

But pop's sociological significance as the mouthpiece of the young rebel, I
begin, taking a leaf from Simon Frith.  Dieter makes the gesture of man
throwing an empty can over his shoulder.

"I know, I know.  But you can also be an OLD REBEL.  Why not?  I think most
of the young rebel bit is purely a marketing concept.  It's just the 'planned
obsolescence' which you find in any industry.  He's old now, better buy the
young new rebel.  I believe that people who have something to say are not
just exchangeable product.

"It is true that at a certain point some artists cease to question
themselves.  I wouldn't blame anybody for that.  I think it's already a very
big thing if you have written one great book, or painted one great painting.
I don't care for this bourgeois critical approach of 'Oh, he's burned out.
He repeats himself.'  Fifty good pages are more than enough, to my mind.
Think about the sheer impossibility of the artist's task.  In this
dialectical way, he has to look very deeply into his heart and at the same
time produce something very definite to sell.  It's like, it's like..."

Dieter gobbles the air in search of the appropriate simile:  "It's like...
making a sculpture out of water!  It's this... lucky moment on a very thin
rope.  A lot of people can't keep their balance, but a few learned to dance on
it.

"Old Picasso, he really had a lot fo fun up there.  But a lot of the
others... most of the people that I really like, they were the ones who
only wrote one good song..."