"Seconds Out"
Melody Maker: June 13, 1987
by Paul Mathur


This Yello thing, this crazy carousing pleasure.  All these ravishing bumps
and wildly dignified pleasures.  This Yello thing is just right.

"Oh, I just love that Johnny Logan and Joey Tempest and Jon Bon Jovi.  It's
so... so... BRILLIANT!"

The woman who does the make-up at Sky channel cable TV station is one of the
millions of people on the face of the earth who doesn't care in the slightest 
about Yello's crunchy simplicity, who will never let such ease impinge on a 
life studded with tight trousered icons and feather cut hair.  Like it or not, 
this is how the earth creaks.

"Would you like any make-up?"

"No, thank you, we prefer to be shiny."

Dieter Meier and Boris Blank, the prankster duo responsible for Yello's massive
tickle, sit sipping coffee from styrofoam cups, flit for a minute on the 
assembly line and try to pretend that what they do connects in any way
whatsoever with the vulgar glamour that their hosts are squeezing into homes 
across Europe.  Yello sit and wait, holding in demure contempt the numerous 
lackeys who walttz in and say they'll be on in 10 minutes, promise.

"I despise these horrible, horrible rock records.  You know exactly when the 
drums will come in loud or when one of the people will play a guitar solo 
that's been played a million times before.  This is the death of pop.  The 
group ought to be made to sit on a single nail for every day of their lives, 
or eat their own excretia."

Maybe we need all this, Dieter, maybe there has to be a yardstick of disgust.

"I know.  That's the worst thing of all."

Broken English come on screen with their new video and a song that swishes 
mornically around the ankles of The Rolling Stones.  Dieter refuses to believe 
that this dreary dirge can have been created entirely without irony.  He thinks
it must be a joke.  Next up is Gary Moore, plodding through an update of some
Golden Oldie.  Dieter likes him "because at least he's ugly".

Eventually Yello are thrust into a stripped pine Habitat sudio full of little 
details like a kitchen drawer that JUST WON'T CLOSE.  It's nailed open, 
although no one seems to quite know why.  Flying ducks and giant alarm clocks 
cluster around Dieter and Boris as they are called upon to say some words 
about three new pop videos.  In the far corner there's a set of full-size 
fibreglass tombstones twitching to be brought on for the Heavy Metal Tour.  
There's a joke here somewhere.

For 10 minutes, Yello are called upon to explain themselves, to tell the story 
and the plans.  Like the time Dieter stood for two hours in a New York steet, 
buying the words "yes" and "no" for a dollar a time, or the plaque he's fitted
claiming he'll be somewhere at a specific date in the future.  The primary 
coloured presenter is very nearly sweating and when Meier starts saying that 
"we must build monuments to the future not the past", he knows it's time for 
the videos.

Two Yello ones wink and wander, acknowledging Dieter's "refusal to dictate to 
the viewers a set perception of what the songs are about.  We fill the time 
with some playful images, but we'll never have anything as imposing as a 
storyline."

When some new pop pretenders are introduced through their videos, Dieter and 
Boris are politely critical, loving the one with the pig's head and the 
bright swimsuits but hating black and white slowmotion obviousness.  A 
recurrent criticism is the squidgy softness, the lack of intention.  The 
programme ends with another madly abandoned Yelloclip and a hope that maybe one
more person in the world might tumble into Dieter and Boris' welcoming arms.

Yello have a new LP out called "One Second" and a single, "Call It Love", each 
a shivery explosion so far ahead of any other attempts by pop groups to restore
elegance, eloquence and eroticism to the genre that criticism necessarily has 
to take the form of "not as good as/better than the last one."

For the only time in my life I ask someone about their album and actually want 
to hear the answer.

"It's more of a circus these days, full of exotic animals and bright colours. 
We are trying to show that you shouldn't be suffocated by the studio, shouldn't
let it turn you into a slave.  The only way to make the music we're making is 
to turn the studio into your slave and to give the machine a soul.  That's what
Boris does, he takes the sounds and the samples which can be created by doing 
things like slapping a wet newspaper against a wall and gives them a dynamism, 
a power." 

Is it a strange circus?

"It's a world like Rousseau created where, to go to exotic places, you don't 
need to travel, you can just go further into your own self. 

"It's also the first time that we've written a record specifically with other 
caracters in mind, characters like Billy Mackenzie and Shirley Bassey."

Billy Mackenzie's vocals have long been suited to Yello's willowy power and 
when, on "One Second", he gusts into "Moon On Ice", the result is pretty much 
what you might expect, albeit magnificent.  But Shirley Bassey?

"Shirley Bassey has one of the greatest voices I have ever heard and a strength
as a performer that's rare.  We sent her some tapes of our stuff and I have to 
admit that, much to our surprise, she got back in touch with us and said she'd 
like to work with us."

The result is one of Yello's most enticing moments.  "The Rhythm Divine" finds 
her voice harnessed and seduced into a song quite unlike anything Bassey has 
done before.  Pop certainly, even Easy Listening in a kind of 
back-of-the-mirror way, what David Stubbs perceptively titled "ghostly 
voluptuousness" and what pop fans would call "fab" had they not been led by 
their elders into dirty plasticene oblivion.  Much as I adore Yello's visions,
I would be very surprised to see them having hit singles.  Is it distressing?

"We've never tried to set ourselves up as better or bigger than anyone else.  
In many ways, we're not really a part of pop except that we'd like our records 
to be popular.  We don't want to be icons."

But isn't part of pop's appeal that otherness, that feeling that the performers
aren't just the person standing next to you.  There has to be more to it all 
than the height of the stage surely?

"You have to be able to create other charaters, to do something which is quite 
obviously not the real you, at least not entirely but, at the same time, you 
have to avoid drifting into pure fantasy.  It is difficult but it's possible."

Dieter Meier finds much, if not all, of his satisfaction from making records. 
There always has to be more though, like the paintings or the sculptures that 
developed and developed until the subject smiled.  There's even a film.

"It's called 'Snowball' and it's set in the Middle Ages in a world where music 
is banned.  This young musician is locked inside a mountain until he find a 
crystal which helps him burn his way out."

A film which looks like being considerably more rivetting than its synopsis, 
particularly since it stars Brit packer Paul McGann and is written by Paul 
Mayesburg, of "The Man Who Fell To Earth" and "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence".

At Sky Channel, Yello are asked to fill in forms asking their favourite 
colours, likes and dislikes.  Boris says he loves cold beer and hates warm 
toilets.  When asked to decribe themselves in one word, they both say 
"International".  As if to bear this out, Dieter returns to Zurich moments 
after the interview, leaving me to talk to Boris Blank, an integral if largely 
under acknowledged part of Yello's force.  Is it true that his role in Yello 
is to give the machines soul?

"I think that's true, yes.  What I like to do is to take the technology and 
create atmospheres for the listener.  They have to be hot, seductive, sensual,
or cold as ice, forboding.  There's no point in them being anything else than 
extremes.

Boris is blind in one eye, the result of a childhood accident involving 
gunpower, pyramids and empty bullet shells.

"I remember we used to get empty gasoline cans and make them shoot 200 metres 
into the air.  One of them landed in a field once and when this person went 
close to it, it exploded.  His face went all black like in cartoons and I got 
dragged out of the classroom and hit across the room.  I got blinded when a 
shell we were playing with splintered and two bits of metal shot into the 
back of my eye.  It burst like an egg does when you break it."

At this point almost everyone in the restaurant wishes they were either deaf 
or had not ordered poached eggs for lunch.  They turn away, missing Boris' 
entertaining stories about being on the hippy trail to Ibiza and stopping off 
in Barcelona where he got arrested, kicked downstairs and packed off into the 
night without a penny in his pocket.  Hardly the dignity we expect from Yello.
A necessary rebellion?

"Probably.  Yello came into being when some of us were making music and we 
needed a singer.  I went into a record shop in Zurich and somebody told me 
about this singer who was in a group called The Assholes.  It turned out to 
be Dieter.  He came round to our house dressed immaculately and proceeded to 
stand in the kitchen while we played, shouting at the top of his voice.  The 
neighbours had already complained so we thought they were about to come round 
and start hitting us or something.  Anyway, Yello came out of that."

I can't imagine Dieter being a child.

"That's just what I was thinking the other day.  He showed me these pictures 
of when he was 17 and he looked really grown up even then, with classic 
jackets and things.  I don't think he's ever owned a pair of jeans."

Is it important that Yello are Swiss?

"Switzerland has a strange atmosphere.  It's the sort of place where, if you 
go through a red light, people shout at you.  Little crimes worry them a lot. 
I don't know if Yello is a playful comment on all that, maybe we're just a 
pop group."

Maybe Yello are just a pop group, maybe that's all we need.  In many ways, 
though, their pop has an innocent trust, a faith in the consumer's desire for 
something slightly bumpier than the expected sightseeing tour through rock's 
twittery traditionalism.

"I think Yello can surprise and suggest but not really shock.  There's no 
purpose to that other than a very egotistical thing.  It would be nice to make
the sort of records we make and have them bought by an enormous amount of 
people.  The new album is an important argument against all those people who 
say that the only music you can make with machines is soulless, dumb noises."

"One Second" is just beginning to grow wings, to tug and tousle like all 
Yello's best moments do.  "Goldrush" was the single that should have been 
bought by everyone, but sits rather uneasily within the context of an LP that 
requires total immersion rather than a glimpse of the beach through dusty 
binoculars to fully appreciate.  Since the function of the radio is to coddle, 
protect and pacify, I can't see Yello's jagged sexiness getting much shrift.

"Someone was saying to me they thought they were too flippant."

You mean something like "Si Senor, The Hairy Grill"?

"That one was inspired by 'Spinal Tap', my favourite film ever.  A hairy grill 
seemed to be exactly the sort of thing they'd want.  One DJ in Germany played 
it but misread the title and called it 'Si Senor, The Hairy Girl'.  I don't 
know what he thought it was about.  Come to think of it, that's an even better 
title."

Would you rather be deaf or dumb Dieter?

"Neither."

Yello are no longer waiting or promising or saying something good's going to 
happen soon.  This is it, the sound of lush pop games and liberated 
expansiveness.  The cuckoo clock is starting to hum.