"Wealth & Efficiency" Melody Maker: July 22, 1989 by Paul Lester Paul Lester talks to Dieter Meier about high-stakes gambling, low-brow art and the great Swiss Dadaist's new single, "Blazing Saddles". Pics: Tom Sheehan. Anyone of the faintest acquaintance with Yello will be au fait with their meticulous discernment and connoisseur attention to detail. They will have heard their impossibly opulent records and seen their lavish Ernst Gamper sleeves. They'll know that anything bearing the Yello fascia is the last word in elegance, that avant-garde technician Boris Blank decorates the Yello soundscapes with scientific precision. And that Dieter Meier's every surreal gesture and vocal growl across the Yello canvas is existentially correct. At once flamboyant and particular. Spotless, but splattered with flourishes. The Dadaist Swiss dilettantes and supreme noise architects are set to release the fourth single from "Flag". "Blazing Saddles", which should emulate the British chart success of "The Race" and "Of Course I'm Lying". As I approach Meier in the lobby of the Savoy, he's revealing the currency of several countries, loosely distributed within his wallet, and more 50 pound notes than I have ever seen. He puts 1,000 francs on McEnroe to win the Wimbledon semi-final against Egberg, "I hate those Swedish tennis machines," he says with disarming nonchalance. "In Switzerland they have this idea that if you're an artist and you're free to do what you want, you should pay for it," he says. "I'm very close to my family, we really love each other and it's always been the case. But my father comes from absolutely nowhere, the poorest background. And he became a very successful man. I've never denied that I'm from this family which now represents something. "This was the first of my problems as a young artist because, whatever I did, the critics would say, 'Yeah yeah, his father's a rich man'. So when I had my first exhibition, this journalist asked how much I paid to get into this exhibition. Then, we got our first deal with Warner Brothers in America, which is unreal for a Swiss band, and they said, 'Oh, this clever Meier with his bribes'. And even now I'm writing philosophical essays for magazines and just a few weeks ago this journalist asked me, 'Who is writing these articles for you. You're not telling me you wrote them!" Do people worry that it all comes too easily for you? "Of course, because I never pretend I'm a hard worker -- even though I might look it from a distance! Some people would call this hard work, two or three scripts a year, essays, preparing films, we've a production company that produces for 15 other artists, I'm having exhibitons as a drawer and I write children's books. You could call this hard work, but I enjoy it, so I don't see it as such. "The only work I'm doing is walking through the few thousand days of my life, trying to find out what it's all about, and this work's like pushing a huge rock in front of me every day, like climbing a mountain. Certainly, you'll enjoy it, enjoy learning about yourself. But it's also tough from time to time." Dieter Meier parades through Zurich in a light blue Rolls-Royce, he is majestically ushered into restaurants by kowtowing waiters, he spends Ghana's national debt in tips. But Meier is no puffed-up show off, just as the flagrant lustre of Yello's records is no ostentatious swagger. Yello are wealthy, but rest assured that if they were stricken with poverty, Yello would be poor with exquisite good taste as well. This existential elegance rubs up those quarters who expect their stars to suffer for their art. "Pain?" What I went through, if you look at it objectively, would've been pain for a lot of people. Fifteen years ago I was already 28, playing concerts in the provinces of Switzerland with two people in the audience, loading the equipment at 2am in the morning through muddy backyards, falling over because it was so heavy and th total turnover for the evening turned out to be 10 pounds. I lived in a little flat in Zurich where there was no heating, with three other people and a mattress on the floor. "Some people would have called these hard times, but I enjoyed them tremendously. Because my parents taught me that, if I was flat on my arse, I should laugh at myself, not take myself too seriously. So I never cared, I enjoyed lying in the mud, all those things that other people would call suffering. The only luxury is freedom, and freedom of the mind is the only real luxury in life. They can chop off my head and take everything else as long as they don't take away that. "Personally I don't care about money. Maybe I like a good pair of shoes or a holiday house by the sea, but I could also live in a doghouse. I wouldn't care if it was a shithole. And no matter how much I look like a guy for whom things come easily, when I start something I'm like an English bulldog, you have to kill the mother f***er, and that's why I'm where I am today, wherever that is. But it has nothing to do with money." Dieter Meier was dubbed "the least f***ed up man alive" by David Stubbs and, like all clinically sane men, he sees the world with true surrealist vision. It takes a straight mind to recognise life's warped corners. Meier is as down-to-earth as the next bloke in conversation at the Savoy, while also evincing those madcap glimmers of mischief that make Yello's music such a Dada disco adventure. But Dieter has a handle on the wayward streaks that zigzag through his brain. He's never lost control, even though it came close during his lengthy addiction to gambling. He later tells me, "Poker is a school for learning who you are". "For five years of my life I was playing poker. It was an addiction, yeah, like drugs, alcohol, or smoking and it certainly wasn't for fun. Anyone who says it is, isn't a true gambler because, even though gambling is the most perfect escape, has the most immediately sensational thrills attached to it, it's eventually a waste of time. "You wonder what the hell you're doing with your life. But I even enjoyed being addicted, trying to manage it and, on the way to the game every day at 11am (it would go on until four in the morning) I would buy new books, saying to myself, 'Come on, Dieter, you've got to start doing something interesting like reading a book or a newspaper', but I was always far more tempted by the gambling room. "So I would arrive home at 4am with several unopened packs of books and I'd put them on my shelves, with my many other packs of unopened, unread books. Then the following day I would do more or less the same thing." Was everything else too slow for you at the time? "That's one reason, yeah. I was hungry, I couldn't wait. I was full of ideals and I wasn't able to take those first few steps you need to make as an artist. I couldn't stand that small, unimportant and ridiculous beginning -- when you're about to write your first sentence or do that first drawing. I was caught in collision with my idealism. I was scared to jump, of getting hurt on the climb, those initial strides... this is what made me escape into gambling's demanding world of immediate excitement." This year, Dieter Meier will appear in a movie directed by a chap called Lissy ("He directed Switzerland's most successful film ever, 'The Swiss Makers'"), playing a sleazy, vicious nightclub owner. He and Boris are also working on "Snowball", Yello's mini-opera and their alternative response to the demands of those who insist that Yello would tour. Meier claims it's such a grandiose project, it'll make The Pet Shop Boys' recent sorties look like a beano in a Scout hut. How much of your life is consumed by Yello, Dieter? "Everything is Yello! Yello is like a circus. There's a tent and a sign saying YELLO. In this tent there's music, elephants, lights, films, rope-dancing, guys making jokes, a clown, loads of departments. But the base of it all is Yello, with its visual and musical side." Yello are a miniature version of what ZTT wanted to be: an organisation whose commercial success would allow all sorts of odd things to go on under their umbrella. "Of course, we sell millions of records, and this is what permits us to spread our wings and enjoy what we're doing without having to fight for it. Yello is all about creating illusions, images, worlds. We are moving away from that narrative approach to create musical scenes. Who cares about the story? Take Hitchcock -- the stories are almost forgettable, but you'll always remember the moments, the great existential moments that he showed you." Is all human life in Yello's music, in those moments? "It depends who the listener is. I tell you, sometimes I listen to Yello and I'm surprised at how funny it is, how bombastic, strange and weird it is. It has a lot to do with us as personalities, it's not just something we decided to do at some point. This is also why you can see the continuity in Yello. Yello is always Yello." Could Yello be anything, any group they wanted? I'm thinking of the awesome heavy metal textures of "Si Senor The Hairy Grill", or the candy-dance flutter of "Vicious Games". "'Course not. It's like Cezanne, he was painting a mountain, then a face, then a landscape, an interior, all different. But it was always Cezanne. And so Yello, whether we paint a heavy metal type thing, or a South American type thing, after 10 seconds, you can tell it's Yello." Do Yello sound exactly the way you want them to? "Not always, and this is why it's so interesting to go on. You may be happy with what you've done on Monday, but by the time the record is pressed the following Monday you think, "ah, why didn't we do such and such?' That's the fascinating thing, because it is never perfect. This is why there's always a reason to do the next piece. The perfect piece of art doesn't exist, it would be death. That's why the most important masterpieces aren't those that have been decided as such by the bourgeois art critics, but those that are full of questions, insecurities, adventure, full of exposing oneself to the world."