"Mellow Yello"
Melody Maker: March 16, 1985
by Steve Lake

Dieter Meier may look like your local bank manager but he once sported a fine
head of bright green hair and survived for five years playing poker.  Steve
Lake talks to the man behind YELLO.


Back when the Apostles were touring Palestine, everybody wanted to get in on
their act.  It was a real headache for the emergent church, sons of God being
ten-a-danarius.  They would set up on opposite sides of the street, performing
miracles competitively.  Perhaps the most colourful of these self-righteous
prophets was Simon Magus, slandered by the Apostles as the anti-Christ.  Simon
preached sex for everyone and as much as possible, and to emphsise the point
he performed with a whore named Helen whom he said was the mother of the
universe.  Simon also had a spectacular line in oratory, making pronouncements
like "in the beginning there was nothing.  And when I say nothing I do not
mean merely the absence of something.  I mean a nothingness so complete that
nothing itself did not exist."  His listeners felt themselves propelled
headlong down lift-shafts of black hole emptiness.

All of this came back to me when I was listening to the latest Yello album and
Dieter Meier singing "Domingo, you showed us just nothing like no one before."

Domingo de Santa Clara, compadre.  A guru of Dieter Meier's invention.

"You never know if he's fake or if he's real," Meier confides.  Inevitably,
those who have not met Yello's lyricist and singer (and even some who have)
feel the same way about him.  And the music with its wacky intermeshing of the
daringly experimental and the crassly commercial... what is that about?
Would you trust a couple of Swiss anti-musicians?  Or are they laughing at us?

"You've got new glasses," said Meier when I walked into the Hilton's lobby.  I
was impressed.  My girlfriend had not noticed and Meier I'd met only once
before, for an hour, a year back.  As far as I could gauge, Meier had not
changed in any particular.  He was wearing his uniform of trim moustache,
jacket and tie slacks and well-buffed shoes.  The colours were just enough
out-of-phase to distinguish him from the other businessmen in the vicinity.
He looked severe but approachable, as if there was a playful edge to his
formality (and of course there is).  Above all he looked successful.  In his
companay, one tends to feel like a sloppy no-hoper.

For five years of his life Meier was a professional gambler, surviving by
playing poker, but he is not the man who would measure success in mere
monetary terms.  For him, it really is all in the game.  And as for the
accumulation of possessions, forget it, how many millstones do you need around
your neck?

"Money is important to me insofar as it allows me to keep my playground.  If
you're a rope dancer you need a rope and a certain structure around the rope.
If nobody ever pays to watch you doing your dance, then you can't do your
dance anymore.  But I never see money as a tool for buying houses and cars and
so on.  Never.  What I would do if I had more money would be to buy more
paintings of friends of mine in whose work I believe.  Even then, the idea
would not be to possess these paintings..."

Meier has pasted quite a few already on Yello's LP's and 12-inchers,
collectively the hippest gallery in rock.  The cover of "Stella", their new
album, an expressionist painting of a head, ripped out in fast free
brushstrokes, then superimposed on various photographic backdrops, is really
first-rate.  (Ernst Gamper is the artist.)

"... Money is your bridge to the world if you are an artist, because you are
not producing something that is of vital importance.  It has no urgent
function.  You can say 'Who needs this painting?  Who needs this record?'  The
artist who has to sell his stuff to survive...  well, you need to be paid for
what you do to convince yourself that you are not a total lunatic.  Do you know
what I mean?"

It's hard to visualise when you look at the impeccably suave Meier of today,
but he once had long green hair.  "British racing green," he confirmed.

The story began in a bath in Munich.

"Yeah, I was staying with some friends here, and I saw some shampoo they had,
which was supposed to brighten your hair a little bit.  I thought, well,
mine's sort of blond anyway, I'll take it.  When my friends came home, they
couldn't stop laughing.  My hair was looking as if no-one should see that
you'd made it blond.  I couldn't stand it.  Back in Zurich, I went to a
hairdresser and said 'Take away this horrible blond colour.'  I tried to
explain what colour my hair was before.  Well, he mixed some stuff together.

"And the result was green.  The two colour components didn't match."

Always one to exploit any opportunity that chance hurls in his path, Meier
used his green mop to gatecrash the party for the movie Isadora Duncan in
Cannes.

"I was down there for the underground film festival with one of my little
films.  But I wanted to go to the big reception.  I wanted to experience the
big time Hollywood party, with the beautiful wines and champagnes and caviar.
Not only did I not have an invitation, I didn't even have the correct dress.

"I borrowed the jacket of the waiter in the little hotel I was staying in and
then, with my green hair, which was... uh, kind of rare for the period, I just
walked through control after control to the heart of this party.  Had a great
night.  And the green hair was my ticket.  Everybody was thinking 'This guy
looks so strange, he must be somebody'."

Unlike a number of contemporary peacocks, however, Meier quickly came to the
realisation that "looking strange is just one arena. And as I discovered
others, I didn't feel this need to go round looking like a matador."

Yello's singer claims that the making of the duo's new album "Stella" was the
toughest haul to date in their erratic career.

"Getting technically more experienced was leading us onto a slick
perfectionist track.  We even went to a German digital studio to do the most
perfect remixes on a digital machine with the SSL Desk and the rest of it.
And we had to learn, a difficullt process for us, that perfection is just a
way to escape from having nothing to say.

"There's a line in the Bible about becoming like children again.  It's the
only 'ambition' I have.  Not to go back or to try to hang on to your
adolescence, none of that... I think it's to do with Zen Buddhism where you
intend the intentionless.  And that of course is a track that never ends and
you can never say 'Now I got it'.  Because by definition you should never aim
at it.

"Well, to become like a kid is practially an impossibility, but you can at
least exclude certain obviously wrong tracks you're on.  With 'Stella' we
were being dragged down by an excess of perfection.

"Now, we're at a place in the process which is really nice.  Not prretending
that we're total idiots technologically, but using the technology we have to
really... yeah, really, really PLAY FOOTBALL WITH IT!

"We spent so much time and energy on the record and yes, money too -- we nearly
went broke -- then we threw most of it away and started again.  I had to laugh
about it, suddenly saying to myself 'Come on!  This is not what you're in
business for... if you can't get more spirit into the thing you should
better give up.'

"I mean, I'd rather be an inspired banker than an eipgone of myself just
polisihing a facade."

Hell, Dieter, if a few more pop stars felt that way, we'd have some music to
listen to.