Dieter Meier and Boris Blank show no signs of giving up on their eccentric modus operandi on their first new music for seven years

There are countless fabulous stories about the Swiss electronic duo Yello, particularly about their frontman, Dieter Meier. One of the best-known is the one about the time in 1972 – years before Yello became popular – when he installed a commemorative plaque at Kassel railway station in Germany which read “On 23 March 1994, from 3-4pm, Dieter Meier will stand on this plaque.” And 22 years on from that unveiling, Meier kept his promise, to the delight of fans (at least one of whom had traveled specially from England) and general befuddlement of curious passersby.

My own favourite Meier story is the one about him being refused entry to a fetish club in London in the 1990s, because he wasn’t wearing the specified rubber outfit. Meier duly reached into his elegantly tailored suit pocket and pulled out a pencil, at the end of which was a small rubber eraser. He was allowed into the club.

There are loads of similar tales – you may wish to share your own below – and they all illustrate a central fact: that Yello are an electronic act unlike any other, and have been bringing a sense of style, character, lateral thinking and deadpan, humorous eccentricity to electropop for nearly 40 years. Their latest video – for Limbo, their first new music since 2009 – is a case in point. Meier and his bandmate Boris Blank are sporting their trademark elegant tailoring and moustaches in a short film that seems to bring together industrial espionage and warehouse rave.

Watch the video for Yello’s new track Limbo

The song itself is inimitable Yello, a gradually unfolding collage of electronics, funky guitar and beats with several melodies going on at once. Meier is a narrator-crooner rather than a conventional singer, drily intoning: “Why don’t you leave me alone / Why don’t you answer your phone? … I’m in limbo” in a voice that seems more knowing homage to movie hardmen than the kind of vocals that usually exist in electronic pop.

It's been claimed Dieter Meier is a millionaire industrialist, poker player, golfer … but he is also a conceptual artist

It was forever thus – and you can hear similar collisions of electronics and manipulated or narrated vocals on their best-known tracks, such as 1985’s Oh Yeah (which featured in films from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to The Secret of My Success) or 1988’s No 7 smash Grand Prix homage, The Race. In that (fantastic) song’s accompanying video, Meier bears an uncanny resemblance to the comic actor Terry-Thomas, and there’s something of the movie role about his life – it’s been claimed he is a millionaire industrialist and professional poker player, and international golfer, though the fact he is also a conceptual artist should be remembered when assessing claims about his life.



Boris Blank was a truck driver, and transformed himself into a pioneer of sampling using found sounds. He has 100,000

However, the stories shouldn’t obscure Yello’s status as genuine musical pioneers. Blank was initially a truck driver, but transformed himself – “without musical training or manuals” – into one of the pioneers of sampling culture. However, he doesn’t sample other people’s music, but uses found sounds, beginning (in his teens) with a splashing bucket of water. Over many years, he has built up an enormous library of more than 100,000 noises, which he delves into to help create the music. There was originally a third Yello man, but tape operative Carlos Peron left in 1983, by which time they had already defined their trademark style on 1980’s Solid Pleasure. Guest vocalists are now commonplace in pop, but Yello have been using them for years, collaborating with often highly unlikely but always genuinely great singers, from late Associates man Billy Mackenzie to Shirley Bassey.



Now 71 and 64 respectively, Meier and Blank are showing no signs of packing it in – they recently announced their first ever live shows, which will take place in Berlin this October, to promote their new album, Toy. Quite what can be expected from a Yello performance can only be guessed at. All we know so far is that Meier promises 20 songs and “operatic staging of the aesthetics of the Yello videos”, which sounds like it will be something special. After all, as one of their album titles once put it, You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess.

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