Conceptual artist, gambler and pop star Dieter Meier is one of my heroes so I was excited to get him on the line from his home in Switzerland when Yello were promoting Flag circa 1988/89. I wrote up a version of the interview for Rip It Up but this the full transcript. I've corrected some of the grammar, but he really did talk like that.
I'm sure I asked more questions than this but chose to save precious time by not entering them into the RIU computron's floppy disc input panel. The faded dot-matrix printout has been sitting in a box since 1988 waiting for a time when I could photograph it with a pocket digital camera, transfer the images to a pencil-thin SSD laptop and upload them to a OCR translator to be shared online. But now that time has come.
CT: Hi Dieter.
DIETER MEIER: Hey you sound very close! Ja, we have an incredibly good line. I am in the house and I was about to fall asleep.
CT: Have you had a busy day?
DM: Today? What did I do, well let's see ... we were discussing several things, we are planning a film in Poland , this is a little Yello opera which we are hopefully beginning in Breslau in a big old film studio, and we were getting closer to the beginning of this.
The film is a fantasy-type story, based on music which was written for it about a young man, a young musician who is kidnapped from planet Earth by the underground empire of the Duke of Shadows where he is used to create images of the world with his music. He plays an instrument down there, and playing this instrument creates real opera scenes inside a snowball. This is the title of the whole movie -- and this snowball is a huge opera set.
CT: Are you directing?
DM: Yeah, sure.
CT: It sounds like a very typical Yello idea.
DM: Ja ja, it has a lot to do with Yello. People call us film soundtrack makers and our music is very visual. This time we are fulfilling the visuals with the reality.
CT: Do you draw inspiration from films?
DM: No, I never go to the movies myself. It's more based on fantasies; it's not real movies, but movies for your head, movies of your imagination.
CT: Will you appear in the movie?
DM: Definitely! Boris [Blank] is playing a part, I'm playing a part and [so is] an English actor called Paul McGann. And a lot of Polish actors because the whole thing is basically a Polish production.
CT: Do you think of yourself as an actor rather than a singer?
DM: Ja, that's true, ja. I've said this before. I don't think I'm a typical rock star; as you said, I'm an actor in Boris's sound pictures for your head. I change my part for each song -- always the same actor but with a different part.
CT: The part has seen you travel the world musically.
DM: Yeah of course, but it's intentional to be very open and to use all kinds of musical subjects. It's not intentional to write an African or a south American piece. It's like two kids sitting at the beach, building a castle made of sand: an opera sandcastle -- a South American or African sand piece -- it's not an intentionally based on a technological piece of music. When there is a rhythm you land in certain territories, and not in others. Like Norwegian is not a rhythmical piece.
CT: And you have no fear of the studio.
DM: Ja that's of course all Boris who is responsible for this. I never touch any equipment and Boris touches it every day for ten hours. Our advantage probably is that, starting with little cassette recorders and later a four-track machine, we really grew with the jungle of technology. Boris is at ease with it: it's not an enemy you have to overrun, it's a friend with whom you are talking. I always said that for Boris, all this technology is nothing more and nothing less than a jungle of the 20th century. For him, the whole studio is one big instrument.
CT: Are you comfortable in the 20th century?
DM: Yeah, sure. Well, in classical music I think in the 20s and 30s -- people from the new school -- everything more or less stopped. And the other things that came out of this century after the 30s to me are either endlessly experimenting.
Of course it is very good to have music that experiments but it gets kind of boring, this sort of John Cage approach. It's a historical monument if you are destroying things, if you you are destroying a piano -- if you are fooling around with sounds, that's important -- but I think that nothing really came out of this after a while.
I think pop and rock -- I believe that till the early 60s apart from some examples, this was a very
slow movement. Then rock and pop made this incredible step -- early Beatles and Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix -- [they were] just like an explosion, and now you see mainly the last little tiny glowing fires of this explosion. Now there is not much, for me, happening.
If you listen to the English charts for example, it's more and more producers squeezing the last drops of blood out of young musicians; young musicians who bleed for a producer's musical non-impact. It's a very dull moment right now. Of course, there are always exceptions, but basically I think most pop and rock music now is very epigonal.
CT: Yello is an exception.
DM: As I say, I think we were very lucky to grow with all the technology and then I think we were lucky not to come out of a country where the last drops of life have been squeezed out of the rock circus. We truly had to invent ourselves, invent something else. To be to become ourselves, because of course rock music has no tradition at all here [in Switzerland] -- if people and bands are moving in the traditional rock and pop direction they are to me like yodelling Japanese: technically very good, but they are doing something that is not their thing, their spirit, their movement. They become as ridiculous as yodelling Japanese -- they change their style, they listen to that then they do that, it's sort of epigonal fashion.
Because we never started as a commercial band, we just did what we had to do to become like this. We had all the freedom and the commerciality of it, at the beginning, was a highly unimportant sideline. It was not something we aimed at because if you aim at becoming an international act then you should be sent to loony home straight away -- it is impossible. So you have nothing to lose, and a lot of time to become yourself, because you don't belong to any traditions. Being alone in a territory without rock and pop in this age was an advantage to us.
CT: A lot of bands that start off sounding different soon fall into traditional forms, yet Yello sound more and more like Yello.
DM: That's true. Of course sometimes people, especially in England, they tell you since the first Yello album, they all sound the same, and I am very proud of this, because if you have found your style, how can you change over the years? When a painter has found his way to dance, to express himself -- how do you call it -- 'on canvas' that is a very slow process, and there is not a dramatic change each year. Only people who have no style change their style every year, because they haven't got one. If you listen to the Cure, it's always the Cure, and if you listen to Mozart, even if you have heard only three pieces from the chap, you can immeditely say, 'Aha! This could be Mozart!' Every strong artistic movement has a style which slowly develops, and does not change like fashion.
CT: You have a lot of other singers on this album -- I'm assuming you don't suffer from ego.
DM: No, I don't suffer from it at all. In fact, I'm the promoter of this idea because Yello really is soundtracks for your head -- movies for your head, and these movies sometimes employ other actors. On the last album we concentrated more on me again, but you can never tell.
CT: How'd you come to use Shirley Bassey?
DM: A friend of mine knows Shirley Bassey very well: and he heard that she kind of likes our music, and she expressed that if we had a track for her, she would be interested in singing it. So we wrote 'The Rhythm Divine' and she liked it and came into the studio. It was very simple. You could get Michael Jackson to come in and sing a few tracks if liked them -- it's not a big trick.
CT: And Billy MacKenzie?
DM: Yeah, he's a friend.
CT: You are known as a performance artist. Do you consider Yello an extension of that?
DM: Well ja somewhere in one way it is, I think. Boris and my performance is always live in the studio -- it
is live. People ask me why don't you ever play live, I say, we play live every day.
My role, which in very much that of a painter, is painting life. Painting
is always life -- you're not reproducing, you're only
producing. You're not like a band which is writing a piece, then rehearsing it and then sometimes bringing it to the studio to
reproduce it -- we only go to/the studio to
produce. We are a very
live band.
CT: Did performance art give you confidence in that process?
DM: No. If you ask me now why did I do this, I can't even tell you. It is to me a very strange wonder how I became a performance artist, how I succeeded in having museum exhibitions and becoming quite known in this area. It was something where I obviously followed a track where I somehow had to go, but I never started with the intention of becoming a conceptual artist or a performance artist -- it just happened to me, like everything. I never planned to become a feature film maker. I always wrote down little ideas and little scripts and someday somebody asked me to direct one of these little ideas, and I said why not? I became a movie director overnight -- I never intended to be one.
CT: You also used to gamble.
DM: Mm-mmm. Not seriously, now. If you do this, you are either a professional or a hobby free-loader. If you do it really you do it like a job, an everyday's work. But that was years ago, I stopped when I was 23.
CT: What's it like as a job?
DM: It's the most complete escape from the world possible. Like being a boxer. I only played poker, and with the very simple idea of standing in the ring to knock down your enemy, the sooner the better, and he wants the same thing. This is such a thrilling but
simple parameter of existence that you can consider it an escape from the world. You are living in a hermetical situation, standing in this boxing ring, only when you play poker you can play it 14 hours a day. You can't box 14 hours a day -- well, they did in the 19th century, but this would be crazy. Poker, when you sit at the table, you're given a new hand each few minutes, and you can work with that hand, and you're carrying your fate in your hand, and this thrilling moment is the most total escape: it makes you feel good, it makes you feel important, it gives you immediate sense for those minutes.
CT: Francis Bacon was a gambler, a blackjack man.
DM: That's interesting. I never gambled in casinos -- I was interested only in poker playing. When you're gambling with and against individuals.
CT: Since Dada it's been respectable to draw a direct line between chance at the gambling table and chance on the canvas, in the studio.
DM: Well, it has a lot to do with this. This is, of course, true.
CT: What's in store for Yello's future?
DM: Well, the movie is Yello, you know? The most logical extension of what we've always been doing in our video work, this time, it's a feature story and hopefully strong enough to entertain people for 100 minutes. There has never been anything more Yello than this opera. I think this is gonna be the future, I think we will make more films like this. I'm also planning some other features, more in the thriller area. I hope we will enjoy ourselves, and be good entertainers.
CT: Is it a musical or a written idea?
DM: We did have a verbal idea, which was then turned into music which is now turned back into a movie, with a lot of verbal ideas.
I hope to make it sooner or later to your most beautiful country. A cousin of mine was there for two months, and everyone says it is one of the last resorts. Is that true?
CT: "The last resort"... yes.
DM: A very famous Austrian painter,
Hundtertwasser lives there, keeps a big farm in new Zealand. The only problem is there's a lot of work here and it takes a long time to travel.
(1989)