“Until now we were simply too young to stop sounding fresh”

It is astonishing how “Toy” sounds: unspent and fresh, familiar and yet furnished with new elements. What is the secret of Yello? After all, the band has now been around for 38 years.

Dieter Meier: Boris isn’t a composer who writes something down and then realises it. For him, the studio – this environment with all the thousands of sounds he owns – that, taken as a whole, is his instrument. And he works like a painter who has a canvas in front of him and then starts somewhere at the bottom left with an idea. Often he doesn’t yet have any concrete figure in mind, perhaps just a particular colour that expresses a certain mood and a rhythm. And this starting point then draws him into the whole picture. And this picture develops, so to speak, under its own momentum. And the fact that Boris keeps engaging with such unpredictable situations is what produces, in the end, this innovative freshness that is present in practically every Yello track of the last almost forty years.

“Toy”, the album’s title, says it all.

Meier: Absolutely. Boris’s studio is like a child’s sandpit. The child goes in, somehow starts building a castle, finds a little twig here and a “little plastic lid” there, and so builds his castle spontaneously and without a plan. One thing simply leads to another.

Boris Blank: You could also say that until now we were simply too young to stop sounding fresh. And now we are reaching an age at which we no longer have to make any compromises. (laughs)

In recent years you both worked separately. Dieter Meier, you made a solo album, “Out of Chaos”, accompanied by a tour. Boris Blank, meanwhile, combed through his sound archive for the retrospective “Electrified” and produced an album for the singer Malia, whose voice can now also be heard on “Toy”, alongside that of Fifi Rong.

Meier: For me, working on Out of Chaos was a completely new experience. When Boris opened his treasure chest for “Electrified” to dig out old pieces and rework some of them, he remained Boris. The Malia album, too, is de facto a Boris Blank album. Out of Chaos was an acoustic project for which I created the music. It was more of a singer/songwriter thing. Quite the opposite of Yello – there it is more about clouds of sound in which a fictional storyteller makes his appearances.

And with Boris Blank it is clear after two bars at the most: that’s Boris Blank.

Meier: (beaming) Absolutely! It’s like Ta Ta Ta Daaa (conducts Beethoven’s 5th Symphony) (Boris laughs)

Boris Blank is practically a brand in his own right.

Meier: That’s how it is!

Blank: (touched) Right, stop it now…

Meier: I heard his sounds back when he was still tinkering about with music cassettes and overdubs. But even then it was clear after ten seconds: that’s Blank. There are other great musicians, like David Bowie, who constantly put on new clothes and changed their faces, but Boris is someone who keeps on rummaging around in his very own musical identity.

What is it like for you, Boris Blank, when Dieter Meier comes along and begins to populate the sounds?

Blank: I am very good at setting moods to music, but in the end it is only Dieter’s intervention that turns the music into a Yello track. He always hides his light under a bushel. Of course the sound is important, but it is only through his singing that Yello really becomes Yello.

If we stay with the comparison with painting: Blank hands the painted picture on to Meier, who is then free to let rip in it with his colours.

Meier: Yes, except that when creating his spaces Boris deliberately leaves room for me, so that I can move through this world. For me it is always an extraordinary pleasure to be inspired in this way. To me these sounds are like an imaginary film score, and the exposed film to go with it then takes shape in my head – scene by scene, piece by piece, I wander through these sound spaces with my invented protagonists.

Blank: Yello always had this cinematic character. I am completely blind in one eye, and a neurologist told me it may very well be that I compensate with my ears for what I cannot grasp spatially with my eyes.

“Blue Biscuit” surprised me with its psychedelia. The track sounds like a gentle homage to Brian Wilson.

Blank: The psychedelia of the 1960s, that Californian feeling of life back then, triggers in me a longing for that era, and with music that longing can easily be satisfied. You can’t do that with schnitzel and chips, even though you remember eating that back then.

Dieter Meier, you keep stressing that the characters who appear in Yello songs are entirely invented. Yet we all carry the sum of our experiences around with us. How much Dieter Meier is there in these protagonists? I am thinking of the song “30,000 Days”. Can one hear in this song the protagonist’s future self-doubts?

Meier: 30,000 days – that is the average life expectancy of a man today. If I really do have the genes of my parents (knocks on the wooden table), who were never ill and both lived to well over 90, then I still have a chance of getting a bit older. But I am now 71, and you do realise that you are approaching at least the last third of this short visit to this world. That is what this song is about. It is certainly the most personal song on the record.

Blank: That reminds me of a story. Every winter I spend time with my wife in the Engadine, and there is this restaurant with a wonderful wall of windows where you can watch the snow falling. The first time we were there, we were sitting in the middle of the dining room, and I asked the waiter whether he might have a table for us closer to that magnificent view. He replied that the guests up front from Germany would surely not be coming next year, since they already had a fair few years under their belts. Now, year by year, we keep moving closer to that window, until one day the waiter will tell others that the Blanks probably won’t be coming next year. (laughs)

Meier: (serious and pensive) The closer you get to the window, the sooner you’re on the gravedigger’s shovel. Better to look at the snow outside.

To lighten the now rather gloomy mood again: I am of the opinion that thanks to Yello you live longer and healthier. “Toy” goes straight to your legs, your heart and your soul.

Meier: (smiles) Wonderful!

Of course, one can only make that claim after putting it to the test. It could be that, as a long-serving Yello listener, you fall prey to your own nostalgia and only like the album for that reason. But everyone dances to this record with a smile – three-year-olds just as much as sixty-year-olds. Really, “Toy” ought to be available on prescription. (both laugh)

Blank: I’ve never heard that one before! On prescription! I must remember that one…