Yello
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Everybody be somebody!" --"Bostich" (1980) by Yello |
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Yello is a Swiss band consisting of Dieter Meier and Boris Blank.
The band is known for their "Bostich" (1980) which was played on the nascent house music scene.
Band history
The band was formed by Boris Blank (keyboards, sampling, percussion, backing vocals) and Carlos Perón (tapes) in the late 1970s. Dieter Meier (vocals, lyrics), a millionaire industrialist and gambler, was brought in when the two founders realised that they needed a singer. The new band name, Yello, was chosen as a neologism based on a comment made by Meier, "a yelled Hello".
Yello's first release was the 1979 single "I.T. Splash". The LP Solid Pleasure, featuring the original short version of "Bostich" (extended to a hit dance single in 1981), was released in November 1980. In early 1983, just after release of "You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess", Perón left Yello in order to pursue a solo career.
The band's fourth studio album Stella went No. 1 in Switzerland in 1985 as the first album ever by a Swiss group to top the Swiss album chart. It also appeared inside the German Top 10 gaining gold status. The song "Oh Yeah" from the album gained the band worldwide attention the following year, after it was prominently featured in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off and then a year later in The Secret of My Success. The song was released shortly after and became the band's only single to chart in the US, reaching No. 51.
In 1988, single "The Race" from the album Flag reached No. 7 in the UK as their only Top 10 hit there.
In 1995, a tribute remix album Hands on Yello was released featuring remixes by Moby, The Orb, Carl Craig, Carl Cox, The Grid and WestBam.
In 2005, Yello re-released their early albums Solid Pleasure, Claro Que Si, You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess, Stella, One Second and Flag,
A documentary on Yello, Electro Pop Made in Switzerland, directed by Anka Schmid, was premiered at the Riff Raff cinema in Zürich in September 2005.
Yello was commissioned to produce music for the launch of the Audi A5 at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2007 and for the Audi A5 commercial in May 2007.
Musical style
Yello's sound is mainly characterised by unusual music samples, a heavy reliance on rhythm and Dieter Meier's dark voice. Yello makes heavy use of sampling in the construction of rhythm tracks, such as in The Race from 1988.
Boris Blank has taken a couple of vocal turns; on "Swing" (from You Gotta Say Yes to Another Excess) and "Blazing Saddles" (from Flag), and guest vocalists have included Rush Winters (the first female diva to be featured on a Yello recording), Billy MacKenzie, Stina Nordenstam, Jade Davies, Shirley Bassey, Heidi Happy and FiFi Rong. The group has shared writing credit with MacKenzie, Winters and Happy.
Yello rarely uses samples from previously released music; nearly every instrument has been sampled and re-engineered by Boris Blank, who over the years has built up an original sample library of over 100,000 named and categorised sounds.