Author: uylrjp

Whitesnake were one of the biggest and most unlikely success stories of the 1980s thanks to the stellar success of the classic 1987 album and ongs such as Here I Go Again and Still Of The Night. In 2009, ’Snake-in-chief David Coverdale looked back on his band’s rise from acclaimed blues rocker to bouffant haired MTV mainstays – and the craziness that came with it.

For the first few years of the 1980s, David Coverdale was an incredibly busy man. After the demise of Deep Purple, the band he’d sung with since 1974 and that had made him a star, he embarked on a solo career, which eventually morphed into the tight, swaggering blues rock outfit known, with a lascivious chuckle, as Whitesnake.

Starting in 1978 with the Snakebite EP, featuring one of the band’s signature songs, a cover of soul standard Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City, David’s new project swiftly became one of the most popular hard rock bands in the UK, releasing a steady stream of well- received albums including classics like Lovehunter, Ready An’ Willing and Saints And Sinners.

Always an ambitious man, David was never going to be content with simply following the usual album/tour/repeat schedule when there was a whole world out there waiting to be conquered, and so by the time Whitesnake arrived at their sixth album, Slide It In, he decided that a whole new approach was called for.

“I wanted Whitesnake to be leaner, meaner and more electrifying,” he tells Hammer. “I felt that we’d done extra- ordinarily well. We’d made six albums in just a few years. We did fabulously on those albums, but I really felt that we were flogging a dead snake. For me personally, I felt it was time for a change. I didn’t want to stay in the same old traditional blues and pop scenario. It was simply my choice as an artist. I wanted to pursue another direction. That was my whole modus operandi. The reason I invited John Sykes into the band was to actually afford that transition, or someone of that style and it happened to be Sykes. And that was it.”

A former member of both NWOBHM stars Tygers Of Pan Tang and the Thunder And Lightning-era incarnation of Thin Lizzy, John Sykes was a prodigious six-string maestro and an entirely different kind of guitarist from the musicians that David had worked with previously in Whitesnake. Although he didn’t appear on the original version of Slide It In, which still featured original ’Snake members Micky Moody and Mel Galley, his fret-melting heavy metal histrionics were slathered all over the second, remixed version of the album that was produced specifically for the American market that David was so keen to crack. And when the band’s new sound, tailor- made for American radio, led them to a new level of success on both sides of the Atlantic, it became more than apparent that there was simply no going back.

“It was all about the Americanisation of Mrs Coverdale’s little boy,” says the singer. “I’ve never ever been motivated or inspired by what’s popular. All that stuff has gone into the blender, but it’s never been a guiding light. I’ve never thought, ‘Oh, I must change Whitesnake because everybody’s fuckin’ doing it.’ It was a series of synchronised elements that came together. It had nothing to do with a resurgence in popularity of anything or whatever anyone else was doing.

“To be honest, when we heard the remixed versions of Slow An’ Easy and the rest, we hated them. But when we heard it for the first time on a dodgy rental car radio, I said, ‘Holy shit, this sounds amazing!’ So that was the beginning. My stock quote at the time was, ‘You can teach an old snake new tricks’!”

Buoyed by the success of Slide It In in the US and the increased profile that enhanced record sales had brought to his band, David knew that the next album had to be another big step up and a further streamlining of the Whitesnake sound to accommodate the tastes of his newfound fanbase. Follow-up album 1987 – named after the year in which it was released – was written in the south of France by Coverdale and John Sykes. However, some of the best-known songs were conceived much earlier, including its epic opener, the anthemic Still Of The Night.

“When my mother died I was going through the stuff at her house and found some early demo cassettes,” says David. “One of them was a song that Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple guitarist) and I had been working on which was the basic premise of what would become Still Of The Night. It was totally unrecognisable, so Ritchie doesn’t have anything to worry about… neither do I! Ha ha ha!

“I took it as far as I could then gave it to Sykesy when we were in the south of France, and he put the big guitar hero stuff on there. John hated the blues, so I had to work within those parameters. I manipulated it to be electric blues, but how he performed was fabulous for his time and relatively unique because of the songs. There were a lot of people doing that widdly stuff but they didn’t have the quality of those songs.”

With a line-up completed by bassist Neil Murray and drummer Aynsley Dunbar, Whitesnake decided to record the new album at Little Mountain Studios in Vancouver, Canada. The process was a lengthy and arduous one, not least because David fell ill with a serious sinus infection, which prevented him from singing for long periods and eventually led to a major operation, but the album was slowly pieced together, including the return of Here I Go Again and Crying In The Rain, both tracks that originally appeared on Whitesnake’s 1982 album Saints And Sinners. On 1987, it had been transformed from surly blues rock strut to an impossibly glossy radio-metal anthem, replete with a suitably over-the-top guitar solo from guest musician Adrian Vandenberg, whose own titular band had had a big hit with the ballad Burning Heart in the US in 1984.

“Recording Here I Go Again for the second time wasn’t my idea, to be honest,” states David. “I very rarely like to go back on any level. I can’t even reverse my car because I hate going backwards so much. Ha ha! But on that occasion it paid off, and huge! We had a bunch of hits with that song in different forms. Of course, John Sykes fucking hated it, which is why Adrian was featured on there. He didn’t play one of his better solos on there. It was metal meets country and western! There were two guitarists that I really wanted to work with. One was Michael Schenker, who was fantastic, and Adrian, of course, who I’d met. It was our destiny to work together.”

Released in the first week of April 1987, the was an instant and massive success, particularly in the US where Whitesnake swiftly became a regular fixture on nascent music television channel MTV with the glossy, high-budget promo clips for the album’s biggest songs, Still Of The Night, Here I Go Again and the ultimate power ballad Is This Love, all of which featured David’s wife-to-be Tawny Kitaen.

Chiming perfectly with the glamour and bombast that seemed to be universally popular during the 80s, Whitesnake’s music and endearingly unsubtle visual approach led to sales for 1987 of over eight million copies in the US alone. Despite his plans to head onwards and upwards, David was in no way prepared for such a phenomenal level of success.

“Are you kidding?” he laughs today. “We had a plan but, Jesus Christ, are you kidding? My whole plan was to hopefully make an album that sells a bit more than the last one and hopefully I’ll sing a bit better, it all sounds a bit better and we’ll get to the point quicker in the lyrics. It was all just very basic spices for the meal, you know? We already had a fabulous relationship with radio after we’d laid the foundation with the Slide It In record, but MTV was an entirety new kettle of fish and they just took to the band hugely. I guess we had all the elements that they wanted. So we had a five-year, unbelievable relationship with MTV and it worked out very, very well for us and in essence it helped us to make that transition that I wanted and then it all became astonishingly successful.”

Caught up in a whirlwind of success and never-ending promotional opportunities, David hardly drew breath between the release of 1987 and the end of the tour that followed the release of the next Whitesnake album, 1989’s Slip Of The Tongue. After four intense years of being a massive worldwide star, not to mention being the subject of much press speculation and attention as his marriage to Tawny stumbled to a somewhat messy conclusion, he finally laid Whitesnake to rest, albeit temporarily, as the 90s dawned. With some of the biggest-selling rock albums of all time under his belt, it was hard to imagine exactly what David could possibly do next. So he did nothing.

“By the end of it all I was knackered!” he laughs. “It’s important that I’m able to have time to reflect, which is one of the reasons why I live in an extraordinarily quiet community. I bought this house in Lake Tahoe, so that I can immediately get here and feel that the rusty armour of tours and LA and the music business just fall off as I walk into the house. After the last show in Japan I had my wardrobe girl burn my stage clothing and told the band, ‘Please don’t be waiting for me to call you for any project. If you get an opportunity, please take it, because I don’t know what is going to happen’. But then I’ve done that a lot over the years. I’ve retired more times than fuckin’ Sinatra! Ha ha!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 195, July 2009

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s. 

The late, great Ian McLagan’s CV read like a veritable who’s who of rock’n’roll. He first came to prominence in the mid-60s as one quarter of quintessential mod outfit the Small Faces, prior to which his Muleskinners backed both Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. In the early 70s, he teamed up with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood in The Faces. He’s since shared stages and studios with the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Bonnie Raitt, the Everly Brothers, Georgia Satellites, Melissa Etheridge, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg. In 2008, McLagan – who passed away in 2014 – sat down to share his recollections of just a handful of his collaborators and confidants.

Howlin’ Wolf

Hubert Sumlin and Howlin’ Wolf came to England in December ’64 to do a tour and my first band The Muleskinners, had the absolute honour of playing three gigs with them. One afternoon he came down to watch us rehearse. He walked in the door, just an immense man in a long greatcoat, came over to say hello, put his arms around the whole band at once, and boomed ‘My boys!’ People say that Wolf was a frightening man to know. He wasn’t at all. He was intimidating on-stage to the audience, that was part of his persona, but he was the warmest, sweetest guy.

Roy Orbison

What a character. What a great singer. He was very quiet. I had some tragedy in my life, but that guy had a lot. I can’t even fucking imagine, but what a sweet-natured, lovely man. He was fantastic; his band were a bunch of characters too. On the last night of the tour we did in ’67 they handed him his guitar and they’d tuned it up two semitones and you know how high he used to sing. He started the first song and in between verses he turned around and said: ‘You bastards!’

I don’t miss him. His mum is a dear friend of mine and I hate to say anything bad about him, because I loved Keith and I grew not to love him quite so much because of how he treated Kim [Moon’s ex, subsequently McLagan‘s wife]. Then when Kim left him – I didn’t steal her away, she left him – when we got together he was pretty mean to me and we’d been very close friends. So I said, well, fuck him.

But I’d loved him. We were pals. It’s difficult because of Kim. Anyway, Kim and I had 33 years together. Mandy is my daughter and has been since she was seven… she doesn’t even know him. I’m dad, you know. He was never a dad to her. It’s not his fault, he was ill. I think he was schizophrenic. I’m not a doctor, but I saw many sides of him in half an hour. If that’s not a split personality, I don’t know what is. He was definitely an alcoholic. A great drummer and a very funny man. If you weren’t his wife he was lovely.

Steve Marriott

Sadly missed and sadly misguided in his latter years. We were very pissed off with him when he left The Small Faces to do Humble Pie. Ronnie (Lane, Small Faces bassist) lost more than I did because they wrote together, but I had no money. Me, my first wife Sandy and our young son moved into a little flat for eight guineas a week, I got some old carpet out of a skip, and I was doing the place up. Kenney (Jones, drummer) would help, and funnily enough, Peter Frampton would come around too. We got working on a song, Growing Closer, and he asked me if I’d join Humble Pie. He and I got on very well together, and Steve was still feeling a bit guilty, so I went down to rehearse with them. Greg Ridley didn’t want me to join, and I didn’t like the songs, so I never went back.

When we got The Small Faces back together in ’76, Steve took us for a couple of hundred thousand pounds. As a band we didn’t have any debts, but Steve had a manager (Dee Anthony) and a label (A&M) that he owed money to. So when we got the advance – we got a quarter of a million pounds from Atlantic [sniggers] stupid bastards; those were the days – about £200,000 of that went to pay off Dee and A&M. So we went, ‘Thanks a fucking lot, Steve’. Maybe that’s what he was thinking all along. But it wasn’t fun. I didn’t enjoy it. Then he left for America and I never spoke to him again. A couple of days before he died I was given his number, I should have called him. It was a tragic death, but he lived a long life for the short time he was here.

Keith Richards

I love Keith, or as I call him: Keep Rigid. We had a few drinks at Ronnie (Wood)’s daughter Leah’s wedding. That accident he had when he fell out of the tree, he was sitting up there, went to climb out of it, got caught on something and fell on his head. He was fine until the next day when he went out on a jet ski. The vibrations brought it to a head and he had to be rushed to hospital. He called me when Kim died. Woody and Charlie called me. Everyone’s been wonderful, but Keith was lovely. When my band opened for the Stones last year, I had a half hour with him in his dressing room, and we had a little cuddle. He was very sympathetic, very sweet. And he’s one of the funniest men on the planet.

Mick Jagger

I wasn’t as close to Mick as I was to Keith, Charlie or Bill. Mick is a very complex character. Keith’s classic line to describe Mick’s personality is: ‘It depends whoever she is today, dear’ He is very mercurial, but he has been very sweet to me at different times. Mick is very business-like. You think Keith knows where he’s playing in two days’ time? Mick’s been to the venues, he knows the name of the promoters, knows how many tickets have been sold. It’s all part of his deal; that’s what he does. He’s also a brilliant singer and songwriter. That last Stones album, that’s Mick’s best album: songwriting, playing-wise, he’s come on so much, and the singing on that is unbelievable. There are so many nuances to his voice, I look to him as one of the great singers, Rod’s a great singer too, but not as varied as Mick. One thing they do have in common is that they are both children onstage: they don’t care how they look. They care about their image sure, but they’ll roll about, jump around, anything for the moment.

Ronnie Wood

Ronnie would if he could and unfortunately, he often does. Ronnie’s my brother. I love him dearly and if we don’t see each other for six months or a year, it makes no difference. The moment we’re back together, we’re having a laugh. His daughter’s wedding earlier this year was fabulous. I left at 7.30am, I was dancing for hours. Someone sent me a photo from the reception that I’ve got on my PC desktop of Kenney (Jones), Woody, Mick (Jagger), me, Keith, Jeff Beck and Bill Wyman. We’re all smiling and happy, amazed that we’re all still alive… and we’ve all got hair!

Towser. Uncle Pete. I have a very soft spot for Pete and always have. I first met him and Mitch Mitchell at Jim Marshall’s drum shop before Jim Marshall made amps, in Hanwell because we all lived out that way. This tall, big-nosed geezer came up to me and said “What band are you in then?” It was at a time when we were all striving to do something, and I saw him play in The High Numbers and The Detours. His band and The Muleskinners both went for the same audition for a club in Twickenham and they won, and they should have. He was great even back then, he was doing different stuff with his guitar. He was doing the mike stand across the neck and everything. Keith wasn’t in the band then, but they got the gig, he later told me they only played one gig and it closed down.

Brian Eptsein

Only met him the once. We shared an orange and some acid. That’s why (Small Faces’ manager) Don Arden held Robert Stigwood over a balcony, because he heard someone was trying to take over our management and assumed it was Stigwood. Epstein was only hanging out to take acid. Whether he thought one of The Small Faces was gay, I don’t know, but he certainly didn’t make any approaches and we had a very pleasant evening.

Bob Dylan

I love Bob. There’s nobody better. He’s still writing amazing stuff. Nobody comes near. We had a party the night before the gig when we recorded The Faces’ live Overture And Beginners album and during the course of the night, Peter Grant went up to him and said: ‘Hello Bob, I manage Led Zeppelin’ and Bob Dylan said, ‘I don’t come to you with my problems’.

Rod Stewart

Me and Rod haven’t been close for years, but I love him. He’s my brother; all my bandmates are my brothers. It’s what you do; you form a brotherhood. But recently me and Rod have formed a more secure friendship which is good, and I hope augers well for a Faces reunion. Fingers crossed… we’re talking at least. My standard abiding memory of Rod is whenever you walked into a bar with him, he always opened and held the door for you, and you’d think, ‘what a gentleman’, and then you find yourself at the bar ordering a drink. The four of us thought we were a band before Rod joined. Woody and Ronnie Lane were going to sing a bit, as was I, but when Rod came down, Kenney brought him into the room and as soon as he started singing it all made sense. Suddenly you realised you were in a really good band. Before we were just four guys writing some songs, it was all a bit iffy, but from that moment I knew we had a great band.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 125, October 2008

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records.

There can’t be many better gaffs to house-sit at than Elton John’s pad. Over his sparkling, illustrious career, Elton has never been shy about displaying the fact he likes to live in luxury and he’s not averse to letting friends and fellow artists enjoy it too, even letting them stay at his house when he’s away. One such benefactor is Nick Littlemore of powerhouse Aussie dance trio Pnau and electro-pop duo Empire Of The Sun. Speaking to this writer a few years ago, Littlemore said it was a brilliant place to stay but also a high-end experience that put him a little on edge throughout this stay.

“My wife and I lived at his place in London,” Littlemore explained. “It was amazing but it was a little nerve-wracking because it’s full of incredible priceless and fragile antiques. So whilst it’s wonderful to stay there, it’s also incredibly nerve-wracking that you’re going to bump into something in the middle of the night or if you’re hungover in the morning. It was wonderful but a little daunting.”

When asked whose job it was to take the bins out at Elton’s place, Littlemore said there was a whole team of housekeepers to keep the operation running smoothly. “There’s all these secret passages where staff seem to just appear and disappear again,” he explained. “You leave a napkin out and 10 minutes later it’ll mysteriously disappear.”

Littlemore probably didn’t have to pay rent, but he has paid Elton back in other ways. Pnau were enlisted to come up with a remix and reworking from vintage Elton recordings to help position him as a contemporary artist rather than just a heritage act and they came up with the gargantuan 2021 hit Cold Heart (Pnau remix). The song stitched together Rocket Man, Sacrifice, Kiss The Bride and Where’s The Shoorah?, added a new vocal from Dua Lipa and became Elton’s biggest modern track.

“It reminds me of what happened with [Empire Of The Sun’s Walking On A Dream,” said Littlemore of the song’s success. “It just got so big that it really had very little to do with us anymore. The record was having its own life, its own relations and it’s a juggernaut. I love that you can be in a store or in a taxi or an airport and you hear your record and it takes you a moment to recognise it and then you’re like, ‘oh right, I know that record’. I always maintained that when one makes music, it’s not for the person who made it, it’s for the listener, but we’ve never had it to this degree where, you know, over a billion people listen to this Cold Heart record, it’s a crazy thing, it’s hard to fathom, it’s like understanding infinity.”

Success big enough, you imagine, that Elton might have even forgiven him if he’d broken a vase. Watch the video for Cold Heart (Pnau remix) below:

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood aren’t the only members of Radiohead who have been spreading their wings of late. Whilst the duo have been touring and recording with their trio The Smile, bassist (and Jonny’s older brother) Colin has been moonlighting with another set of cherished alt-rockers, becoming a member of Nick Cave’s backing band the Bad Seeds. He recently completed a 33-date run in arenas with the band and also played on this year’s Wild God record. A week after the tour was finished, he told this writer about what a fantastic experience it had been.

That advice was mainly about tempos (“Steady as she goes,” Greenwood states) and not to play too fast on some of the Bad Seeds’ older material, with Greenwood saying he’d also have to be aware of a lurching Cave now and then. “Sometimes Nick would run over to where Larry’s playing the drums and go, ‘Arghhh!’,” he laughed. “I’d have to give him some space so he can jump up onto the riser and commune with the drums. That was fun. It’s a different experience because Nick has this sort of spiritual fervour with his audience, really special, like a furious euphoria or something, the way he takes the audience with him through the songs. I’ve just had an incredible experience, I had a wonderful time.”

With the tour completed and The Smile seemingly on hold for the time being, there’s a possibility that Radiohead might spring back into action in 2025. But Greenwood says it’s not totally up to him. “I really would love to play some shows at some point but I have to wait for everybody to be free to do them,” he said, diplomatically.

Listen to the recent Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds album Wild God in full below:

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Their synth-driven pop songs have been smash hits and soundtracked some of Hollywood’s biggest films. Yet the Swiss group’s commercial sheen hides a surprising amount of complexity, and a daring, experimental approach that changed the mainstream forever. In 2014 we explored Yello’s incredible history with Dieter Meier.

To call Dieter Meier, frontman with Swiss techno-pop duo Yello, one of a kind in the rock world would be something of an understatement.

In fact, if prog is synonymous with adventure and derring-do, then he’s one of the proggiest men alive. He’s the former professional poker player and one-time member of Switzerland’s national golf team who owns a farm in Argentina and a restaurant in Zurich, manufactures watches, has his own brand of ready meals and is now involved in chocolate production.

The mustachioed art prankster – whose deep baritone wryly defaced the baroque splendour of his Yello partner Boris Blank’s maximalist sound paintings, including hit singles Oh Yeah, Vicious Games, I Love You and The Race – lives the life of an aristocratic millionaire, jet-setting from one curious project to another. If he didn’t exist, you could never make him up; he would seem too far-fetched.

“That’s actually true,” he says. “I had to learn to live with these things. So when I look back – which I rarely ever do – it seems pretty unreal. But obviously I had to accept that I have a life like these Chinese jugglers who have these 20 plates on sticks and they have to move these sticks so that the plates don’t fall down. This seems to be my life, and I enjoy it.”

He began his brilliantly haphazard, accidental career in the late 60s as an experimental filmmaker and conceptual artist. Today, 45 years later, he’s a sort of postmodern Willy Wonka, about to unleash a new cocoa-based taste on an unsuspecting populace.

“It’s a fantastic project,” he announces. “I met one of the world’s leading scientists for aroma and he researched how to get five times more flavour out of the cacao bean. Now I’m going to revolutionise the chocolate world. I call the brand name Chocolate Freak: The Essence Of Cacao.”

Meier, 69, is probably alone in straddling the alternate universes of confectionary invention and quirky electronica. He is certainly the first person in Prog’s experience to spend much of his interview discussing the pros and cons of the hazelnut. Immaculately dressed, surreally suave, he’s like a Dada Bryan Ferry.

“I don’t know about that – Ferry is a very serious, very elegant man,” he parries, then reconsiders. “Maybe it’s not so bad to say I’m a Dada version of Bryan Ferry. I like a good pair of shoes and a well-made jacket.”

Is he bemused by the notion of the authentic rocker, by the scruffy, degenerate hedonist or guttersnipe punk that generally populates the rock milieu? “Well, I definitely was never the tortured, suffering artist,” he replies.

Despite their uniqueness and strangeness, with their combination of Meier’s bluff croon and Blank’s unusual rhythms and lush productions, Yello managed to become commercial oddities, chart regulars and soundtrack staples on both sides of the Atlantic. The extracurricular activities may keep him busy, but it’s Yello’s luxuriant, idiosyncratic progtronica that has been Meier’s passport to wider recognition.

“When I travel to the USA, these quite unfriendly immigration officers, when they read ‘Musician’ on the form, they ask, ‘Is there anything that I should know?’” he recounts, adopting the sceptical tone of an unimpressed customs official in his faltering English.

Then he remembers the trump card that he plays at airports, in his inimitably resonant voice. “I say, ‘Oh yeah.’ And they go, ‘You’re that guy!’ Suddenly they remember Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or some Budweiser commercial and it’s OK. It’s fantastic – my passport to a better service.”

For Kevin Feazey of noise-rockers and Prog favourites The Fierce And The Dead, what’s most impressed about Yello is how make their askew club music richly detailed and intricate while managing to reach a mainstream audience.

“It’s very easy to be avant-garde and progressive when nobody is listening,” says Feazey. “It’s far harder to be surreal and innovative and have original ideas while having hit records. I’ve always looked up to those bands like Yello who are able to be artistically interesting and also commercially appealing.”

Feazey reckons Yello are a cross between a synth-pop act and a krautrock outfit: “Pet Shop Boys meet Can,” as he puts it. “Growing up, I was aware of them. Then, as I got older, I became aware of their genealogy. They’re like Stockhausen with a touch of street-level dance, and they satisfy a lot of people on a lot of levels.

“The general public clearly have a lot wider listening potential than they’re given credit for. Yello, like Talking Heads and The KLF, infiltrated the mainstream, implanting ideas without people realising. That’s really clever, and quite subversive; populist but with massive amounts of intellectual meat behind it. Joe Public can enjoy their songs for their pop catchiness, but you could hang them in an art gallery or write a dissertation on them.

“Even though we’re an instrumental guitar-bass-drums band and they’re an electronic duo, Yello definitely feed into what we do. There’s a real progressive quality to their work.”

Yello formed during Christmas 1978, mere months, as Boris Blank explains, after being exposed to the strange, urgent new DIY electronic sound of The Normal. The latter turned out to be the alias of one Daniel Miller, a former student at the Guildford School Of Art and later the boss of Mute Records. Miller had grown weary of the restrictive nature of guitar music and had discovered the radical potential of the synthesiser. He used a Korg 700S and a four-track tape recorder to create TVOD and Warm Leatherette.

Blank had never heard anything quite like them. “Hearing those songs was a key event in my life,” he recalls. “It was historic. I’d like to personally thank Daniel Miller for that.”

Yello – Blank, Meier and Carlos Perón (who left in 1983) – issued Solid Pleasure, their first album of exotic, quixotic world music-inflected cabaret disco, in 1980, and followed it with 1981’s Claro Que Si. At that point they were regarded as little more than a Euro novelty, nearer to Trio than Kraftwerk. But by 1983’s You Gotta Say Yes To Another Excess, which saw Blank reach new levels of pristine production and Meier scale new heights of crazed invention, Yello began to earn a reputation as serious players in the field of experimental electronic dance pop.

They were the next logical step after The Human League et al, like a comical Cabaret Voltaire, or Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft with Groucho Marx moustaches.

By 1985’s Stella – their first album without Perón – they became the first Swiss group to reach No.1 in their home nation. They were big in the States, and suddenly they were no joke. One Second (1987) featured collaborations with Billy MacKenzie of Associates and Shirley Bassey on a series of alternative torch songs and propulsive beats at right angles to Detroit techno and Chicago house. Then 1988’s Flag gave Yello their biggest UK hit to date in sports TV staple The Race.

Since then they have continued to release albums, while Meier has proceeded along his divergent paths. Today nobody in their right mind would confuse them with Trio. In fact, Prog suggests that with their lavish sonics and grand ambition, they have more in common with Yes and ELP.

“Maybe a little bit,” concedes Meier, considering the haphazard genius of his other half in Yello, “but those guys were trained musicians, whereas Boris and myself were total dilettantes. Boris doesn’t really compose in a traditional way. He’s a sound painter who mixes his colours endlessly.

“Each brush stroke leads to another, and at the end he surprises himself with a painting. But it’s a totally unstructured way of composing, handing yourself over to the canvas and the dynamic of the stroke.”

In some circles, Yello are acclaimed as founding fathers of Eurotronic soundscapes on a par with Kraftwerk. Does he agree with that description? “Yeah, but Kraftwerk are minimalists and Boris is a maximalist. I always compare Kraftwerk with the painter Mondrian and Boris with Rousseau, the man who invented jungles and fantasies and came up with these rich, lush, naive paintings.”

Ironically, after 36 years at the forefront of proto-electronica, Meier has just made his first solo album – and it’s not a synth-fest at all. Titled Out Of Chaos, it includes forays into chanson and conventional balladeering, with Meier actually singing instead of drolly barking. It features real live musicians such as Thomas Wydler (drummer in Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds), Nackt (producer for Mute recording artist Apparat), Ephrem Lüchinger (piano), Tobias Preisig (violin), Nicolas Rüttimann (guitar), Ben Lauber (producer, synthesizer) and electropunk T.Raumschmiere, aka Marco Haas.

The album even sees Meier do what Yello hardly ever did: play live. It’s like seeing Kraftwerk go country and western. Was Blank horrified by Meier’s solo excursion? “Not at all. He actually came to see me in concert and he said, ‘Dieter, you pulled it off!’ He was sceptical because he’s a perfectionist; he likes things very polished and smart and slick, and of course this is the opposite – rough and emotional and authentic. But he loved it! He’s a fan, absolutely.”

So why the title Out Of Chaos? “It’s a comment on how, whatever I do, chaos is the mother of invention,” he says. “With an unstructured idea you can come up with something interesting. If you’re walking footsteps you’ve walked before, you’re just an epigone of yourself and therefore not interesting. I always start in chaos and slowly find some structures – only to leave these structures again, hopefully to enter another chaos.”

So is this avant-chanson version of Meier the ‘real’ him? “Well, this is definitely the real singer me. Of course, it’s all at the level of artifice – in my real life I’m not singing – but this is the identity of Dieter Meier as the singer onstage or in the studio; whereas in Boris’ sound paintings I’m more of an actor in a not-existent movie, and I have all these different characters, different voices and approaches.”

From absurdist electro iconoclast to left-field troubadour with a twist, what has he learned from his chaotic journey through music’s different genres? “I’ve learned not to take myself over-seriously,” he says. “That’s a very serious business! I hope I’m getting to a point where, in 50 years, when I’m 122 years old, I can say goodbye with a smile on my face. That’s basically the idea.”

Paul Lester is the editor of Record Collector. He began freelancing for Melody Maker in the late 80s, and was later made Features Editor. He was a member of the team that launched Uncut Magazine, where he became Deputy Editor. In 2006 he went freelance again and has written for The Guardian, The Times, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, Classic Rock, Q and the Jewish Chronicle. He has also written books on Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Bjork, The Verve, Gang Of Four, Wire, Lady Gaga, Robbie Williams, the Spice Girls, and Pink.