Released on 29 January 1985, "Stella" was the fourth studio album by Swiss electronic band Yello, it was the first album made by the band without founder member Carlos Perón, and with his departure the remaining duo of Boris Blank and Dieter Meier
began to move away from experimental electronic sounds towards a more
commercial synthpop and cinematic soundtrack style.
As well as becoming
the first album ever by a Swiss group to top the Swiss album chart, it
was the band's breakthrough album internationally, helped by the success
of the song "Oh Yeah", which 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 recording sessions took place from mid-1983 to mid-1984, at the band's Yello studio on the shore of Lake Zurich. Yello decided to try the new digital mixing process instead of the
standard analogue process, and in August 1984 they visited Hartmann
Digital Studio in Untertrubach Germany where engineer Tom Thiel began
mixing the album. However, Yello abruptly cancelled the sessions after
just ten days, unhappy with the sound of the album.
Two singles were originally released from Stella, both of
them after the album's release. "Vicious Games" was released on 27
February 1985, with a video shot in Yello's Rote Fabrik (Red Factory)
working space, featuring Blank and actress Mirjam Montandon miming to
Winters' vocals (Winters was not available for the video shoot). The second single, "Desire", was released on 4 June 1985. Meier's
friend, Swiss TV station owner Paul Grau, had suggested that the video
should be shot in Havana in Cuba
to match the song's Latin sound, and the video, which included three
orchestras and around 150 dancers, was filmed there in May 1985. Yello's
stay in Cuba was filmed by a German TV station for a documentary, Yello auf Kuba (Yello in Cuba), and the duo were also accompanied on the trip by photographer Anton Corbijn: some of his photographs appeared on the back cover of the single and in the booklet for the 2005 reissue of Stella. The song was later used in the Miami Vice episode "Killshot" in 1986, and in the film Dutch in 1991.
No further singles were planned to be released from Stella, but something odd happened in 1986 Yello fan and film director John Hughes asked permission to use the track "Oh Yeah" in his new film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Featured during a scene involving a Ferrari 250 GT,
and again over the closing credits sequence, interest in the track
caused "Oh Yeah" to be released in the US in July 1986. It was
eventually released as a single in Europe in September 1987, following
the song's appearance in a second Hollywood film, The Secret of My Success.
Some of the songs and themes of Stella had begun as part of an operatic stage show titled Snowball that Meier had started developing in 1983, the show was "Boris Blank plays a medieval magician/musician whose songs have an almost Rasputin-like
influence over his listeners. The powers that be consider him so
dangerous that they banish him to a sealed-in mountain cave. So that he
doesn't go mad from sensory deprivation, he must resort to the powerful
imagery of his music. The show gets its title from those little
water-and-scenery filled trinkets that 'snow' when shaken. The magician
uses one of these 'snowballs' as a sort of surrogate crystal ball." In the end Blank felt he was not a good enough actor to play the lead role, and Meier abandoned plans to put on Snowball as a stage show due to costs. After reworking the plot and changing the title to Lightmaker, the project eventually appeared as a film in 2001.
Certain aspects of the Snowball project were retained for the band's new album, including its title. Meier told the Dutch music magazine Vinyl in an interview in April 1985 that the name for the album had been inspired by one of the characters from Snowball, saying, "Stella is a character of fiction. The idea is that it is a hysterical singer, sitting in a stalactite cave near Capri, singing his insane arias." The track "Stalakdrama" was intended to be the show's opening overture.
Blank said that the name of the track "Koladi-ola" came from a
lion's roar that he had recorded from an album of animal sounds: after
pitching the roar up one octave he believed that this is what the roar
sounded like phonetically. Meier explained the story behind "Domingo", saying, "Domingo is a
false preacher who, with a few sentences, is trying to impress the
people there, and then the choir chants 'Domingo, you showed us just
nothing like no one before', it means 'you didn't show us anything
either, it's all nonsense what you said, but somehow you did it right'.
Domingo de Santa Clara actually existed. There was an Abraham a Santa Clara,
he was some religious fanatic. I don't know where I got it from, but
the name pleased me very much: Abraham a Santa Clara. And since the
name Domingo pleases me as well, I called him Domingo."
Describing the composition of "Oh Yeah", the album's best known
track, Blank said, "First I did the music and then I invited Dieter to
sing along, and he came up with some lines which I thought, 'no Dieter,
it's too complicated, we don't need that many lyrics'. I had the idea of
just this guy, a fat little monster sits there very relaxed and says,
"Oh yeah, oh yeah". So I told him, 'Why don't you try just to sing on
and on 'oh yeah'?... Dieter was very angry when I told him this and he
said, 'are you crazy, all the time "Oh yeah"? Are you crazy?! I can't do
this, no no, come on, come on.' And then he said, 'some lyrics, like
"the moon... beautiful", is this too much?!' and I said, 'no, it's OK',
and then he did this 'oh yeah' and at the end he thought, 'yeah it's
nice', he loved it himself also. And also I wanted to install lots of
human noises, all kind of phonetic rhythms with my mouth; you hear lots
of noises in the background which are done with my mouth."
The album received mixed reviews from the UK music press, considered it an album of moods and atmospheres, it must be
listened to at maximum volume in a very dark room, others were less impressed, saying, "Their slick marriage... no, make it a steamy affair,
between accessible splicing montage methods and sophisticated disco has
the necessary balance of artifice and sweet melody, crisp danceateria [sic]
moves and conceptual laziness (posing as artful dodging) that could
conceivably pull the wool over people's eyes... Post-Fairlight, Yello
are clever, sometimes too clever-clever, occasionally jarring as the
montaging lays code upon codas." Reviews became different in the years to come.
Stella Track List:
1. Desire
2. Vicious Game
3. Oh Yeah
4. Desert Inn
5. Stalakdrama
6. Koladi-ola
7. Domingo
8. Sometimes (Dr. Hirsch)
9. Let Me Cry
10. Ciel Ouvert
11. Angel No
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario