Hailed as pioneers of synth-pop and techno music and still filling halls in the wake of a career spanning four decades, the Zurich duo has just won the Swiss Grand Award for Music. Speaking to SWI swissinfo.ch, they explain the secret to success: not to care about success at all.

Boris Blank is the musical brains, but he confesses that he can’t read a score. Dieter Meier is the singer who learned how to sing on the job. Together they are Yello, probably the most globally successful and influential Swiss band in history. These two assumed dilettantes couldn’t be more different from each other – Boris, the shy genius behind the group's unique samples, and Dieter the lyricist and front man, who also doubles as a business maverick, bohemian, conceptual artist, and gambler.

Yello has so many contradictions in its DNA that it’s hard to fathom how the duo became a sudden global hit right from their beginnings, in the early 1980s. Maybe the reason lies in the fact that they have always been outside of all trends and movements.

Blank and Meier welcomed SWI for a chat in their studio in the noble hills overlooking Zurich, but they insisted on being interviewed one after the other rather than together. We asked their manager whether they were no longer on speaking terms, despite displaying genuine brotherly affection and cracking jokes at each other. “It’s a marriage of 40 years,” replied the manager, “and each one of them has his own style and personality”.

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