The Yello Piece

This appeared as Shirley and Company in NME 27 June 1987, and it's probably my own favourite piece of writing. As an interview it’s actually a Reply Record, to Grace Jones’s ZTT LP Slave to the Rhythm : the Bassey quotes mainly come from I.Penman’s sleevenotes. I told him this once, and he laughed and said he’d nicked them from Bataille in the first place. Happy days! The caption for the Yello pic in NME was nice also: “Deiter and Boris: Helvetica Bold”, written IN Helvetica Bold hoho. My kind of joke, though I don’t know whose gag it actually was. I never wrote the piece I wanted to, mind, the one on Trevor Horn and Morley and all, the one that would have started “Last night I dreamed I went to ZTT again...” This is as close as I got, and probably as close as I was ever going to get.