Stella (album)

Stella is the fourth studio album by the Swiss electronic band Yello, first released in Germany, Switzerland and Austria on 29 January 1985, and in the UK and US in March 1985. 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 more of a synthpop 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.

Composition and writing

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. He told the US magazine Trouser Press that the outline of 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.