Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  The Turkish photographer who accompanied her to Cannes became her boyfriend, and it was he who first suggested a career in music. ‘I did a little bit of singing at school, and I love music, but I never imagined it as a career.’ Seyyal’s first single disappeared without trace in the summer of 1975, but her pouting, bikini-clad form on its cover earnt a lucrative residency at a Black Sea casino.

  Seyyal arrived for her debut wearing torn jeans and what my structural engineer calls ‘a face full of nose rings’. The outraged casino manager immediately summoned one of Turkey’s leading designers, who beheld Seyyal’s ‘magnificent body’ and declared, ‘I cannot dress this girl, I can only undress her.’ So it was that she took to the stage wearing only a light pink piece of cloth, before announcing to the audience that she didn’t know any Turkish songs. Her repertoire that night consisted of Cabaret and ‘two or three German songs’, but these were delivered with such sensual verve and energy that a bellowing audience demanded four repeats of each. ‘This girl is an animal!’ shouted the ecstatic manager.

  ‘Seyyal Taner never waited to become a famous singer,’ said a media commentator many years later. ‘She went on-stage one night and became a star right at that moment.’ The woman was a phenomenon. At fifteen she goes to a gig in Istanbul and within months is acting alongside the top film stars of the era; at twenty-three she steps on-stage with a repertoire of four songs and before she steps off Turkey has a new sensation.

  No female singer in Turkey had ever previously dared to move on-stage; Seyyal, who had toured with Los Bravos and – one night in Germany – jammed with Tina Turner, didn’t dare to stay still. ‘We had nothing like that here,’ she confirms stridently as the waiter tops us all up and finally delivers some food I can eat – grilled sea bream, straight from the Bosporus. It’s full of bones but at that stage I don’t care; even the head goes down the hatch almost whole. ‘Nobody in Turkey can teach me or tell me any new stuff, no one. You have to find your own way at that time. I was the only person who can dance and sing and make her own costume, her own show, her own group.’

  Norway and Turkey wouldn’t appear to have much in common, but both are cultures where a little talent and a big fat sack of brazen self-confidence can take you anywhere. The cuttings describe her as ‘the Turkish Cher’: ‘She did not have a great or unique voice,’ wrote one profiler, ‘but she was different, crazy in her clothes, rebellious, sexy, energetic …’

  Seyyal later says she didn’t want to be famous, that fame found her by chance, but if ever there was an example of someone making their own luck, it’s right next to me now, knocking back the raki. Fortune favours the brave, and in showbiz they don’t come much braver. In 1979, touring Anatolia at a time when nationwide political unrest had led to the imposition of martial law in the province, Seyyal found herself facing a huge and unruly crowd of right-wingers in the Black Sea resort of Sinop. Her carefully selected opening number, notoriously composed by a recently imprisoned local socialist, incited an instant hail of coins and missiles that forced her backing band off the stage; facing the barrage alone, Seyyal strode to the front of the stage and addressed the mob with deafeningly amplified righteousness. ‘I am a woman,’ she bellowed, ‘but I am not afraid of you! I will not go! The man who wrote this song is one of the greatest writers in Turkey – we should all respect him! There can be no right and left in this business! Life is a cabaret, old chums!’ Even shorn of that last fabricated exhortation, her words had an extraordinary effect. As Seyyal defiantly launched into an a cappella reprise of the inflammatory song, a deep silence fell over the audience; a moment later, in my engineer’s words, ‘the coins thrown on the stage are replaced by gillyflowers’. Her backing band sheepishly stepped back out from the wings, and in what has clearly been a career-defining tactic, Seyyal sang the song five times on the trot.

  By then she was already a national pop legend. Her third single went to the top of the charts in 1976, and led to a huge-selling album. ‘Suddenly I was very famous,’ she announces, with an appealing absence of self-effacement. ‘People are going crazy, following me everywhere. When I am walking right, they are walking right. I go left, they go left. You know what I’m saying, nyeh?’ Extricating bream vertebrae from the back of my throat with raki-fuelled indifference, I nod.

  Press profiles talk of this period as a golden era of Turkish girl-pop, with Seyyal as its queen of sass. Fan clubs mushroomed; in 1977 she was voted the sexiest woman in Turkey. ‘You had no rivals,’ simpered a recent interviewer, with reference to that time. ‘You were loved and wondered at.’ Her response: ‘I still have no rivals.’

  Yet it was the type of celebrity that rarely endures, and by the early eighties Seyyal was barely recording. As her career went off the boil, so Seyyal’s personal life overheated. A tabloid exposé in November 1983 revealed a love between the ‘brunette of the stages’ and actor Halil Ergün; within months, she tells me, her moribund marriage to Harald was formally dissolved (though the Turkish media had been describing her as divorced for almost fifteen years). ‘We are still friends,’ she mutters, without conviction, when I probe deeper. ‘But, you know, I was so young when I married him. And for a Turk and a German it was hard to meet in the middle.’

  Harald aside she claims only four boyfriends, all of them long-term, most of them showbiz impresarios. ‘They were charismatic, intellectual, Turkish in nationality but not like a Turkish man,’ she told a female journalist recently, as they drank whisky aboard her current beau’s yacht. ‘And they balanced my personality – I am an ill-tempered woman!’ This non-revelation was underlined in an accompanying account of the time she discovered photographs of another woman in her photographer boyfriend’s desk: ‘Everybody was in a panic. I broke the office to pieces, and then him.’

  A scrawny stray cat scrabbles noisily up a tree beside us and begins mewing pitifully from a high branch; Melis leaps to her feet and dragoons passers-by and waiting staff into what swiftly becomes a complex and raucous rescue. ‘And then in 1986 I make another boom record, nyeh,’ drawls an oblivious Seyyal, leapfrogging the intervening years when – as I later confirm – little of professional import occurred. ‘So once again I am very famous in Turkey.’

  The blandness of her tone in declaring this repeated achievement is significant: in a pattern with which I was now familiar, conquest of the domestic market can often underwhelm. In Seyyal’s case, the imperative for a career beyond the borders was made more urgent by her professional perfectionism and individual extravagance: ‘While on tour,’ wrote one media biographer, ‘Taner wants to enjoy the same conditions as she has in Istanbul, and her new group Locomotif soon understand how she likes every detail correct on-stage. To achieve all this, she pays from her own pocket if required.’

  This contemporary editorial view is succinctly encapsulated by Seyyal: ‘Nyeh, it was hard work. And very expensive – I am getting one lira, and spending six lira …’ Her red lips curl in weary scorn. ‘Pah … this mew-sick, I pay too much: my money, my health, my brain – I paid a lot of things. What music gave to me, I gave two times music back.’ A grimace evolves into a small snort of amusement. ‘And then it’s stupid, boring Eurovision.’

  As soon as the E-word pops out, Melis enters the conversational fray with a vengeance: the four lightly bearded musicians who took to the stage as Locomotif, she swiftly emphasises, were originally her backing group. Nearly twenty years later, the ‘Seyyal Taner and Locomotif’ tag still rankles, a grievance that evidently outweighs any temptation to whistle nonchalantly away from the nul-points wreckage. Seyyal’s CV is bulked out with conspicuous non-Eurovision achievements; for Melis, her career low-point has to double up as its highlight. ‘All the stars go for Eurovision then,’ she says; Seyyal indeed had tried the year before, falling just short in the national qualifier. ‘If you are a big one, you go for it. It was such a big thing at that time.’

  These last three words are becoming something of a catchphrase; it’s as if we’re recalling
events from fifty years before, rather than just eighteen. ‘But just think of this!’ Melis blurts, hoarsely. ‘Eurovision was in! It was cool!’ As a bevy of waiters interrupt our debate, bustling around picking up plates and – inward sigh of fuzzy resignation – refilling glasses, I reflect that Turkey has packed three decades of pop-culture evolution into one and a half. They’ve been fast-tracked from solemn, Nordic-model Eurovision worship to jeering Brit-pattern scorn.

  In 1987, though, the pressure was intense. ‘It was huge, like a war!’ Melis almost shrieks. ‘Everybody watches it – we have only three TV stations at that time. Now it’s maybe 400.’ Indeed so: grisly and spartan as my room was, its incorporated satellite TV boasted more viewing options than the Big John beach bungalow and all my Scandinavian hotels combined. In a dedicated forty-five-minute quest for nipples and Al-Jazeera, I’d barely clicked through a quarter. ‘So we felt absolutely that this was for the whole country, that we are promoting Turkey to 500 million Europe people.’

  Across the Bosporus, all the lights in Asia abruptly flick off; my dining companions merely shrug when I point this out, and two minutes later they all flick back on. Sitting alone by the river, I’d been powerfully impressed by Turkey’s strategic and mercantile importance: what a momentous coup to welcome into the EU a nation that straddled both the world’s most densely populated continents. But now, reminded again of Turkey’s shambolic infrastructure, I can’t help asking my dining companions if this place is really ready to become the newest star on the Brussels flag.

  ‘I hope it will be, that we are in Europe Union,’ says Melis. ‘Of course we want. The French are against, but everybody knows they are very selfish people. Maybe we must wait many years.’ Ah: the true spirit of Europe. But perhaps it won’t take them that long. After all, a mere twenty years bridge the pan-continental scorn heaped upon Opera with Turkey’s first Eurovision victory.

  ‘Stupid, boring Europe politic,’ drawls Seyyal. A woman of deeds, not words – long decades before Turkey had even begun to ponder aligning itself with all those busy little countries to its west, she was over in Spain marrying a German. ‘Turkey cares too much. About this and about Eurovision. At that time Turkey is always doing really so bad in this competition, but every year they expect more.’ The record book, like everything else on the planet, isn’t about to argue with her: Turkey first entered Eurovision in 1975, and in the pre-Seyyal era had only once broken into the top ten; after her it would take nine further attempts before they did so again. This mightn’t be the most tactful moment to bring up Çetin Alp, but I do so anyway. Surely, I suggest, his pioneering zero made theirs a little easier to bear.

  ‘Who?’ asks Seyyal, genuinely clueless.

  ‘You remember this super-weird song,’ says Melis, and the tact issue evaporates. ‘So difficult to listen to. In fact,’ a guilty chortle, ‘it was really the worst song of Eurovision history!’

  Seyyal shrugs in continued ignorance, but accompanies her friend’s burgeoning smoked cackle regardless. ‘Why we have that song?’ gasps Melis between helpless, cough-bridged guffaws. She’s a great snorter, too, and in full comedic flow lets rip with a remarkable Woody Woodpecker machine-gun. ‘For what?’ At length she gathers herself, dabs her eyes and the end of that freckled nose, and after a final, rogue giggle, says, ‘He died actually.’

  A three-woman bray of explosive laughter; it’s all getting a bit Ab Fab. ‘We are good girls,’ quavers Seyyal, ‘but you have to be careful!’

  For rather a long time they seem to forget I’m there, cackling, waving their arms about, babbling in Turkish – a surprisingly gentle, melodic language, with none of the phlegm-dislodging hacks I’d been expecting.

  I sit back, fuzzily content, happy for a breather – in the post-Finn world, it’s difficult to relax fully in a nul-pointer’s conversational presence. I watch the ships pass under the bridge; I run my bleary eye across Asia; I down a litre of water in a rearguard assault on the rampaging axis of raki and red wine. Then, amidst the cross-table babel, the words ‘Johnny Logan’ snag in my ear, and I reluctantly stick an oar in.

  It’s a different Seyyal who talks me guardedly through the run-up to Brussels. ‘Newspapers were saying that this time we must succeed in Eurovision,’ she says, those soft features gradually hardening into an expression of wry, slightly bitter aloofness that will do her, give or take the occasional rant or cackle, for the next hour or so. ‘TV company, music company, all my friends, all my producers, everybody say, “You can win it, with your style, your music, you’re the person for European people.” Hah!’ How significant that for the Turks, the Scandinavians, for us, Europeans are someone else. Perhaps understandable from a woman born way east of Damascus, I think, but still: act like a gatecrasher, and you’ll get treated like one.

  ‘So in the end, I say, “Pah – why not?”’ I suppose the money softened the blow, I suggest intemperately. ‘Money? You make jokes?’ A single bark of scorn.

  ‘Maybe we make money if we win,’ offers Melis, in a conciliatory tone; at twenty-three and with a significantly lower profile than Seyyal’s, Eurovision success was inestimably more important to her. ‘And maybe we think we can win: in the national competition here, you know, we were by far the first.’ By now fully conversant with Eurovision’s capacity to muddle memories, I don’t point out that Şarkιm Sevgi Üstüne in fact edged out runner-up Günesli Bir Resim çiz Bana by 142 points to 140.

  Melis distractedly pops another cig in her mouth, hands one to N. Dogroll, and lights both. Glazing over, she sighs out a plume of smoke just above Seyyal’s head, then pulls herself back into focus with a brisk shake of the head and a smile. ‘But in Brussels it was fun! We were the party people, in every second! We were going about the city with Sandra Kim, doing photos in these ancient squares … One day, the King and Queen invite all the Eurovision singers to have champagne in the botanic gardens. At nine o’clock in the morning!’

  Seyyal’s furrowed look melts into a gentle beam of eager recollection. She clearly has no memory of Sandra Kim, whose 1986 victory had brought the contest to her Belgian homeland, but royalty … she’s away. ‘We are laughing with Queen and with King, and I was too laughing – my God! Like crazy! The Queen, she says, “Why are you laughing?” And nobody else is, all very serious. I say, “We are from Istanbul, we laugh always!”’ No arguments there. ‘We enjoy, we laugh, we dance – and we make beautiful joke with King and Queen!’ I find I’m thinking of Jahn and Serge Gainsbourg in a Paris nightclub, of Kojo in his fume-filled sedan chair. And Rudyard Kipling: ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.’

  But as quickly as her mood has lightened, it darkens. For almost the entire meal Seyyal has been trying quite hard to steer us away from Brussels and its stupid, boring contest, but now she seems to sense there’s no turning back. We’ve started, so we’ll finish. And after that Bollinger with King Baudouin, it’s going to be downhill all the way. ‘Some things I didn’t like so much,’ she says, her voice lowered. ‘This press conference. The people ask us just the po-liti-cal questions, because we are Turkish, about Cyprus, about Greece.’ Her jaw clenches; she leans forward. ‘We were so mad and sad and angry, and I start to shout and I gave them a beautiful big lesson, especially the Greek person, nyah-nyah-nyah – so silly and stupid. We are there for music, we are non-politics, why are you asking us this stupid, boring, politic questions? You have to shut your mouth and take care about us!’

  She sits back and nods once, with fierce hauteur. It’s a coins-to-gillyflowers performance: Eurovision’s bitterest internal conflict, dismissed in a swift, majestic tirade. Melis rallies to the cause. ‘This English guy who talks for the TV?’ Her curled lip gives a clue: it’s Terry again, more notorious across the sprawling Eurovision empire than I’d ever have believed. ‘You know what he says? “Here are the ugly Turkish people.”’

  Not quite up to his normal repartee, I think. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have quite, um …�
�� Sensing Seyyal’s spine stiffen beside me, I tail off.

  ‘We haven’t forget what he says! People in Turkey, we were shocked by this!’

  I nod, then mumble: ‘Well, he’s actually Irish.’

  Seyyal bridles at this craven deflection; her nostrils flare. ‘Nothing to do with Irish, England, Russia! It’s in his brain, the problem!’ She taps her head, then chinks a ring against her glass. ‘There is good wine, bad wine, and good people, bad people. Who says those things is a bad person. Who give me no points – this is not bad people. This is just … bad music.’

  Melis tilts her an aggrieved look. Thank Christ: for a fearful moment it looked as if they were all set to go Kalvik on my ass, make me suffer for the sins of the Wogan. Instead I can just sit back and watch them settle their artistic differences. On the recording, it now becomes difficult to tell who’s who – they talk over each other, trying to get their point across first, and, failing that, loudest. In Turkey this doesn’t qualify as an argument, but there’s nonetheless a sense that the Locomotif power struggle is still being fought out.

  Seyyal had been in showbiz since Melis had been on solids, but for a woman this was a weakness as well as a strength. Age hadn’t been a problem for Jahn, Finn and Kojo, all in their thirties when the scoreboard let them down, but the harsh realities of the business meant that at thirty-five, Seyyal would have seen Melis – twelve years younger and six inches taller – as a threat. ‘All women are rivals,’ she told an interviewer recently. ‘They smile to your face but one day they will stab you in the back. It’s the reason why I have not been a good friend with women in any part of my life.’

  Hearing Şarkιm Sevgi Üstüne for the first time, Melis at least was modestly impressed. ‘It was written by a Turkish guy, but sung in French at that time, a nice song. You know what is about?’ My head, which appears to have doubled in weight since the arrival and dispatch of the most recent bottle of raki, manages a slow lateral movement. ‘About love,’ says Melis, ‘but a huge love. Not for one person, but all people … friendship, peace …’ She trails away, leaving Seyyal to smirk slightly at the humdrum hoariness of these Euro-themes.