Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  Translated as My Song is About Love, Şarkιm Sevgi Üstüne kicks off with a burst of quasi-kasbah ululating keyboard; I’ve downloaded it from Andreas’s DVD on to my MP3 player, and I hand Melis the earphones. She plugs them in and her head jiggles in delight; soon she’s mouthing along with some animation. ‘Oh, it’s a long time since I hear this in Eurovision version!’ She giggles, handing the earphones over to Seyyal. ‘But you know it’s a lot on the radio now, at this moment. Yeah! One love!’ And in the chorus, twenty-eight consecutive las – not a bad effort, but some way short of the Eurovision record of ninety-four set by Portugal in 1973.

  They pass the earphones back and forth, Melis laughing, Seyyal rolling her brown eyes. I allow my lips to crease into a wistful smile: this is the closest I’ll come to realising that regrettably abandoned intention to coax my nul-pointers into a singalong. After a couple of verses they take an earphone each, heads craned together across the table. Slowly, Seyyal’s look of sullen indifference melts into resigned indulgence, and towards the end they briefly sing along together. For one night only, Seyyal Taner and Locomotif are reformed. And I’m back in my bedroom, two weeks before, watching Victor Laszlo cede the stage to seven white-clothed, dark-haired Turks.

  If it had been just been Melis and Seyyal, Şarkιm Sevgi Üstüne would have done just fine. Possibly even quite well. The mad-or-bad debate on the causes of Eurovision failure is irrelevant – Opera might have been both, but Şarkιm, at least considered as a whole, was neither. Which isn’t to say there’s any difficulty in pinpointing its fatal flaw.

  Two sparky young women in white gloves and fringed jackets, bouncing around in energetic formation: you want to look closer. But five blokes behind them, wearing and doing the same: you want to turn over. With her luxuriant Donna Summer hair, frilly tutu and microphone-stand-grabbing stage presence, Seyyal showcases the verve and allure that made her an instant star. Tonsorial history hasn’t been quite so kind to Melis, but overlooking that stacked-up afro quiff, and in particular its bleached central stripe, it’s no chore to watch her happily strut the stage. Both of them look like they’re having the time of their lives.

  The beat is relentless, driving things forward with a hyperactive sense of purpose that detracts at least a little from the cheesily ethnic keyboard fills. There’s a very retro, rather commercial feel to all the breathless, shimmying vigour: you’re almost expecting some period consumer product – a Hoovermatic twin-tub, perhaps, or the all-new Triumph Toledo – to be unveiled behind the band on a spotlit turntable. It’s a shot in the arm after the shot-in-the-head, blandly plodding Euro-pap that’s gone before and will come after. (The 1987 winner – and the only singer to take that big bouquet a second time – was the fearsomely insipid Johnny Logan. Despite this unparalleled success, or in fact because of it, the man christened Séan Sherrard has never managed to carve out any sort of extra-Eurovision career for himself.)

  For a couple of jaunty verses it seems the disco-trousered buffoons behind Melis and Seyyal are merely there to pace about in flare-flapping unison and add a little musical authenticity: all have an instrument hung round their white-collared necks, even if this orchestra includes one of those irritating strap-on keyboards then so de rigueur. (You know what I mean: think Herbie Hancock and – if you can bear to – Level 42.) And then it comes, the nul-points trigger. The background chap with the horridest haircut – half Manilow, half Melis – plucks the mike from Seyyal’s stand and strides towards the nearest camera. From Reykjavik to Rome, you can almost hear the sound of jurors’ pencils being dropped.

  In a terrible, screen-filling moment we are made aware that there are to be none of the jaunty pop-smiles essayed by his female superiors. The head settles deep between the shoulders, the fists are clenched and gathered tight to the chest. A look of exasperated strain contorts the reddening features above: a compelling portrayal of advanced constipation, which when he begins to sing intensifies into one of mortal agony, as if he’s just been shot in the back. In strangled distress he rasps his final words: ‘My song is full of friendship, my road is the road to wisdom.’ The Turkish entry is less than a minute old, but the points – all none of them – are already in the bag.

  Melis plucks out the earphones and plonks them on the lavishly soiled linen with a small tut and a sigh. ‘Pah,’ she groans. ‘That Garo Mafyan.’

  ‘The Manilow guy, right?’ I say, following up with an impression that may more convincingly suggest an energetic tortoise concluding the act of love. Wrong, say the concerned faces angled towards me. I catch N. Dogroll glancing significantly at my raki.

  ‘He was conductor,’ says Seyyal, slowly. ‘And he destroy our song with his crazy, crazy speed.’

  My ears have almost returned to their normal colour by the time I’ve had it all explained. The scurrying breathlessness of Locomotif’s performance was not, I am made to understand, in any way intentional: old Garo, falling victim to what Melis calls ‘Eurovision Stress Syndrome’, whisked the orchestra to the song’s conclusion fourteen seconds early. ‘Maybe it don’t seem much,’ says Seyyal, a little shrilly, ‘but fourteen seconds in three minute is like ten per cent!’

  Of the nul-pointers I’d so far met, only Jahn admitted watching the relevant fateful performance more than once. But Seyyal has clearly analysed her Eurovision demise with the scientific dedication of a forensic pathologist, going through the tape again and again to establish the precise cause of death.

  ‘In the rehearsal, it was fantastic, beautiful singing, beautiful choreography,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘People loved it – the press say we were a favourite.’ Indeed so: Martin Faulkner, a Eurovision authority who’d offered many helpful insights, told me he recalled more than one delegate tipping Turkey for a podium finish. ‘But on that night … he start to go fast, we start to run, we start to shout, like fast-watch on a video. And nyeh: just like that it’s finished!’ A part of me wonders if she’s clutching at straws, but watching the final again at home I concede her point. From the second verse on, they’re gabbling to squeeze the words in; more than once, Seyyal shoots a look of concern in Garo’s direction. And he paid the price. Brussels was Garo’s third Eurovision, and his last. ‘What is your limit in forgiving?’ a journalist asked Seyyal some years later. It isn’t difficult to picture Ms Taner’s expression as she delivered her reply: ‘I never forgive.’

  ‘So: we were unlucky,’ she says, pursing those enormous lips. ‘You see: it was not my fault!’ A nod of satisfied finality. ‘End of story.’ She shivers slightly, rubbing her silk-sheathed arms. Seconds later, an unbidden waiter glides up to wrap her shoulders in a fleece-lined cloak.

  A rather sombre silence falls over the table. Seyyal shifts about and glances expectantly towards the maître d’: we haven’t even got to the voting and she’s about to get the bill. ‘No!’ I yelp. ‘Not end of story. Just … end of chapter. You went off stage, and …’

  I’m counting on Melis, and she doesn’t let me down. ‘When the votes are coming through, we were just, pah! What? What? And it came to the final result and we were saying, “No, this is not us, this is not right.”’ She smiles helplessly. ‘I called my parents, and they said, “Well, you weren’t that bad.” And Johnny Logan was so friendly, I love him, and the Israel guys, they were so nice, and sad, they cried with us.’

  As she says all this, Seyyal leans forward and with an air of purpose slowly pours herself a tall raki. OK, she seems to be thinking, if you want to do this, let’s do it. When Melis falls silent; she does it.

  ‘We don’t cry. We are angry! We are shocked: what, zero?’ A look of pantomime disdain. ‘Zero! Is that what we deserve? Pah! Shit! You goddam liars European caaaarntries! You don’t understand nothing!’ I’ve come to imagine Seyyal’s early film roles regularly requiring her to spit in a stubbled bandido’s face, pulling the very face she now pulls. ‘And then you know what I do?’ Garrotte Garo? Torture Terry? Maim Melis? ‘I dance! I dance like I am the winner!’

>   Everyone laughs, largely with relief. The fuck-you-all defiance of the bloodied-but-unbowed loser – this is why I’m here, talking turkey with Turkey’s turkeys. I’ve come to taste the elixir of life after death: to a stage-phobic speaker-hider-behinder, there is no performer more awesomely heroic than the one who endures crippling, catastrophic indignity in the entertainment world’s most powerful spotlight, then swats it away and moves on. As a devotee of When Good Pets Go Bad, I claim no immunity from the unwholesome impulse that draws crowds to the police tape, but there’s no appeal in leering at the twisted nul-points metal unless I’m assured that the airbags and seatbelts have done their job, that the dashboard isn’t spattered with ragged chunks of Kalvik.

  ‘Nyeh, we party, we dance, and you want to know for why?’ She’s working us now: on cue, our laughter fades. ‘Because there is something pure in a zero, it is a pure number.’ She glances from face to expectant face, smiling inscrutably. ‘The colours black and white, these are the strong, honest colours. Between them a thousand weak colours, with a little white in them, a little black …’

  This is the sort of stuff she probably picked up in Tibet, I think, but without the inward sneer that would normally accompany such a conclusion. Drastically pissed as we all are – on my next visit to the facilities I’ll sideswipe two ice buckets and wink at a passing waiter – Seyyal’s poetic rationalisation has us in sober thrall. She’s the maharashi, and we’re the Beatles (sorry, N. Dogroll – you get to be Ringo). ‘And in life everything turns always, so black turns to be white. Yin and yang. Life is short. Be happy.’

  We all nod. Then Melis says, ‘When I go home after Eurovision, this is what I hear at the airport: no problem, you are unlucky, it’s all over.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘But when I arrive at my apartment, there is written on the wall: “Locomotif woman – you are shit”.’ And we’re back to the shrieks, the snorts, and a strafing burst of Woody Woodpecker.

  Seyyal has been keeping her Eurovision cards close to her chest, but now they’ve been snatched from her hand, laid on the table. Suddenly, she seems more at ease: the cat is out of the nul-points bag, and there’s nothing left to hide. ‘Of course it is all psychology,’ she says, in a new, confessional tone. ‘People think you might win, and you do badly … maybe you think the same. It isn’t easy. I laugh about this zero on that night, but after that I don’t laugh so much. I stop making music for a long time.’

  Ah, yes: ‘Seyyal Taner got sad for two years after her big fat 0.’ Defiant bravado is always a tough act to sustain. ‘I go to your city, to London, trying to forget. There I cut my hair real short and have it with these funny, funny colours – in red, in green, in peeeeeenk – and come back to Istanbul.’ Her lopsided half-smile says: I can laugh about it now. ‘I had this emotional, depressive, crazy feeling, and all my days I am just running, running. Crazy hair, in sunglasses. No one notice who I am. One day I run along Bosporus, and I see some musician friends: I run past them maybe seven times and they don’t see me.’

  At this dramatic point, a dolorous tannoyed ululation falls down from on high – a muezzin up in the minaret of that marble mosque calling his congregation to evening prayer. No one else even notices, of course, but I can’t help finding it a sombre counterpoint to Seyyal’s darkest hour. ‘I did nothing! In Istanbul and Bodrum, running, training, dancing, making bodybuilding, therapy, reading, watching, listening, but nothing else.’

  The wailing intensifies, almost drowning her out; there’s something about a big composer persuading her to do an album – ‘Come, Seyyal, I make a beautiful music for you’ – and this selling fairly well, and getting her back on the summer-festival circuit. Then ‘another two years of quietness’, another album, another lull. It’s a period neatly summated by my engineer: ‘From 1989 to 1993 her good-quality albums made Seyyal Taner fans happy, although they did not attract attention as the ones in the past.’ One harsher critic – and with her forthright character there can’t have been a shortage – described thus her last original album, ‘I am Coming’: ‘She is gone.’

  ‘Seyyalname’, the 2002 reworking of her greatest hits that she’ll autograph for me later (‘To Tim with love from ISTANBUL, Seyyal Taner’) remains her most recent release. Eighties Turkish chart, pop heavily seasoned with flavours of the month – a little pinch of Latin, a big dollop of techno – it wasn’t a big seller. Sample review: ‘An album that nobody is interested in, an artist that nobody yearns for, no concert offer and no extra job offer.’

  She had failed to adapt, said the press: ‘When her rivals switched to more arabesque music, she continued her line of pop.’ Too Turkish for Eurovision, she was now too European for Turkey. She’d spent her formative years with Bronson and Brynner and Beatle-cut bassists; too late to change now. West is west and east is east, but Seyyal Taner was stranded in the cultural no man’s land between. When back in 1975 that casino manager had beseeched her to sing something in Turkish, she’d shouted back, ‘But I am a girl from Spain!’

  Seyyal, of course, sees it all very differently. ‘All Turkish pop music today is a continuation of my signature,’ she told an interviewer. When challenged to justify this statement with reference to a certain popular female vocalist, Seyyal replied, ‘Can we talk about good music instead? I only saw her once, shaking her ass and wearing something scaly, torturing a song. You see, I am still alone in my field, people still stand up and cheer for me. I am the only peerless artist.’ Canvassing an opinion of Sertab Erener, who in 2003 won Turkey’s first Eurovision title, I’m fixed with a look she might have kept reserved for a trouserless Terry Wogan. ‘Oh, come on, I don’t have any idea, I have nothing to say on this woman or her song.’ When you’re voted Turkey’s sexiest woman at twenty-five, turning fifty can’t be much fun.

  That could have been it for Seyyal. Shortly after her 1993 album sank almost without trace, she moved in with the owner of the Dodo Beach Club in Bodrum, a millionaire yachting enthusiast who remains her consort. Life there sounds right up her street: in the online assessment of one visiting tourist, ‘the sunbeds on the Dodo Beach pier and beach are very comfortable, however it is impossible to escape the loud music that plays all day long’. In twenty-five years, she’d made a dozen films, sixteen albums, played countless gigs and snogged Demis Roussos. More than enough to warrant early retirement for the best bad girl of her day, living out her days as the ‘respected middle-aged lady’ her countrymen had described.

  But you only need to skim her CV to understand that Seyyal Taner did not get where she is by lying about on sunbeds, no matter how comfortable. In 2002, more than a quarter of a century since her previous thespian engagement, she successfully auditioned for a role in the distantly aforementioned soap opera, Istanbul is my Witness. For a woman of her character and background, it must have seemed a spiritual home: all soaps need a Joan Collins. I can just see her flirting and shouting and slapping her way through the plotlines. Infuriatingly, my sources let me down on the details of her part in Istanbul is my Witness, and Seyyal herself she isn’t about to spill the chickpeas.

  ‘I made a beautiful show for three years, but for the next series I am not in it,’ she says, poker-faced. Her reluctance to refer to the programme by name suggests this departure might not have been her choice, but her stint there sufficed to rekindle Seyyal’s celebrity: the neighbouring diner who at this point comes over to pay gracious homage is far too young to recall her musical prime. Bolstered by this, she perks up. ‘And soon I am in a new show, very fun, very big, but I can’t tell about this now.’ A sweet, unusually prim smile. ‘So one time again, acting is my life.’

  With duty rather than enthusiasm she talks of another forthcoming greatest-hits compilation, ‘from ‘76 to ‘81, my golden time’. She raises those neatly marshalled eyebrows at a waiter to summon the bill towards which she will refuse all contributions, and turns to me to deliver her summing-up. ‘I am happy now. Maybe some time I like to do more concerts, in squares, for public, for no money. It’s e
nough.’ I think of the final question in her most recent press interview: ‘What kind of a feeling is it, to not be able to say “Tomorrow is mine”?’ Or more specifically, of her reply. ‘Past, present, future: it all belongs to me!’

  You just had to hand it to these nul-pointers, every one of them. I was utterly in awe of their reckless pursuit of fame and fun, the unquenchable spirit of adventure that had fuelled them since their teenage years. All had done what so few of us dare to do: they’d gone for it. Better still, all those I’d met thus far had got it. In their lives before nul points they’d shared Abbey Road with Beatles, been picked up at the station by an ABBA girl in a Maserati, represented their nation at two sporting disciplines, learnt English off Charles Bronson and Yul Brynner. Each and every one of them boasted a more eye-widening CV than all of your most fascinating, successful and dangerously eccentric acquaintances combined. Waiting while their lives flashed before their eyes, Death was going to need a good book, and maybe four cans of Stella.

  Recall beyond this point is entirely dependent on the recording. All through the meal my hosts have been praising the purity and – ha! – smoothness of this particular raki, but 40 per cent alcohol is 40 per cent alcohol, no matter how you dribble it down your sagging chin and into your velvet lap. I’m as sure as I can be (which is to say not even remotely) that they’ve drunk more than I have, yet the bright intensity of my hosts’ three-way chatter offers an unflattering contrast to my fuzzy, addled slur.

  ‘Last chance for salad. No? You don’t want? Ah: you need more ice in your red wine.’ (‘Thank you,’ I croak feebly as the cubes clink in.) ‘Can we ask you something … why you not trying to speak in our language? There are these little books, you learn one or two hours a day. Please, you be kind, buy a book, Turkish-English, and some time you read the pages. Please?’