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It’s Friday and so it’s time for a recent Eurovision song. Nick takes us back to a Turkish favourite this time…

Turkey 2005: Gülseren – Rimi Rimi Ley (13th place)

I am not a big fan of most Turkish Eurovision songs. Often they just didn’t send anything remotely appealing to me. However, some songs I quite like and this is one of them, even when it took me some time…
Over at our partner site escChat.com, the chatroom I visit on a daily basis, this Turkish entry has turned into a real classic. And that is how it started to grow on me and it is now one of three Turkish entries I enjoy – the others being Dinle and Petr’oil.
So what is it that I enjoy so much about this? It’s just the sheer happiness that Gülseren delivers on stage. This is just being Turkish without knowing the limits and interestingly, I’ve seen many Turkish fans saying this was a ‘disgrace’ for their nation. And you know, that’s something I don’t understand. This is an entry that’s hard to forget, mainly because of Gülseren’s performance.
The highlight in this performance for me is the drum section in the middle, started by Gülseren shouting Allez go!, which just gives the song life. My least favourite bit is when the Kyiv technicians accidentally threw Moldova’s Boonika Bate Doba into the backing track about a minute in (in case you were wondering what that noise was).
All in all, it just goes to show that if you hear an entry a lot, you can’t really stay indifferent about it. It’s hard to feel ‘nothing’ in such cases – you’ll either like it or dislike it. In the case of Rimi Rimi Ley, I grew to like this three minute tourist advert for Turkey quite a lot.