Alt-rock star releases debut solo EP - Harun Tekin - A Dictionary of Night

Harun Tekin, lead vocalist of Turkey’s biggest alternative rock band, has released A Dictionary of Night, a debut EP featuring songs by The Beatles, Kate Bush and Elton John.

With mor ve ötesi, ‘Turkey's answer to the Manic Street Preachers’, Harun has won millions of fans in a career spanning three decades. Since 1996, the band have released eight studio albums, represented Türkiye at the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest, and made history in 2022 by becoming the first Turkish rock band to headline a solo, sold-out show at Istanbul’s iconic İnönü Stadium.

Now based in London, Harun is embarking on a fresh creative chapter with his debut solo project, A Dictionary of Night, a collection of six stripped-back, intimate recordings taking on the raw, vulnerable storytelling of iconic singer-songwriters like Elliott Smith and The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon.

The EP was launched with an exclusive, intimate performance at Stone Nest in London’s Soho, attended by Harun’s mor ve ötesi bandmates.

A Dictionary of Night pairs three English and three Turkish songs in an attempt to bring his two home cities, Istanbul and London, together in song. Bound together by the theme of night, Harun chose to call the collection a “dictionary”, believing these songs provide an eclectic yet meaningful means of defining night in their own way. He actually wrote a tiny dictionary as well: one with his own definitions of concepts and places related to these six songs.

Harun’s music has long been shaped by a dialogue between British rock and classical Turkish influences. During the early years of mor ve ötesi in the mid-1990s, the band drew deep inspiration from seminal UK records such as Radiohead’s The Bends, Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go, and Suede’s Dog Man Star.

The EP includes a reinterpretation of the McCartney-penned Beatles classic ‘Golden Slumbers’, a personal favourite from Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, ‘And Dream of Sheep’, and Elton John’s ‘Tonight’.

The collection also holds a cover of Sezen Aksu’s ‘Alaturka’, whom Harun describes as "the greatest female music person ever in Turkish culture", as well as Fethi Karamahmutoğlu’s ‘Hiçbir Şeyde Gözüm Yok’. Münir Nurettin Selçuk’s ‘Kalamış’, a love song set in the Kalamış neighbourhood of Istanbul, completes the body-of-work. Selçuk is an inspiring figure in Turkish music that Harun wishes every music fan on earth had a chance to know.

The singer chose to strip back the songs, playing guitar on one half of the songs and piano on the other. He said: "A good song doesn't really belong to a specific period - it’s timeless. And a good song still sounds good with only one accompanying instrument.”

Having performed to a sold-out crowd at London’s Barbican Centre with mor ve ötesi, Harun is relishing a return to UK stages for his solo work. Beyond his music career, Harun is a graduate of Boğaziçi University, where he studied philosophy and psychology, and has previously taught songwriting at Istanbul Bilgi University. He lives in London with his partner, the celebrated actor Melisa Sözen (Winter Sleep, Le Bureau des Légendes).

A Dictionary of Night tracklist:

1. Hiçbir Şeyde Gözüm Yok (Fethi Karamahmutoğlu cover)

2. Kalamış (Behçet Kemal Çağlar cover)

3. Alaturka (Sezen Aksu cover)

4. Tonight (Elton John cover)

5. And Dream of Sheep (Kate Bush cover)

6. Golden Slumbers (The Beatles cover)