The thick headline on the album cover, below the oriental artist name with bold “s” and “ts”, does indeed say “2023” but in Funkadelic font, which probably gives away the time of its first release: 1975.

It was in the mid-1975s when – having been with the label since the 1960s, first with the Turkish Harmoniler and then with the Belgian Les Mistigris – Barris Mancho released an album2023“, one of the gems of the so-called Anatolian or Anadolu Rock (or Anadolu Psyche), as the Turkish-Eastern version of the various offshoots of the Western rock sound of the 60s and 70s came to be called.

Baris Manso’s “2023” will outlive time (Manso himself died in 1999 at the age of 56) as a sound standard still maintained by bands like Altın Gün as a window into another era when the “new” Turkey still existed. searched with an eye more to the west and less to the east.

Mancho himself, born in Istanbul, grew up drawing artistic inspiration from the West. He went to a francophone school (in Galatasaray lisesi where other big names of what would later be known as Anatolian rock were to go), he copied the style of Chubby Checker (Let’s Twist Again) at first, he moved to Belgium for a while and tried to make a career musician in France… before ending up back in his native Istanbul.

“2023” by Manso is a concept album, a disc with compositions revolving around a common (in this case, futuristic, psychedelic ala Turkish) theme.

The Spanish company Guerssen, which re-released it in 2012, calls it a “masterpiece” of the 1970s.

An interesting fact of the time is that, among many others, Gökhan Aya notes in the insert accompanying the Guerssen reissue of 2023: that many Turkish young people learned American rock and roll not on the radio (which at that time played mainly Italian and French pop) but also from 1950s American films such as Rock Around the Clock, High School Secrets and A Girl Helps. If you look at the 2023 cover again in this light, you can see the font taken from the movie poster and the artist himself as a movie character…

In a tribute to the “Turkish psychedelia” he published exactly eleven years ago (December 2011 issue) in British Wire, Daniel Spicer notes that young Turkish musicians of the 60s were influenced by British instrumental groups of the time, such as The Shadows and tornado. Spicer points to a song contest called “Altin Microphone” organized in the 1970s by the newspaper Hürriyet as the center of events.

However, the 1970s were also “difficult” for Turkey.

It started with a coup (the one in 1971 when Suleiman Demirel was overthrown) and ended with another, much bloodier coup (the one under Evren in 1980 that overthrew Demirel again), leaving in the meantime many major crises: Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Turkish provocation of 1976 with the Hora in the Aegean, ups and downs in US-Turkish relations (see the deep international situation of the Cold War, against the backdrop of military conflicts (Yom Kippur), revolutions (in Iran in 1979), coups (in Assad’s father’s Syria), scandals (Watergate), energy and oil crises (1973, 1979), recommendations of new parties (PKK founded in 1978) and economic arrhythmias (stagflation).

For Turkey in particular, the 1970s was a period of extreme political violence, civil war-style conflicts, high-profile terrorist attacks, and persecution. The 1977 massacre of workers at Taksim Square in Istanbul and the 1978 anti-Alevi program in Kahramanmaras stand out as some of the black pages of that era.

However, Barysh Mancho (whose name means “peace” in Turkish) seems to live artistically and takes us to another world through 1975’s “2023”.

From a political point of view, it should be noted that he moved to the right more than other Anatolian rock musicians. The 1980 junta didn’t touch him, writes Daniel Spicer in The Wire, apparently because they didn’t think he was as “dangerous” as the others. Manso himself even tried unsuccessfully in the 1990s to enter politics in Istanbul with the right-wing Right Path Party (DYP) of Demirel and Çiller.

Decades later, ahead of calendar year 2023 (the year of dual presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey, when the Islamic nationalist duo of Erdogan and Bahceli head to the polls, investing in tensions inside and outside the borders), the record of that 1970s decade is still takes us to another world.

However, looking out into the real world, shortly before the calendar year 2023, one realizes that not only musical gems have survived the passage of time, but also many of those wounds of the 1970s, wounds that, unfortunately, are becoming actual and menacing. again through in the light of new crises.