Turkey Celebrates Halley's Comet With a Eurovision Song

MAY 15 1986 · 12:10

Klips ve Onlar · "Halley" · Turkey · 1986 Placement: 9 · Score: 53 · Language: Turkish · Composers: Melih Kibar · Venue: Grieghallen · Host: Bergen, Norway · Type: deep cut · Broadcast: color analog Klips ve Onlar — three women, one man, red-and-silver Star Trek-adjacent costumes — take the Bergen stage to sing a song literally about Halley's Comet's 1986 appearance. The synth arrangement is aggressively 1986, the choreography is spacy, the hooks are Turkish-language and proudly so. 9th place with 53 points is Turkey's best-ever finish at that point. Context Halley's Comet was a global news event in 1986 — its 76-year return synchronized with a Eurovision broadcast. TRT's selection was playful, a deliberate break from the prior Turkish pattern of respectable mid-table folk-pop. Composer Melih Kibar was one of Turkey's most prominent pop musicians. Legacy The 1986 result was celebrated in Turkey as a breakthrough into Eurovision respectability. Klips ve Onlar released the song as a single that went gold in Turkey. Kibar died in 2005 and remains one of Turkey's most-cited pop composers. Turkey's 9th-place arc would keep building through the 1990s toward the 2003 Sertab Erener win.