Spinners: A girl-power story from Turkey’s punk scene

The story of Turkey’s first all-female punk band

“In the 80s we had a lot of heavy metal bands in Turkey. There were also some mainstream rock bands… And then there were us. The punks,” recalls Zuhal Uneri, my mother’s best friend and the founding frontwoman of the Spinners, Turkey’s first all-female punk band. “There weren’t many punk listeners in Turkey at the time,” she adds, “but we wanted to play punk anyway and started our own band.”

Having an all-female punk band in the late 80s and early 90s is quite unique in Turkey. During the 1960s, hippies had been beaten up for their long hair and unusual outfits. Erkin Koray, the so-called “father of Turkish rock”, had found himself in many brawls because of his long hair. In time, however, people — at least in the big cities — got used to them. They even loved them — especially after the ’70s, when they moved from alternative culture to the mainstream. Now it was the punks’ turn to deal with Turkey’s conservative population. So it was not easy to be a Turkish punk when the scene started in the late 80s. If it was hard for men, imagine how much harder it must have been for three young women to overcome all the prejudices and conservatism.

“We had hair shapers and temporary hair colour sprays,” Zuhal tells me, “we’d go out of our apartments as normal students, walk to the bar we were going to play at, and change into punks at the door. It was like Clark Kent turning into Superman”.