Some people feel extraordinarily close to the sea. They feel that they are stepping on the ground when in the sea, their heart beat the fastest in the sea. As an example, when you read Aganta for the first time, you realize this immediately: It is as if the sea is circulating in the veins of the Fisherman of Halicarnassus. He experiences love, anger and struggle to the extreme in the sea. But most of all he is passionate about the feeling of freedom. For him, the sea is the horizon of freedom. I personally think that there are Fishermen of Halicarnassus, Bedri Rahmis, Fikret Kızıloks and Sadun Boros among us today. There are people that feel passionate about the sea as much as them. While I was going to meet him on his boat named “Nev'i” in Kalamış & Fenerbahçe marina, I felt that musician Nevzat Doğansoy, also known as Nev, was one of them.

 

 

Kayhan Yavuz: Was there sea before everything?

 

Nev: Fate is such a thing, it was there before you, with you and after you! We live on such a planet where you are temporary, but it stays. Think of it, you are the son of a man. There were the most significant ships of Turkey at a time, let's name them, to remember, like Akdeniz, Karadeniz, Ege, Truva, Bozcaada, İskenderun. My father, Ziya Doğansoy, was a captain on some of these ships, for example Akdeniz. And I, am the son of that master captain. I am a man whose story of sea started before him, who ran on the decks of the most beautiful ships of Turkey until the age of 10 and lived his childhood freely with the sea. I am a child who once slept in the cabin of the master captain. I am a lucky child who became the mascot of the ship, holding the helm with the helmsman on the huge Akdeniz ship.

 

KY: Huge ship?

 

Nev: Yeah, the huge ship! The first sentence of the story goes like this: I am the son of a sailor and a wonderful lady with a very good voice.

 

 

KY: Just like in the song!

 

Nev: Just like in the song! I am the son of a sailor, I am the orphan of the blues / I am a drop from the sea, that is why my tears are salty / There comes a moment, I cry to the sky. There comes a moment, my heart flutters as you pass. There comes a moment, I pass following the wind / Come early in the morning if you are to come. I am calm in the mornings my beauty / A blue, gentle smile. The seas are my drunkenness of sadness / Remember you asked, my friend. Maybe I am just a lighthouse... with respect to all the sailors and sailor veterans!

 

KY: Your father sounds like a solid character.

 

Nev: He is nicknamed Goat Ziya. He is a stubborn man. He is disciplined! My father worked as a man who really loved this country, a very honest man. This is important, I have to underline it. We can mention many other captains. Seyfi Gezer, Namık Asena, Şefik Gonen. When Captain Şefik was taking anchor from the port in Karaköy, the tradesmen of the Tuesday Market would adjust their hours accordingly.

 

KY:  Oooh... a very Kantian move!

 

Nev: Of course. These are solid characters. Among them is a man, who, at the port in Italy, tells his wife "you are going shopping, but return on time", and say that when the wife is late, she should get on the bus, take the anchor and untie the rope.

 

KY: What years?

 

Nev: 1976, 75, 74, 73.

 

KY: Are all of your first memories about the sea?

 

 

Nev: Yes, of course. The deckhouse, that curtained, wooden, fragrant, shipmaster's room. For example, I saw the compass for the first time on the ship, not at school. I tasted the best meals in my life as those “eat and go to sleep” meals.

 

KY: Eat and go to sleep?

 

Nev: "Eat and go to sleep" means the food that the sailors grubbed on secretly before going to sleep. But it is very nice, very meaningful!

 

KY: Let's talk about it a little more then. Once upon a time, there were few highways in Turkey, and the railway was the same as it is today. Ships were very important at that time, even more basic means of transportation than airplanes.

 

Nev: It was a pleasure, in fact, it was like climbing up the social ladder, traveling on those ships. They used to go everywhere. To Aegean, Rize, Trieste. They would leave Istanbul, and go on their way.

 

KY: I went to Rize, at three years old. Who knows which one of them it was? I wonder if it was Karadeniz? But I remember the black beetles, there used to be many black beetles on the ships.

 

Nev: There were, yeah. However, I, as the captain's son, used to hang out at the high society section. You know those parts from the movie when Titanic sank, it was like that, everything was like from a movie to me. Therefore, the sea started before me.

 

KY: But you didn't have the desire to be a sailor. You did not consider choosing it as a profession. Did you ever think about it?

 

Nev: I am an orphan child, child of a civil servant. Children of civil servants avoid taking great steps unless it is necessary, they are uncertain. It is because they know the price and struggle in the sea.

 

KY: They say let's get educated, become something else...

 

Nev: Especially children whose fathers die at an early age like us do not want to be a burden to their mothers. I actually did not make a choice. My father gifted me the sea before I was born, and my mother gifted me the melody and the rhythms before I was born.

 

KY: You grew up around here, right?

 

Nev: I lived, grew up in such a place! Think about it, going to Moda pier with your father. We would walk to the pier, I would see the rowboats, I would get so excited! They had numbers. One, two, three, four. We would always hire the rowboat numbered 5. I still sense that smell of rowboat and wood whenever I want.

 

KY: It is a smell from childhood for you.

 

Nev: Absolutely! I am such a lucky guy. I had a video clip shot at that spot. I shot "Sevdalarım", you know. What kind of loves, great loves I had in your every corner / Last break up hit bad, there are traces of it in Kadıköy / Ah Istanbul, tell me to stay, give me back my love / Ah Istanbul, I am leaving, saying goodbye / Keep my loves, my dreams, all my worries / I am leaving

 

KY: You sang it before I asked. Then let's continue with music. Where is the music in the sea or where is the sea in the music?

 

Nev: The sea feeds the music, and the music feeds the sea. The sea, the wind and this boat that we are currently on... My boat is my guitar, my sea is my music, my wind is my breath. What I experienced, what I want to explain, my lyrics! Therefore, the sea is the provision of my heart. When I look back, I consider the sea as my most beautiful mirror in life. Which, my mirrors, are also the soul bequeathed to me by music. For example there is Bedri Rahmi, look over here it is Selahattin Pınar, move a little forward there is Kaptanzâde Ali Rıza Efendi. "I am caught in the wind of my fortune" or "Do not filter the evening sea, your color burns my eyes / The pink trace in the vastness virialized in my heart". Now, when you look from here today, if you look for it, you can see that pink trace.

 

KY: "Pink mornings, blue noons, golden mid-afternoons, violet evenings..." Is it possible to set sail to the sea and not encounter the Fisherman?

 

Nev: Here, when we were kids, wandering around the rocks, there was no marina yet, obviously. We were teenagers, we would relax here. Then this place was built. Kalamış & Fenerbahçe marina. Was it 87 or 88?

 

KY: 1988.

 

Nev: Yeah, 1988. One evening, there was the opening of the marina. We saw that there was a band, playing rhythm 'n blues. We had an older brother called Ümit Yılmaz, an academic at Mimar Sinan University, several foreign musicians, playing "Call me the breeze". It is banging! I was in love with Lynyrd Skynyrd at that time. I was so impressed, I went up to the guy and asked, will you please teach me? We went, and Brother Ümit taught me at Mimar Sinan. Think about it, I was playing “country finger picking” then. Then, over time, I started singing. We formed bands, we broke up bands. I had a band called Şantaj, maybe you know about it. Then I started writing my own songs.

 

KY: What is your first song?

 

Nev: Her şeye rağmen. I failed a class in high school 1st grade. I started working as a secretary at the doctor's office of a doctor brother, I was making pocket money. I met people with disabilities there. So I wrote the song on the concept of "disability". The lyrics go like this: I cannot know about the dark as much as you, but sometimes I am not sure if I see the light / I cannot know about silence as much as you, but I seem to understand what your eyes tell / Maybe you do not understand what I say, but I know you feel that I love you very much / If you feel like running and hugging, know that I am longing for it too. I wrote this song to bring down the obstacles. Because I want meaningful pieces to be written!

 

KY: Then?

 

Nev: Then... I was taking the stage at holiday resorts, solo. In Kemer, in Beldibi. I had made a souvenir tape. I was buying empty tapes from Unkapanı. I was playing, making everyone sing. I was recording those live, memories of that night, they would be sold. How joyful I was! I was making money, I was experiencing the love the best. Summers would be like that, and I would continue studying Business Administration at Istanbul University in winters.

 

KY: I think you also do diving.

 

Nev: I maybe have more than 2 thousand dives. We would dive everyday back then, I knew beneath the sea better than the neighborhood. I wrote "Mavi" there, beneath the sea! There is a cave called Kız Taşı in Üç Adalar (Three Islands) area. I dove 18 meters, entered the cave and wrote the song.

 

KY: You are both inside the sea and completely outside…

 

Nev: I sense a world / Root of which has become an ivy in me / A blue, rich blue light / I am swimming in the middle of it... Like that, I always asked the question to myself like this: To watch a sailboat from above? Or to be on that sailboat? This is how literature, music and the sea nourish each other. The Fisherman, Bedri Rahmi, Jack London and Hemingway... The writers whose works I read taught me where I belong.

 

KY: Then I am going to ask, where?

 

Nev: I've always wanted to be in a container like this in my life. About the size of that boat you see. I wanted to close all the curtains and have a space of this size in my life. You know, it is the most beautiful door that I have seen in my life, the little door of that boat. Showing the piece of rich blue sky. The luxury of looking at that blue from here, the luxury of being able to go out in two steps, when I wake up in this cabin. This is my luck!

 

KY: The passion of man to dominate the sea and nature is, on the one hand, a dangerous passion. While the old timers loved the sea, they were also afraid of it. We, on the other hand, could not control ourselves when we wanted to control the sea. There was the issue of mucilage last year, and whatnot. How soul shattering were those images. One cannot help but think, are we losing the seas?

 

Nev: I am very sorry to say this, but we are getting dirty from the inside out, the outside in, the bottom up and the top down. The issue of waste, the issue of grey water tank, the matter of respect in sharing. Although Sebahattin Ali says "the sky is like the sea, don't worry about it", to be honest, I do worry a lot about this issue.

 

However, the sea had told us, it had said "I do not tolerate", it had said "Do not mess with me", it had said "I will take back from you what you take from me". Do we hear the sea now? Maybe a little more lately. But is it enough? Not at all.

 

Gustav Jung has a saying: "What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate." In other words, what you don't experience as consciousness inside, you experience it outside as fate. Do you think there would be so much pollution outside if we didn't get polluted inside? We should be like in the song. "I am the wave of the seas, I am the struggle of this country." If we cannot say this, we have a very difficult job!

 

KY: We are not conducting an interview here, ours is chatting at most, but I am going to ask you two typical interview questions. One of them is, what do you eat, what do you drink, what do you like on the boat table?

 

Nev: The taste I enjoy the most, obviously if I am on a fishing trip, is raw fish head. I immediately remove the bones of the fish I catch, squeeze a lemon, a little extra virgin olive oil, a little salt and pepper. But the trick is: it should cook on its own under the sun! I get my swerve on with a double dose of lion's milk (rakı) on the side.

 

KY: Now, the most classical one: What is next?

 

 

Nev: My biggest motivation is obviously to produce new songs, write those lyrics, compose and record them. My greatest friends on this journey are the sea and its metaphors. The sea water should touch your lips, drinking the blue / Your hair should smell like seaweed, making love while salty / We should cover ourselves with the stars. This was "Mavi". The sea was present at some point in all of my albums. But now I want to make an album of “sailor songs”. I started the new album with a poem of Bedri Rahmi. I composed a poem of his called Çakıl. "A pebble warms inside me, when I think of you".

 

KY: Everyone asks this first, but I ask it at the end. Finally, how are you?

 

Nev: I am very happy. Do you know why? I have been a man that chooses, gives up. I did not accept simplicity. Of course, I fought, but I did not try to get attention. I did not take anyone's side. Thus, I lost nothing. Maybe that is why, life has given me everything.

 

Interview: Kayhan Yavuz, Setur Marinas Highlights Editor

Photos: Hasan Tahsin Kural, Setur Kalamış & Fenerbahçe Marina Front Office Representative