Ajda Pekkan

Ayşe Ajda Pekkan (born 12th February 1946 in Istanbul, Turkey) is a Turkish pop singer and actress. Through a career spanning five decades thus far, Pekkan has released more than twenty albums and - together with Sezen Aksu - is the most commercially successful female Turkish music artist, with sales of over thirty million copies worldwide. Pekkan is nicknamed the "Superstar" of Turkish pop music. She got this title after her album SUPERSTAR which was released in 1978. Although famed for her music, Pekkan started her career as an actress, with appearances in almost fifty films. During her musical career, Pekkan has recorded songs in nine languages. Apart from Turkish, she is also fluent in English and French. With the help of her sister, Semiramis, she began singing at the popular Istanbul nightclub Çatı (Roof) in 1962. The following year, Pekkan won a Cover Star contest sponsored by the Turkish music magazine Ses ("Voice") and was launched on a professional career. After a short film career she started singing, and she has been at the centre of the Turkish musical scene since 1965. A star of both stage and screen, Pekkan's repertoire extends well beyond Turkish folk and popular music to embrace styles such as French chanson. It made her the first Turkish singer ever to perform at Olympia, Paris, which she did in 1976. In the course of her career, Pekkan has received countless honours, and toured internationally. 1980 marked her participation in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song 'Pet'roil'. Her albums have been released in Japan, Spain, Greece, Germany, France, Israel, and Italy. Her album Cool Kadın was released in June 2006, her first official album for ten years. In 2008 Pekkan's album "album artist=Ajda Pekkan]Aynen Öyle, including hits like "Aynen Öyle", "Flu Gibi", "Can Gidiyor", and "Stretch", was one of the most popular albums of the year. Ajda Pekkan's last album was released -Farkın Bu - and it was the best-selling album of the year 2011 in Turkey. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.