Pain, passion - and the subtle pleasures of a good pipe

Singer-songwriter Sezen Aksu rubs shoulders with her fans and eschews the trappings of stardom, yet she has dominated Turkish music for nearly three decades, says Sue Steward

At the Dunya Music Festival in Rotterdam, (dunya in Turkish and Arabic, means "world"), crowds of Dutch world music fans and people of Turkish, Arabic, African and Indonesian origin mingle in the park. Headlining is Senegal's Youssou N'Dour, but top of the bill for several hundred Turkish-Dutch fans is singer/song-writer and queen of Turkish pop, Sezen Aksu. The three-time Eurovision Song Contest finalist, now in her early forties, has three decades of hit records behind her. (She is also the composer of "Simarik", a song currently enjoying a new identity as Holly Vallance's UK hit, "Kiss Kiss".) And for the estimated three million people of Turkish descent living in western Europe (the majority in Germany), Aksu's songs offer a common point of contact and reassurance of identity.

For this reason, her scheduled performance at the Barbican next Saturday has caused a frisson of anticipation in Britain's Turkish community. In north London's Dunyasi Music shop, several local men are keen to air views on the subject. A young architect, a middle-aged ex-journalist, the editor of the local newspaper Olay, and the shop's manager Mr Faik are very animated. Mr Faik – who keeps Aksu's early (1970s and 1980s) CDs in his car for "winding down" – insists that her audience is "posh, educated people, not peasants", but he is shouted down. "Everyone likes her," the architect says. "Three generations buy her music," Mr Faik admits. "She outsells every other Turkish artist. Because of the lyrics," they agree. "And the way she sings them," the older man adds. "It's our blues."

The Rotterdam festival audience certainly proves her appeal to three generations, and also reveals the diversity in modern Turkish society. Scarved women with small children, glamorous couples with Italian élan, and students wearing international fashions pack together during the build-up to the concert, and talk passionately about what Aksu means to them. A pile of Aksu's CDs reveals, inevitably, a changing image, but the same thoughtful, round-faced, full-lipped, beautiful woman looks out. At our lunch appointment in Amsterdam I assumed at first that the small, pale-faced woman with no make-up and pleasingly dishevelled hair was her assistant – until the face suddenly gelled with the photos. Turkish pop star convention favours, broadly speaking, heavy make-up, padded-shoulders, low cut, tarty chic: I was thrown by this fashionably Western woman in long, tight black skirt, T-shirt and black wedges who has absolutely no show-biz airs.

Aksu's background is firmly middle class. Her parents – both teachers in Izmir – strongly disapproved of a musical career and she studied agricultural policy at university – but at the same time she also studied folk music and dance, sculpture, singing and traditional instruments at art college. In 1977, she became the first Turkish woman to write and publicly perform her own songs. Her parents now attend many of her concerts.

Aksu has thought a lot about fame during her 28 years in the limelight. For the first decade – from her recording debut in Istanbul in 1975, to her first hit singles and albums every subsequent year, and the extraordinary peak in the 1980s – she says she liked it. "I needed fame then, but now I think it's a sickness," she says. "Now I prefer to be 'in the back of the kitchen'. I don't want to be different from other people." In Istanbul, where she has several houses, everybody knows her. "I can go anywhere and people just say hello." Most Turkish singers relish or at least tolerate the star treatment. "They live in a different world," she says with a shudder of recognition. "But it's just a job: I'm a singer."

The festival audience is near-hysterical by the time Aksu strides on stage, bare arms swinging, eyes straight ahead. She pauses, reaches, and lets out three long, deep notes which announce her 1980s ballad "Sari Odalar" ("Yellow Rooms"). The song was an enormous hit with her former partner Onno Tuncboyaciyan or Tunc, the talented Armenian-Turkish singer and composer who died in a plane crash in 1996. "I stopped for a year," she tells me. "For six months I sat on a chair facing the chimney and looked at the fire. But you can't make music without pain and unhappiness."

On stage, the woman is transformed into a meditative diva. A long black, hip-hugging dress adorned with a sequinned hip scarf glints as she shimmies; the hair is trained into kiss curls. She sings "Tutuklu" ("Still captured") about a lost love, and even the men around me looked tearful. "Firat", a song from Eastern Anatolia opens with a barrage of rock drumming, and leads to traditional instrumental solos. She sings a traditional Kurdish folk song, an uplifting lament called "Sari Gelir", about a blonde bride who has disappeared. She sings some lines in Kurdish. After Aksu and her three backing singers perform the closing number, she waves goodbye. There is no expectation of an encore.

Such massive popularity as Aksu's carries great power. She confronts controversial political issues, and has suffered occasional bans by Turkey's state television company, TRT as a result. She admits to liking the power, but would never consider switching to politics. "I have the power of telling the truth by singing about things I believe in," she says firmly. "But I'm not like Bono or the politicians." She publicly supports Turkey's Kurds, and her inclusion of their folk songs in her repertoire is a strong statement.

As the sound fades, my 23-year old translator defends Aksu's final song's themes in case I thought she was presenting women as victims of love. "In translation they make her sound a bit hysterical or dependent. But in Turkish we use a lot of metaphors and that changes the meaning," she explains. Two Turkish women doctors, trainee psychiatrists who have lived in Holland since childhood, have spent hours analysing her lyrics. They tell me, "She's a strong, powerful, self-motivated woman – just look at her!"

As if to prove their point, at our lunch in Amsterdam, Aksu had casually pulled a pipe from her bag and lit up. "I was the first woman in Turkey to smoke a pipe," she said, gleefully.

Sezen Aksu and the Kocani Orchestra: Medfest 2002, Barbican Centre, London EC2 (020 7638 8891), 15 June