Mika révélation de ce début d'année 2007 !
Triumph of a tortured soul.
Mika, our hot tip for 2007, turned to music after he was bullied to a breakdown at school, he tells Pete Paphides
Dressed in a bright pink cashmere cardigan, Mika stares into where the eyes of a banana would be if bananas had eyes. Then, slowly, he peels it — in a manner that suggests that someone has told him he’ll no longer be allowed to eat bananas when he becomes famous. There are not many days of anonymity left now, but he appears to be making the most of them – taking regular strolls from Earls Court, where he lives, to the wide spaces of Hyde Park, and choosing to return on the Tube rather than by taxi.
Mika insists that he’ll continue to travel by Tube, but if the predictions of pop’s foremost tastemakers — many of them canvassed in last Friday’s Times — are anything to go by, it’s a promise that may prove impractical. George Ergatoudis, head of Radio 1, says of his showboating bubblegum pop: “It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Mika will be everywhere.” Alison Howe, producer of Later, was taken by the way he handled himself in a studio full of seasoned artists. “It’s always interesting to see how a new artist manages in that environment, and he translated effortlessly to television.”
Relay the hubbub to the 23-year-old at the centre of it, and the reaction is a brief high-pitched giggle that — if he didn’t nip it in the bud — could easily become an excitable whoop. Mika’s amusement is understandable. Two years ago, with little left to lose, he wrote his new single Grace Kelly – “a screw-you” to yet another music company that wanted him to be a little more of the smouldering singer-songwriter du jour. Did he know he had a hit when he finished writing the song? He must have had an inkling when he attached the typewritten lyrics — “Should I bend over?/ Should I look older, just to be put on the shelf?” — to a demo of the song and sent it to the executive who had turned him away. On the finished version a sampled Grace Kelly ventures that “getting angry doesn’t solve anything”. The irony, he says, tickled him. “Getting angry solves quite a lot of things. The song exists to prove that. If you write a happy song and put a little dark lyric into it, it empowers your message.”
Mika has had good reason to ponder his own anger and how best to give vent to it. Born Mica Penniman, in Beirut, to an American father and Lebanese mother, he spent most of his early years in Paris, before a move to London brought a rude awakening. At a school in South Kensington, Mika says he was “completely tortured”. The bullying, he contends, wasn’t just limited to the children. “I wasn’t the kind of boy that used to throw stones at windows, but I would still get into trouble with the teachers for saying things that were blindingly obvious. Why was I being picked on? All sorts of things. I was called the typical fag and all those other homophobic, horrible little comments that kids throw at each other. But it wasn’t just that. Sometimes my hair was way too long. I was tubbier then, so they would say I had child-bearing hips.”
If those years appear to have left their mark, it’s hardly surprising. The dyslexia from which he continues to suffer was, he says, exacerbated by the treatment he faced at school. At 11, his condition deteriorated into what he calls “a little breakdown”. His mother pulled him out of school, but it took seven months to find another that would accept him. In that time, he says, he found himself, too, and the five-octave range that he uses to full effect on future hits such as Big Girls (You Are Beautiful) and Love Today — thanks to a Russian singing teacher hired by his mother to break up the torpor of being at home all day. While his mother attempted to reschool him, the boy soprano graduated to the chorus-line of a Strauss opera at the Royal Opera House, and later — his recording debut — joining the Royal Opera chorus for its treatment of Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The new boy remembered by fellow pupils at Westminster School was no less conspicuous than the one that had left the previous school. But if the recollections of fellow pupils are anything to go by, his sense of purpose earned him a measure of respect. “He was very flamboyant,” one recalls. “He took the role of the Emcee in the school production of Cabaret, and he was really good at it.” A review of the show in the school journal praises his “ strongly sung and wittily acted...performance (that) seemed to delight and intrigue audiences nightly”.
Self-belief has never been Mika’s problem so much as finding other people to believe in him as much as he does. The only sign of insecurity during a morning spent with him revolves around his small CD collection. “I’m very much of the greatest-hits generation,” he concedes.
The one exception, he says, is Harry Nilsson, with whom he shares a few similarities: in particular, the love of vaudeville, the proficiency on the piano and vocal acrobatics. “Just one Nilsson song is an education in itself,” he says, “if only for the amount of emotional ground he could cover with the twists and turns of a melody.”
Does he feel any sort of kinship with the crafted pop classicism of Scissor Sisters and the Feeling — the two bands that have set a commercial temperature in which Mika’s own unashamedly mainstream creations can only thrive? Only, he says, in as much as both bands seem as unconcerned as he is when it comes to being cool. But as for being an influence, Mika adds that he knew exactly what his debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, was going to sound like before he had even inked a deal.
By the time the songs were ready, he was using the holiday time from his studies at the Royal College of Music to go to Los Angeles, where he would deliver folders full of accompanying ideas to interested record companies.
Included in them were a booklet of painted scenes — conceived by Mika and his sister — depicting the songs and their characters. “I started to create all these characters about a year before I made my record,” he explains. “Even after I got signed, the record company thought I was insane because I was just sitting there drawing characters saying, ‘This is what the album’s gonna look like’. They were like, ‘You haven’t chosen a producer yet.’ And I was saying, ‘It doesn’t matter’.”
But success has a way of vindicating obsessive behaviour. MTV in America has thrown its weight behind Mika’s multimedia vision, commissioning animations for his songs based on the drawings. In the meantime, the inhabitants of Mika’s interior world can all be found on the dedicated MySpace pages that pay host to their blogs. Among them are Lollipop Girl and Chew-Chew who, um, wants to get his hands on her lollipop, and the eponymous star of Billy Brown, whose confusion over his own sexuality has sent him into hiding and triggered a flurry of concerned postings — not least from the irate Mrs Brown.
Twenty-three years into a life punctuated by rejections, Mika must have been tickled by a review of a recent show which attributed to him “the battleship confidence of someone for whom nothing in life has ever gone wrong”. “To me,” he says, “that’s kudos. That people can assume that when they see me live means that the illusion is working perfectly.”
It’s ironic, I tell him, because I was at the same gig and it seemed as if the reverse was true. So many of Mika’s songs seem to spring from that exact point where a plea for affection turns into a demand. “Why don’t you like me?” he asks repeatedly on Grace Kelly. When the soaring sunshine falsetto of Love Today follows it into the Top Ten, it’ll be the lyrical tease of “love, love me” that lingers longest in your head.
Burning brightly at the heart of Mika is the emotional neediness of all natural entertainers. Unsurprisingly, it’s a trait to which he has already given some thought. “Hasn’t that always been the job of an entertainer?” he asks, “taking something that works against you and making it work for you?”
Grace Kelly is available as a download on Monday and as a single from January 29. Life In Cartoon Motion is released by Universal/Casablanca on Feb 5.
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