Mika interview for The Boy Who Knew Too Much

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/6223882/Mika-interview-for-The-Boy-Who-Knew-Too-Much.html
Mika is driven by his desire for fame and love of performing, but is still battling his insecurities on his new album The Boy Who Knew Too Much.
 
By Neil McCormick

When he was fifteen years old, a friend of Mika’s mother took him to see the Dalai Lama. “She thought I might find it illuminating at this impressionable age,” the pop star recalls, “but I was completely uninterested, except for one thing, Annie Lennox was there, sitting in the third row. And I went up to her and said, ’Annie, hello, my name is Mika. I know this is a holy Buddhist thing but I really want to make it!” She looked at me, almost upset, and then she went, ’Listen boy, if you have to make it, you won’t have a choice. You’ll have that burning.’ Then she turned around and walked away. I thought, ’well, that’s a load of use, it’s the worst piece of advice I’ve ever heard!’ But now I get it. She was right. I don’t have a choice.”

Mika Penniman is a fascinating character, a tall, handsome, well spoken, polite 25-year-old whose utterly shameless, extravagant pop has quickly established him as one of the defining stars of our time. His 5.6 million selling 2007 debut album, ’Life In Cartoon Motion’, displayed a flamboyant gift for melody and irritatingly insistent hooks, combined with witty lyrics delivered in a pure singing voice that could (and frequently did) surge from a sweet tenor to a glass shattering falsetto. The sheer bravura of his presentation defied the prevailing blandness of the charts, as if channelling the glamour, daring and spirit of Freddie Mercury, Prince, Elton John and David Bowie through a narcissistic, hyperactive, 21st century nerd.

Its success gave the green light to record companies to sign their own eccentric minstrels, presaging a whole new wave of personality driven pop, from Lady GaGa (a fan of Mika’s before she landed a deal) to La Roux and Little Boots. Love him or hate him (this is the kind of pop music that can cause allergic reactions), Mika is currently top of the pop pack.

His second album, ’The Boy Who Knew Too Much’, is just as extravagant, compelling (and potentially irritating), with a little added bite to the lyrics. “I chase melody, shamelessly,” says Mika. “I want something that you will hate me for, because even if you don’t like my music, you can’t get it out of your head. That’s my power.”

Ask most pop stars what motivates them and they will almost invariably claim it’s all about the music. Fame is a word that gets noses wrinkling, as if it is just a slightly distasteful by-product of success in their chosen field.

Mika is having none of this subterfuge. “Oh, the fame!” he declares, when questioned about what drives him. “As a teenager, in my songbook, I used to script what my lighting would be like. I used to dance in my room, it was like putting myself in a trance, and making myself feel good about things, almost like a private ceremony of begging people to like you.”

His current hit, ’We Are Golden’, makes this desire explicit, opening an album that Mika describes as “a comic book musical biography of my adolescence.” He describes the colourful music as “a kind of fantastical set that I’ve built” while the lyrics, full of doubt and insecurity, are “the reality. It kind of tries to hoodwink you and I love that about pop music.

The approachability, the immediacy is like nursery rhymes and comic books, they’re distilled forms of art. A nursery rhyme is comforting, appealing, easy to remember but then at the heart of it the lyrics are brutal, violent and macabre.”

If you can peel away the chocolate box dressing, Mika’s songs convey an almost Morrissey-ish sense of precarious ego, in which sexual desire is pitched against a self-pitying conviction ofs the protaganist’s innate lovelessness. “I guess I was addressing one thing, asking myself ’do I write music to be liked? Did I gravitate towards pop because it was popular, and I was such a loser, and I was excluded?’ Most of the people who write pop music were outsiders at some time in their life.”

Picking at the clues he scatters about his childhood, it seems Mika was raised in a creative household in a large family (he has three sisters and a brother), with a frequently absent American businessman father and a Lebanese “rock n roll mum”, who once told him “you’ll either be in prison or you’ll be famous.” School was an ordeal due to constant teasing, bullying and unrequited desires, but his secret focus, since he was 12, was his fantasy life as superstar in his own bedroom. “I was a kid who found comfort in the things I created, but sometimes it felt that was only taking away from the more functional side of my personality. I felt mad.”

He attended Westminster School where he experienced something of an epiphany when a teacher cast him as the MC in a production of Cabaret. “She saw that I could do something way beyond the level of a school production and did everything she possibly could to get me out of my shell. The production caused a kind of frenzy. It was just the fact that I was so out there. In the dance moves and the raunchiness and the singing, I was channelling this completely sexually androgynous guy who’s so overtly self assured. I saw all the people that I hated sitting in the front row looking at me with their mouths open. I remember hearing gossip a week later, one of the boys who had given me the hardest time said, ’Man, if I was gay, I’d be waiting at his door for a day.’ It really made me laugh. I know where my place is, I know where I belong, and I have to be comfortable with the fact that on stage and in real life, I’m different.”

Like a lot of camp stars, Mika declines to be drawn on his sexual orientation but it’s there in the music. “It’s not taboo for me, discussing gender or sexuality, I do it in my shows, my songs, everything. Maybe there was a part of me that was running away from my sexuality as a teenager but maybe I was running away from a classification, because it felt like it was too easy. So far I am label-less, which is a conscious decision.”

Success has not immunised him from insecurity. “It doesn’t feel like a victory. That’s probably my neurosis. I always imagine things are a bit of a disaster. When I walk on stage, all of that is gone, every single milligram of doubt and insecurity or modesty disappears, and I sometimes wish I could just live like that all the time. The stage is my territory, my boxing ring. That’s where I’m free. Its more difficult in real life.”

Frank and friendly, Mika is such a shameless exhibitionist in his art, its hard to credit how normal he seems off it. “They say shyness is a form of egotism, and you are only shy because you care too much about what people think of you,” he muses. “And maybe its true, maybe I am just an egotist. At least I have found a channel for it.”

The Boy Who Knew Too Much is out this week on Universal

Mika returns with The Boy Who Knew Too Much

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6818966.ece
Follow-up to 2007’s Life in Cartoon Motion includes first single We Are Golden and is Disney through a Tim Burton lens
Lisa Verrico

In a canalside studio complex in east London, Mika ushers me into a dimly lit room where a team of people are hunched over tables. The atmosphere recalls a school science lab. Several artists, including the singer’s sister, are pasting hundreds of tiny paintings, some smaller than a thumbnail, onto pieces of paper.

For three weeks, Mika and his cohorts have been perfecting the artwork for his second album, the follow-up to 2007’s 6m-seller, Life in Cartoon Motion. The title, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, was decided on only last month, while the artwork will be delivered just in time for the album’s release in a fortnight. The record company, Mika concedes, must be having kittens.

If it sounds as though the 26-year-old is poorly prepared to reclaim his pop crown, don’t be deceived. Beneath the flamboyant facade, the attention-seeking outfits and the songs that can seem as suited to seven-year-olds as grown-ups, lies one of the sharpest minds in music. Mika is meticulous about every aspect of his career — from the horn arrangements on the first single, We Are Golden (about which he argued with Jerry Hey, the maestro who has worked with Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra and Elton John), to the shoes he wears on stage (handmade by Christian Louboutin, whose only male client is Mika). His critics — and there are plenty who find his songs too sugary-sweet to take seriously — may mock, but you’d be hard pushed to find a pop star more concerned with the concept of “art”.

“Look at the detail in this,” insists Mika, pointing to a shrunken strip of photo-booth portraits repainted by hand. “We could have used the original photos and altered them digitally, but it wouldn’t have looked as good. The painting gives them a strange, 3-D effect. It gives them soul.”

For the next 15 minutes, Mika takes me on a tour of his CD booklet. It features colourful cartoon characters called Mubbins, inspired by Little Golden Books, each with their own personality defect — one is narcoleptic, one cross-eyed and overweight, another a weed-smoking manic depressive. All hold clues to the songs and, according to Mika, parts of his own personality he has left for his fans to decipher. Even a painting of an old Tube ticket boasts a significant date: February 14, 1996.

“What does it refer to? Well, obviously, it’s Valentine’s Day. And I’d be… er, hang on. If I was born in ’83, what age would I have been in ’96?” Mika ponders his question for a moment, then gives up on the maths. Clearly, his decision to drop out of the London School of Economics after a day, to pursue a pop career, was a wise one. Yet the poshly spoken, elegantly mannered and surprisingly attractive (he looks a lot more handsome off stage than on, not to mention considerably taller), Beirut-born, London-based singer is no longer the awkward wannabe who won a place at the Royal College of Music by sheer persistence. After failing his audition, Mika found the phone number of the tenor Neil Mackie, the school’s head of vocal studies, and hassled him for four weeks until he agreed to a second audition that won Mika a place. Within six months of its release, Life in Cartoon Motion turned Mika into an international pop star. The album sold everywhere from America to Australia, and he won three World Music Awards and a Brit, while the single Love Today was nominated for a Grammy. When it came to starting his second album, the spectacular success of its predecessor proved a problem.

“I couldn’t deny that the landscape around me had changed,” explains Mika. “My plan was to write the album in my flat, just as I did with my debut. But I couldn’t. The fact that my old songs didn’t belong to me any more I found most disorientating. I write very selfishly. To me, my songs are bedroom records. Suddenly, sitting at my little white chipboard piano trying to write new ones, I couldn’t get out of my head the image of other people singing them back at me.”

After a fruitless few weeks, he took advice from a musician friend he eventually admits was Pete Townshend. “He told me that if I wanted to keep making music, I would face the same challenge with every album. He said to stop romanticising songwriting, to think of it as a craft, then the art would come. The fact that it was Pete Townshend was important. If it had come from anyone else, I would probably have said, ‘Yeah, but your music is shit.’”

The result was that Mika quit trying to write in the basement of his parents’ Kensington townhouse — “Hey, don’t make it sound like I live at home,” he pleads. “It’s a separate flat with its own front door, and I do all my own washing” — spending six months at London’s Olympic Studios, instead.

“I went to the studio every day at 11am,” he recalls. “I had lunch at the same place at the same time and, in the evenings, a beer at the same pub. I love that concept of going to work, of having somewhere to be. It’s the same reason I had to get myself into the Royal College of Music. I knew I wanted to make pop music, but I needed somewhere to be at 9am, just to structure my day.”

With the album largely written, Mika decamped to LA to work, once again, with the producer Greg Wells. “I did consider changing producer, but everyone else I spoke to told me what I should change about my sound, which smelt bad to me. There is a common perception that if you make a pop debut, you have to come back more complex and guarded on your second album. I wanted to do the opposite — not necessarily be more poppy, but certainly not apologise for making pop music. I wanted to celebrate it. That’s why the video for We Are Golden has me jumping around a bedroom in gold shoes and a pair of white pants. I’m like a 16-year-old, striking poses and staring at myself in the mirror.”

Indeed, adolescence is the basis of The Boy Who Knew Too Much. Lyrically, it covers first kisses, long nights out being naughty and characters trying to figure out where they fit into the world, although since the protagonists tend to be fictional figures, it’s impossible to separate fact from fantasy. Sonically, too, it’s a slightly more grown-up successor to the relentlessly childhood-referencing Life in Cartoon Motion — there is less falsetto and reliance on nursery-rhyme melodies, and more widescreen soundscapes and moments of melancholy. There may be nods to Disney soundtracks, but there is also soul and, according to Mika, the spectre of his idol, Harry Nilsson, behind even the most discotastic tunes. He dislikes dissecting his songs, but says the album feels “like my adolescence, seen through a Tim Burton lens”.

Veteran guests include the horn arranger and trumpeter Hey, the English cellist and string arranger Paul Buckmaster (Miles Davis, David Bowie, the Bee Gees) and LA’s Andrae Crouch Choir (Madonna, Michael Jackson), all known for their work with Quincy Jones. Other ­collaborators include the producer Stuart Price (Madonna, the Killers), and Imogen Heap on By the Time, a ballad the pair co-wrote over two days at Heap’s home after Mika admired her hair at the Ivor Novello Awards.

“I wasn’t looking to duet with anyone,” says Mika. “But we decided it might be fun to write together and our voices just clicked. It’s the first time that’s ever happened. My voice doesn’t seem to sit well with other singers.”

More likely, Mika is uneasy about sharing songwriting duties. He claims not to be a control freak, but purposely isolates himself from any pop scene and relies only on a close team of people around him, whom he refers to as ‘‘family’’. In fact, several of them are family. Two of his three sisters work with him, as does his mum, a former children’s-wear designer who makes most of his clothes. His mother’s influence looms large. When Mika rented a fancy house in the Hollywood Hills as his LA base, she cancelled the booking, insisting he stay instead in the meagre apartment he had previously rented. “Was she allowed to do that? No. Trust me, no. She put a gypsy curse on me and said the more money I spent on comfort, the worse my album would be. Superstitious idiot that I am, I went back to the same old apartment.

“I mean, I saw her point. Mum didn’t want me in a beautiful house, sitting round watching movies. Money matters to me because I never used to be able to pay my bills, which I can now. But to her, my career never has or ever will be about commercial success. It’s about discipline. That’s how this all started. Since I was 12 years old, she drilled discipline and a quest for excellence into me — tirelessly. It was hard growing up with her always harping on about hard work, but I now know what she means.” Mum needn’t worry. Mika is exhibiting no pop-star peccadilloes and his work ethic is impressive. On the day we meet — his only scheduled day off in August — he will spend eight hours on his artwork, before flying to Sweden to record a radio session. He knocks back almost every celebrity-party invitation and shuns famous friends. Fashion appears to be his only indulgence.

“Oh, no, not fashion, dah-ling,” he mock-drawls. “Fashion is about flogging perfume. I hate fashion, but I do love style.”

For this month’s London Fashion Week, Mika is hosting a dinner for a number of designers who contributed artwork for free to a recently released, low-key acoustic EP, Songs for Sorrow, which he financed himself. Among them are Peter Blake, Paul Smith, Alber Elbaz of Lanvin, and Louboutin, for whom Mika is working on the soundtrack for a short film, alongside David Lynch.

“Do you want to hear who I am inviting to my dinner?” Mika whispers. “The famous folk on my list are: Kathy Burke, Adele, Ian McKellen, Rory Bremner and Alan Cumming. Even I looked at that list and thought, ‘Oh, boy, what a weird collection.’ What do I think it says about me? Ha-ha. I let you decide that for yourself.”

La Roux, Lady Gaga, Mika, Little Boots: the 80s are back

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/5978573/La-Roux-Lady-Gaga-Mika-Little-Boots-the-80s-are-back.html
The best of today’s pop from artists like Lady Gaga, La Roux and Little Boots, is a shiny reflection of the glitz-and-glamour decade.
 
By Neil McCormick

Does this remind you of anything? At a pop awards event, a lithe, aerobicised woman storms the stage in a platinum blonde wig, leather and diamanté-studded corset, spiky S&M boots and a conical bra that shoots fire.

That’s not Madonna, circa Blonde Ambition. It is Lady GaGa, currently the hottest new global star in pop, stealing the show at the MuchMusic awards in Canada last month.

Or how about this: an electro duo fronted by a pale, skinny, androgynous young red headed woman with a big quiff, tailored suits and garish make-up, her high strung vocal blaring over cheesy synths and chintzy drum machine as she insists she is coming in for the kill. Not the Eurythmics, circa 1983, but breakthrough British stars La Roux, whose latest single, ’Bulletproof’, went straight in at number one.

And there is plenty more where that came from: Little Boots delivering delirious electropop in a minidress of reflective mirrors and duetting with The Human League’s Phil Oakey; and floundering rock trio The Noisettes reinventing themselves with uplifting disco pop hit ’Don’t Upset The Rhythm’ featuring frontwoman Shingai Shoniwa in shaped hair and glam Afro couture à la Grace Jones.

The shift in pop music was really brought home to me at Metropolis Studios in London recently, where a number of Britain’s brightest young talents assembled to record a charity single for War Child. There was VV Brown, a nearly six foot black woman with a polka dot dress and elaborate rockabilly haircut, whose own records sound like a mix of doo wop and uber pop. And Mpho (pronounced Oompah), a mixed race singer in a Day-Glo Pop Art T-shirt whose debut single samples 80s new wave synth pop wonders ’Martha & The Muffins’ with the genre hopping bravado of Neneh Cherry. The studio was overcrowded with flamboyant, oddball characters: Pixie Lott, Kid British, N-Dubz. And there was a whole posse of hip hop performers, scampish young men with comical names and self mocking identities, like Tinchy Stryder, Ironik, Bashy and Chipmunk. While not exactly household names, between them the participants had already scored five number one hits. Unashamedly cheesy in their colourful images and sonic attack, these are performers who dare to be ridiculous in ways we haven’t really seen in pop since the Eighties.

After decades of dourness and plastic perfection, pop has become shameless again.

The return of the Eighties has been threatening a while. Nostalgia being an inevitable element in the endlessly revolving pop cycle, you can currently see an abundance of Eighties originals on the live circuit, from the revivals of Spandau Ballet, The Specials, Level 42 and Kajagoogoo, to the ones who never went away, U2, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds, Prince and Madonna. But where it really counts is the way the Eighties spirit is reflected in new music. “I think it’s a generational thing,” Mpho suggested.

“The digital age really started in the Eighties, with real instruments being mixed with funny little Moog synths and electronic drums. It’s the music we grew up hearing, almost subconsciously, when we were very young. So we respond to it with no sense of shame or self-consciousness.”

Ah, the shame. As someone who lived through the Eighties pop boom, and, indeed, participated in it to the point of flouncing about in chiffon scarves and eye liner, it is hard for me to look back without cringing. The Eighties is a decade that splits opinion. For some it is the high watermark of truly original British pop, for others it was marked by fashion embarrassment and musical excess, shoulder pads, Lycra, too much make up and the big cheesy sound of DX7 synthesizers laying their electronic sheen over everything they touched. Duran Duran hovered over the British rock scene like a shocking pink dirigible, Wham! basked beneath the big blow dryer of world acclaim, Adam and the Ants swapped make-up tips with Apache Indians, Boy George flounced around the charts like a six foot transvestite navvy in a kimono and bovver boots and Britain ruled the airwaves, exporting pop (and lip gloss and eye shadow) to teenagers around the world in quantities not seen since the Sixties beat boom (and, for that matter, not seen since).

It wasn’t just the UK, of course, although the chart obsessed, Smash Hits reading teens of Britain participated more enthusiastically than most. But the US gave the decade its greatest stars, a new King and Queen of pop in Michael Jackson and Madonna, and a veritable emperor of the entire pop universe in the diminutive, multi-talented figure of the Minneapolis wonder, Prince, a man so extravagantly talented and on such creative fire he was equally admired by screaming teens, bullish rock fans and highbrow critics.

La Roux cite as influences Prince, Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Human League, Blancmage and Simple Minds. “ I don’t want to be ashamed of saying that it’s pop. Back in the Eighties, even if there was an electronic beat, it wasn’t called electro, it was just pop music,” singer Elly Jackson explains.

Although she has the hip credibility of any indie artist, Jackson’s eye-catching appearance reflects “that whole glamour thing pop had in the Eighties. It used to be a show all the time, with outfits and make-up. I think dressing up and characterisation have been missing from pop. The Nineties will always be known to me as the ’casual wear decade’: khaki, baggy trousers and vest tops. Fashion is definitely coming back, the glamour and drama is returning.”

Like many of her contemporaries, 21-year-old Jackson was a child of the Eighties but too young to have really appreciated it. This, she thinks, is probably a good thing. “I’m happy living in my time. Not everything in the Eighties was great, obviously. It’s all leg warmers and Erasure for some. Living now allows me to pick out the best bits.”

And that, really, is key. This is not a slavish recreation of what went before, more a rediscovery of pop’s sense of fun and adventure. The rise of colourful pop reflects a perceived failure of guitar music to satisfy the mass audience. In the Noughties, a lot of hope was pinned on a revival of serious rock, but, apart from Coldplay and some already flagging stadium pretenders (Franz Ferdinand, Snow Patrol, Keane), the latest wave of British guitar bands have singularly failed to deliver a mass audience. It led to a controversial admission by James Oldham, head of A&R (artists and repertoire) at A&M records earlier this year, that “all A&R departments have been saying to managers and lawyers, ’Don’t give us any more bands, because we’re not going to sign them, and they’re not going to sell records.’” Interestingly, the one British rock group to break through this year, White Lies, have a brash, synth-dominated sonic palette strongly reminiscent of Duran Duran (themselves now so retro-cool, their new album is being helmed by superproducer Mark Ronson).

The roots of this contemporary pop revival lie in the “wonky pop” scene of recent years. It was scruffy pop music with indie adult appeal, although it took the breakaway success of Mika to really put a rocket up the genre.

Flamboyant, unashamedly commercial and seriously musically gifted, Mika may be the most talented pop star of his generation, his camp theatricality and operatic soul making him a one man cross between Culture Club and Wham!, a kind of Boy George Michael. Record companies always like to see hits before they follow with investment and this year they have embraced outright pop with a vengeance.

The credit crunch has probably played its part. In economically straightened times, it was perhaps predictable that major labels would revert to what they know how to sell. Pop is a musical area heavily susceptible to the power of marketing. But ultimately it is the public who make stars, and Iain Watt, who manages Mika and founded the Wonky Pop brand, has cited “economic drudgery” as the driving force in the new pop. “People want a two-minute escape from their pressurised lives.”

“The economic climate in the 80s wasn’t so great, and obviously there are similarities with times now,” Elly Jackson concurs. “I like to think people are using music to feel better.” Faced with doom and gloom, perhaps the answer, as Lady GaGa proposed in her smash hit, is “just dance.” But don’t forget the shoulder pads and flaming brassiere.