musictalk4u.com

MIKA
Live without any excuses!

intro by Owen Connors
interview by AngieBlack

From the start, everyone could see that Mika wasn’t going to be a normal pop star. For him pop music has never been black and white, but Mika's songs are technicolor pop dreams. London singer Mika Penniman exploded onto the charts three years ago with his first album Life in Cartoon Motion, which sold more than five million copies. Now, after two and a half years of touring the world, the 26-year-old is back with his second album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, which is even more flamboyant.
Just like the first album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much is an explosion of colour – visually and musically. But in his new songs, Mika sings about his difficult teenage years. Spot on caught up with Mika before the start of his European tour. We asked him about the new album, about growing up in different countries, and we hear the truth about celebrities!


What was it like growing up in all these different countries?

MIKA: Beirut I don’t really remember. Beirut was like a shadow that flavoured the food in my house. And decided what my house would look like and smell like and what my skin and my hair would look like. I don’t really remember living there, but it influenced so many aspects of my life. It’s a lineage that’s hard to understand. Even though I was evacuated at the age of one, it was still such a part of our culture at home, no matter where we lived in the world.
Paris was the place of my childhood and it’s associated with a lot of very happy memories. We had a very good life there and my father had a very good job. Unfortunately, we left Paris under very sour and unfortunate circumstances. We lost everything – our apartment, our television, our paintings, everything to a mixture of pass people, rent people, everything. So I went from having a very chic comfortable life where I took things for granted as a little boy, to having it all disappear.
Then we moved to London and lived in a bed and breakfast and started all over again. And then London was where things were hard. Really hard. But the thing is we conquered it and things got really good again.
And when I look at my whole life after that and the life I’ve been able to create for myself, hating my adolescence, and so I guess it leaves me the product of multiple places. It leaves me not really belonging anywhere. And I guess that has its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantages are I’m not afraid to be on the road, I’m not afraid to travel all the time. Other cultures don’t scare me. And the disadvantage is I don’t know where I belong. And because I came from so many places, I wasn’t born out of a sound or a scene. I was too eclectic in so many ways – musically, sound wise, everything, my personality, I suppose that’s why my music sounds like it does.

You used to be bullied in school. Does your music help you feel more self-confident in yourself?

MIKA: When I was young I felt like a freak, I felt like an outcast. And in normal life, I felt like an ugly freak. But when I did music, I felt like a beautiful freak. It’s not like music made me feel normal, it made me feel more weird – but also more untouchable and more special. I felt there was a reason for why I was strange and that was that I made music. And I gravitated towards that. That’s why I fell into it and that’s what promoted a feeling in me like I almost resented the fact that people always made me think of sounding the same. I was like, I don’t want to make guitar music in a barrage that everybody else is trying to make, I don’t want to make hip-hop music like everybody else is trying to make. I don’t want to be cool, grungy or geeky, I just want to be entirely me and just make whatever I feel like making at the piano. So that’s kind of where it came from.

What was the worst thing that you experienced back then?

MIKA: Oh it depends. I was so bullied by one teacher when I was younger that I was expelled from school. And later the kids bullied me. It was just totally demoralising. It can be the worst. I think people really underestimate how dangerous bullying can be to people. Sometimes I look at my mother and I think she never really recovered. She was bullied when she was younger, and I don’t think she ever recovered. But then again, I wouldn’t change a single thing about my past and I think the only thing that really helped me was that I had such a strong family unit, which my mother didn’t necessarily have.

Do you still live in London?

MIKA: I do. In the same place I’ve lived in for seven years. It’s a one-room studio.

What does London mean to you?

MIKA: It means everything you need in one big city without intimidation. The thing about London is that it has everything a city like New York has, but it’s softer and it’s more eclectic, simply because it’s not as far away from everything. You’re only an hour away from so many countries by plane. It’s such a mix of different influences. London is a very good place for storytellers because you can make of it what you want. The geography of the place doesn’t necessarily inspire me, I think there are far more beautiful places in the world, but it’s practical, it’s what I know, I speak the language and there are a lot of people who I admire who have lived here and work here, so for now it will do. But in terms of my attachment to it, it’s not forever, sacred at all.

What do you love most about the city and what do you hate about it?

MIKA: There are so many ways to have a good life in London without needing to be a millionaire, which is what I hate about New York. You have to be so rich to have a decent standard of living in New York, it’s all tiny apartments and stuff like that. At least in London, things are bigger and less intimidating. What would be in a massive office in New York City is in a small office in London. But it has as much power. It’s very approachable, London, I think.
What do I hate about London? The press culture. I hate the tabloid culture, it makes me so sick. I hate the fact that you go to a nightclub and then you’re chased by photographers who insult you just to get a reaction. Everyone has tabloid culture around the world, the difference is, our tabloid culture functions on an hourly basis. So a photograph that has been taken of you at lunchtime or in the morning will be printed in the afternoon paper and it comes out and it’s given away for free. So the consequences and the culture that creates is really negative. 

That sounds very annoying.

MIKA: Well, it’s not annoying because of like the diva thing, “Oh, I don’t want to be photographed”, because there are more famous people than me, or at least there are more scandalous people than me. But they get harassed a lot more than me. That’s not the annoying part of it. The annoying part is that there is a constant commentary in London. In the London scene there are always people commentating obsessively. And that can be very poisonous to creativity.

Have you ever lived in New York?

MIKA: No, and I never would. I don’t like New York. I like it but I don’t like it to live in. It’s too cruel.

What languages do you speak?

MIKA: I speak French and Spanish. French was the first language that I spoke.

Did your dyslexia make learning new languages difficult?

MIKA: No, because I do everything by ear. I can learn languages very easily because I learn like songs. Which is why when I do shows, I can do an entire show in German or in Dutch or in Japanese. Because I learn and memorize everything I want to say like I would a song.

Would you also sing songs in another language?

MIKA: Yeah, I’ve done that. Because my background is in opera so the first things I was singing were in French and in German.

So I could speak German to you?

MIKA: Well, the problem is I can speak Goethe and things like that, I can sing you Brahms songs, but I can’t actually order coffee, so it’s totally useless. Useless classical German.

Do you have any learning tips for teens that want to learn English?

MIKA: The funny thing about me is that I failed everything! And I was really bad at school until I got this specialist teacher who basically told me that I should never learn anything like anybody else does. I should figure out my own way. So what I did was I taped all my lessons onto a cassette tape and then I would memorize my lessons. And I would do the same for all my language lessons. I would memorize them and then I would make all these visual mind maps with drawings and collages. And when I memorized things off a page, I could literally go into an exam and pass it very easily. And I went from being a C and a D student to being pretty much a straight A or A plus student. Just by figuring out to record things and memorize them and I wouldn’t forget them. I think that people can have visual photographic memories, but I don’t. I have an aural photographic memory.

You work with your sister to design your album covers and a lot of your artwork. What role does she play in bringing your music to life visually?

MIKA: The reason I work with my sister is because no one else would work with us at the beginning. I was sending out demos and they weren’t doing very well. People weren’t even answering them. Not answering my letters. I mean it’s normal; it’s what happens to everyone else. So I said “OK, I’ve got to change. Obviously something’s not working.” So firstly I said I’m not going to change my musical style, I’m going to exaggerate my musical style. And secondly, I’m going to present my music visually as if I was already famous. Because they may think this is too weird, but if they are fooled into believing that someone powerful is behind it, then they will support me.
So with my sister I came up with this plan. Every demo I made was packaged in a box, like the kind you’d get in a special edition box set, that someone would do twenty years into their career. But we made them by hand, gluing the boxes together out of cardboard. Covering them in artwork, photocopying artwork, hand-painting every single one. We even put an interview in there, photographs of myself as if I were famous, and the cheekiest thing was, I signed and I numbered each one, and I made 100. And I sent them out and for the first time ever, people understood. Because my sister and I had managed to create something that explained to all these people how I would be as a complete artist. I wasn’t letting them assume how they would turn me into an artist. I was saying this is entirely who I am. From my interviews to my artwork to my songs, my sound, my voice. This is who you are getting. It’s ready to be launched. All I need is for you to launch me. I was always being asked, so who paid? What company is behind you? And they had no idea that my sister and I had put it together in my mother’s laundry room.

What about the 64-page hardcover book for the Songs For Sorrow EP?

MIKA: Exactly the same thing. The same attitude. We sat down and I had this idea. My sister said it was going to be really hard and no one is going to want to do it. And if we ask someone else to put it together, everyone will say no. But if I put it together myself, all these artists will say yes. So I was calling up and e-mailing all these different artists from around the world completely cold, I had no introductions to them. I found them on the Internet or by galleries. One of the artists I discovered through a TV show, so I was calling up the TV company to get in touch with the artist and I just called them up and I explained who I was. Some of them knew who I was, some of them didn’t. I said, I have no money to pay you but this is what I want to do. But we did it. It took nine months but we pulled it off. We had a concept and we knew we wanted to make a small beautiful little project that we wouldn’t advertise. And the beauty of it was that we never launched it and we sold 15,000 copies and 7,000 of those copies were sold through a waiting list before because people had heard me write about it on my blog but hadn’t even seen it. It’s really important because no matter what happens in my career, to keep on doing small beautiful projects that are not done for money but are just done to inspire me and my sister, but also my fans, now I realise, they have to be inspired as well. It puts them in the context of everything I like to do.

Are you afraid that your happy attitude might tire your fans with such bright colours on everything?

MIKA: My fans understand that there is no two-dimensional happiness presented in anything I do. It’s like a Cheshire Cat, the power is in the smile, but the teeth are very sharp and very dangerous. I think that’s the secret. My fascination is the combination of something that is joyful, approachable and comically light with something that is very real, almost menacing and sometimes totally desperately depressing. It’s taking a fairytale and turning it into a contemporary gothic fairytale that is the most fascinating part. I think my fans understand that and I think that’s why the project Songs For Sorrow was a kind of visual and song-writing experiment on that whole theme. How do you take sorrow and present it in a million different ways? And make it something that you want to illustrate, something that you want to sing and listen to. To me that’s why I did it as an experiment on that kind of concept of sadness. What I do is far more associated with sadness than it is with happiness. However, the power is in the smile.

Your second album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, sounds very different to your debut. Have you grown up in any way?

MIKA: A little bit, I think inevitably. The first album was definitely a product of my childhood. I was probably running away from my adolescence. But I was confronting it more on this second one. I think I’ve grown up a bit. At the same time, I don’t think I’ve grown up as much as I will, musically I mean, and I think I’ve got a long way to go and I’m fully aware of that. I think there was something about me with the second album, I wanted to finish what I had started. I would say there’s definitely a feeling in me now of liberation. In more ways than one. I suspect that will give me a lot of freedom, and a lot of petrol for my song-writing from this point on.

The lyrics are quite dark and the music is happy. Is this the trick of a pop artist who wants to send out hidden messages?

MIKA: Absolutely.

So who is “Dr John”?

MIKA: Dr John is many different things. You could say he’s a shrink, you could say he’s a form of alcohol or drug. He’s a million different things. The song talks about the desperation of a very dark time in my adolescence. It sounds like some kind of theme from a children’s show.

Alcohol features a lot in your recent work. Why is this so interesting for you?

MIKA: Because it’s a common drug which affects so many of us and our families and our friends. And so many have to deal with this menacing problem that kills them. And there’s been a lot of that in my family. It’s something I’ve had to grow up with in my adolescence. Not necessarily in my self, but in others around me.

In the song “Blue Eyes” you have a really happy Latin feel but once again the lyrics are sad.

MIKA: It’s all about taking a sorrow and turning it into something powerful that makes you feel good about sorrow. The joy of a sad song is that it makes you feel OK to be sad. It gives you a reason, it gives it a meaning. And in making you move your hips and making you move your head, it instantly gives you a way to deal with sadness. I think that is something very powerful. The music is the fantasy background and the lyrics represent reality. When you put the two together and you’re in Alice in Wonderland.

Can you imagine making a film about alcoholism or something like that?

MIKA: No, because I’d have to illustrate reality in a way that I don’t feel comfortable visualising things – so literally. In fact, if I could figure out a way to not do things literally, that’s the problem with film, there’s often so little that’s not literal. I prefer dealing with things like that without having to show them. But I think in my shows there’s this kind of half-world that you feel you’re in, half reality, half fantasy. My new shows, the ones I’m bringing to Germany, are all based on doll’s houses and different sizes of doll’s houses. A lot of magical things happen throughout the show. It’s all about the surreal fence I like to establish in my shows. And my shows are very anarchic; you never know are the walls going to tumble down. I love that; it’s a kind of very dangerous joy. It doesn’t just invite, it needs the audience to join in in that spirit for it to work in the first place.

You said once you don’t like the way you look. But here you are in the video for “We Are Golden” and you’re dancing around half naked. Has your opinion of yourself changed?

MIKA: That’s why I did the video. To illustrate someone who doesn’t like the way he looks when he looks in the mirror but is making movies in his head, dancing around in his room all alone, imagining being someone else.

How much has your life changed since the huge success of your first album?

MIKA: Not much. I can pay my bills.

Can you walk on the streets?

MIKA: Oh yes, I can walk on the streets. People leave me alone. I don’t have to go to college, which is really nice. And I don’t have to wait tables anymore, which is even better!

And you can afford a nice piano.

MIKA: Yes, I’m looking at getting a Bösendorfer piano, which is the most expensive thing I’ll ever buy.

Maybe you’ll find one over here in Germany.

MIKA: I would never buy a piano and then transport it. I would only buy one after it’s been transported. Simply because it changes. You have to know what you’re buying. The sound may change. Some people disagree with me, but I really believe that.

What do you think about the world of celebrity?

MIKA: It can be very mean and it can be lots of fun. There are monsters in it and there are really nice people. Unfortunately more monsters than nice people. It’s normally the ones that pretend to be nice that are the nastiest in real life.

So what about your friendship with Lady Gaga?

MIKA: She doesn’t pretend to be nice and she’s actually one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in real life. She’s a really good person. But as her persona, she doesn’t come across as really nice. I think that’s really clever. She’s extremely intelligent and she is her own creation. And she works harder than any other woman in pop music – that’s for sure. And when you speak to her, she’s just very communicative, very intelligent and totally normal. She just looks fabulous. She was going to see my shows in New York before she was even Gaga.

And what about Beth Ditto?

MIKA: She’s hysterical! And very similar to Gaga, she’s very much her own person, her own creation, and lives life totally on her own terms. Those are the women I love in music. They’re strong and they protect themselves.

Are you friends with other famous people?

MIKA: I’m friends with Adele, the singer. She’s another strong woman and her own creation. A couple of actors, Ian McKellen who I’ve gotten very close to. The English actor, he’s a much older actor, but to me it’s the same thing. I can have the same conversation with him as I can with any of the others. And I’ve kept my three friends I’ve had since I was younger.

Is there one song on the new album that’s your favourite?

MIKA: I like “Rain” a lot. And I like “Toy Boy”.

Could say something nice to our readers please?

MIKA: Thank you first for supporting me. If you look at what has happened in mainstream music over the last few years, the one thing that you can realise is that this army of people who used to be considered as freaks have suddenly become beautiful freaks who are allowed to be the way that they are. What I regretted so much when I was younger was that I was always waiting for later. And that’s why I did music. To give me an excuse to be who I wanted to be in my life. But now, I think there’s no reason to have such excuses. If you want to dress up like Grace Jones or David Bowie or Lagerfeld, then just go for it. Do what ever you feel like. If you want to look like a librarian, then do it. Live without any excuses whatsoever.


Photos: Julian Broad

Check for the latest tour dates!
Mika's official site
Mika on myspace