Aged 13, he sang for Diana Ross and introduced himself to Simon Cowell. He’s been spoken of in the same breath as Prince, Freddie Mercury and George Michael. Oh, and his debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, shifted six million copies. Mika, the crown prince of pop, tells BRIAN BOYDabout his second coming
IT BEGAN with a pilgrimage. In Los Angeles to record his new album, Mika paid a visit to the United Western Recorders studio complex in Hollywood. The space has been used by Frank Sinatra and Phil Spector among others, but Mika was there for a very specific reason. "When I was 16, I drowned myself in the Pet Soundsalbum - I was obsessed with it to the detriment of my outside life," he says.
"The Beach Boys recorded most of it at United Western, so I went in one day. I just sat there in total amazement trying to take it all in. That album was the beginning for me. And I only got into it because, when I was younger, I had seen this experimental German abstract interpretation of Pet Soundsat the Barbican. That show and that music really stimulated my interest - seriously, it was like I had an 'awakening' of some sort."
Following the six million-selling global smash hit Life in Cartoon Motionthat was his 2007 debut, Mika confesses to having had a slight panic attack about writing the follow-up. "You come back from this big, glitzy tour and you're looking at a blank notebook, and terror sets in," he says. Help came from an unlikely new best friend - The Who's Pete Townshend.
"He picked up on the frightened look in my eye. He had been there before. His advice was just to discipline yourself as a writer, concentrate on the craft of the songwriting and wait for the inspiration to flow. So I sort of went missing in sction for a year, pretended that I was working in the Brill Building (New York's famous songwriting factory) and went back to where it all had started for me musically - the studio where Pet Soundswas recorded."
The ascending vocal harmonies on Good Gone Girlfrom the new album are a direct nod to Brian Wilson's masterpiece, but that's the only time the West Coast gets a look in. The Boy Who Knew Too Muchis indecently crammed with technicolour pop melodies over which Mika's choir-boy-on-a-sugar-rush falsetto soars and swoops.
"I'm unashamedly pop," insists the impossibly skinny and rangy 6ft 3in singer. "I know the so-called 'cool' music press might find it all a bit chart-friendly and even a bit vulgar. I'm not a great pianist, I'm at best a mediocre classical singer - I don't have any delusions about what I do. I write pop music because I am driven to do so. The music is like Marmite - you either love it or hate it."
With influences as atypical (if not downright bonkers) as The Slits, Shabba Ranks, Harry Nilsson and Roxy Music (a band he only discovered in the past year), Mika's sound was always going to be "eccentric". The surface reading of his music is that it's the best bits of disco and glam rock with sweeping orchestration and widescreen arrangements, but dig a little deeper and you'll find that his great skill is in re-upholstering established musical patterns to produce a familiar-sounding collage.
"As a child I had this obsession with musical patterns," he says. "I used to do up these mix tapes and I never knew what the singers looked like, so I used to arrange them by patterns or the style of the music. Rock, classical, show tunes, jazz - I'd put them together according to feeling. And I order my own music by patterns because music is a way for me to communicate. Communication was always a problem for me growing up. I didn't have a great childhood."
Now 26, Michael Penniman was born in Beirut to an American father and a Lebanese mother. The family left Lebanon when he was a young child due to the ongoing civil war. After some time in Paris (he speaks fluent French and is hugely popular in the country), the family, now broke due to the collapse of his father's business, settled in London.
School was a nightmare for the young Mika - he is dyslexic and was mercilessly bullied by his classmates. "I had long hair, bright red trousers and a matching bow tie and shirt," he remembers. "I've never thought of myself as camp, but maybe in an all-boy's school, I was perceived that way."
He was home-schooled from aged 11 onwards and also received singing lessons from an expatriate Russian. "I have OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and the idea of making a career from singing just dominated my life," he says. "You won't believe this, but when I was just 13, I talked my way into a private record company party for Diana Ross and sang five songs in front of everybody. I met with Simon Cowell at around the same time - he said my songs weren't any good, but that I had a 'unique' voice. That was after I had rang him every day for four months solid. The OCD is still there - people around me are used to it by now."
Aged 19, he won a place at London's Royal College of Music, even though he knew he wanted to be a pop and not an opera singer. Working as a waiter to make money to pay for studio time, he eventually got a clutch of songs together which were impressive enough to get him a record deal. "It wasn't easy - I was scorned by the alternative crowd because of my obsession with good melodies and I was rejected by the mainstream because they thought I was too weird. Also, I had all these strong ideas about artwork, packaging and marketing - maybe that put some of the labels off, like 'who's this arrogant weirdo telling us how to do our job?'."
Life in Cartoon Motionwas trailed by the number-one single Grace Kellyand was followed up by further singles Lollipop, Love Today, Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), Happy Endingand Relax, Take It Easy. It was an album that wouldn't stop selling - and he picked up a Brit Award, an Ivor Novello and a Grammy nomination along the way.
"The first album was me processing my childhood," he says. "Everything on it was, in some way, the soundtrack of my childhood. It was me processing all those mix tapes I used to listen to. This new one is the next logic and emotional step in my development - it's my adolescence album. Writing it, I went back to how I felt about things when I was 17 or 18. There are songs of joy in there as well as songs of bitterness as well as a lot of adolescent sorrow - that sense of leaving your childhood behind. But I try to take that sorrow and turn it on its head - make it into a beautiful, fragile thing. There's a real sense of loss and regret to the songs."
A stronger, if not radically different, work to the debut, The Boy Who Knew Too Muchwill dominate the upper reaches of the charts for the rest of the year. To the boss of his record label, Lucian Grange, the album confirms Mika's place in an elite group of musicians: "Once every 15 years, pop brings along a Prince, a Freddie Mercury or a George Michael - all great writers, singers and performers. Mika is a classic example of that kind of artist. Of course, they can be slightly odd people, but their genius is that they communicate that oddness on a mass level."
As regards the guessing game about his sexuality, he's has his stock "I never talk about anything to do with my sexuality" response. "People ask me all the time, but I don't see the point in discussing it. I just don't think I need to. A lot of my favourite artists like Bowie and Prince resisted labels," he says.
Cut to the unlikely surrounds of the Sadler's Wells theatre in London (a space normally reserved for ballet) where Mika is previewing songs from the new album at a fan club-only gig. The stage is completely decked out in tin foil, giant balloons drift over the audience and a small army of backing musicians are acting out a pantomime version of one of the songs. In the middle of the melee, Mika is dancing on top of a grand piano banging a metal dustbin with no little gusto and screaming with laughter.
"Music is the thing that helped me to get through the hard times - the bullying, the OCD, the dyslexia, the moving from country to country - everything," he says afterwards. "I've always lived in my own weird little world - the music is the only reason I ever leave it".
* The Boy Who Knew Too Much is out on September 18th
