guinchogirl

HeHeHe, sorry, it was nearly 2am, guess I didn't read your message properly, many apologies

Hey welcome jfung Hope you don't mind me asking... if you're in the US, then how on earth do you know who Spencer Moon was????!!!!!!

Really?! WOW!

Your english is great, don't worry

HeHe, I love it that he'd do a duet with Dolly Parton - that would be very interesting indeed

Hey Welcome! Here's the track listing for Life in Cartoon Motion... Grace Kelly Lollipop My Interpretation Love Today Relax, Take It Easy Any Other World Billy Brown Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) Stuck In The Middle Happy Ending

Welcome aboard aj We're getting more & more excited about Mika every day that goes by! Hope you enjoy the forums

Oooh goody! So, the rumours were true

This is quite a long interview (hence Parts 1 & 2) but in my opinion, it's one of the best articles I've read so far

Part 2. The drawings that go with the songs are immensely cute. Is that you? I do all the drawings with my sister who does drawings under the name Da Wack, which is so unlike her as she's dainty. They're like little caricatures of the songs, Lollipop Girl, Mrs Brown... And this is just the beginning, they're gonna be everywhere! There's going to be a little family of cartoons? Oh yeah, they live in the Emerald Forest. There's a very special little podcast we're working on because I really like The Archers, it's such a cool little oddity, a gem of this country. I was thinking "If we did the Archers, but in the Emerald Forest, instead of where the Archers is set. What if Billy Brown is one of the characters, and Lollipop Girl is one of the characters, and I'm in it, let's do a audio-Holloaks with psychedelic characters". What was your favourite Archers storyline? It's gone a bit downhill since Brian and Siobhan. I like all of them, I like the mundane-ness of it, it’s really great. It's warmer than watching something like Hollyoaks or Emmerdale, and you can tell it's fake, but something about the Archers, it’s got an antiquated feel to it, and the sound effects are brilliant (makes motorcycle noise) What's your favourite cartoon? I just saw Belleville Rendez-vous again, I think that's fantastic. But as far as a series cartoon, The Simpsons is great, I always refer to it because I have this fascination with the way that a cartoon like The Simpsons, or any cartoon going back to Warner Brothers cartoon and stuff, where they're so loosely attached to reality, so by the end of a thirty minute episode Homer can become president of the United States but by the next episode he's right back where he started, you know what I mean? Anything's possible, but it’s always pinned slightly in reality so it’s funny and relevant but anything is possible. So, life in cartoon motion? Exactly. I love how Homer Simpson can sit there... I just saw the episode where George Bush Sr moves in opposite it in, and it causes a riot, and then he’s beating him up and punching him in a sewer, so he can make political statements, talk about Michael Jackson... if you're a kid you get a certain level of it, if you're an adult you get a deeper level of the joke, it's not just an old man moving next door, it’s George Bush Sr and you relate to it on a different wave, and I wanted to write songs that had a similar effect. So if you listen to a song like Love Today, there's coded little stories in it. One of them's about a hooker, because when I was writing I was working in Miami demoing with a bunch of musicians who were helping me for free and I co-wrote with a woman called Jodie Mark who helped get me some attention, and we'd be borrowing studio time, we'd come back from the studio at 3 in the morning and meet at the corner of 95 which is this highway there. Don't ask me why Miami, it just had to be Miami, and it was during holiday time when I was at the Royal College of Music and I got a student loan out, stayed with friends, it was ridiculous. It took us a year to do four songs, but that's the only reason why I got my deal. And there'd always be hookers and drug dealers because it was kinda rough, and there was always one that never got picked up. So she's in the song, it goes "Carolina sits on 95/ Give her a dollar and she'll make you smile/ Hook her, book her, nook her then walk away, but everybody's gonna love today, gonna love today". And if you're a kid and you hear that song, you don't hear tha!. "Girl dresses like a kid for fun, she licks her lips like there's something other/ She tries to tell you life has just begun/ So now you know she's getting something other than the love from her mother". You' don’t get that if you're a kid, but if you're an adult you get it. It's like a cartoon - you take what you want out of it and leave what you don't. Crikey. Like Grease, we never realised how dirty the lyrics are. They're disgusting! It's all about writing lyrics that get around all the (sex thing) like "#### her senseless": you don't wanna say that, so say "Hook her book her nook her". You've lived all over the place, so if we end up in Beirut, Paris, and London for a couple of hours each, where do we go? Beirut, you've gotta go to Balbech and if you can, go see a concert. The last concert I saw there was Sting at the old Phoenician ruins. It's actually a Roman temple I think, and you sit outside on benches in the ruins and it's completely amazing and intimate. Sad, because a lot of it's been destroyed quite frankly so Beirut great, but you've got to look hard to find. Go up to where my family is from in the South, the old hippodrome, there are just ruins everywhere. A lot of them have been stolen and destroyed, especially now, but you go into people's houses and there’s so many bloody ruins everything that they've just built on top of them down in the basement, there's a horse head or something popping out of the ground. That's Beirut. Paris? Just get loads of money and eat loads of food and buy crap that you don't need and stay in a beautiful hotel. That's the glamour of Paris. To tell you the truth, to get into the nitty gritty of Paris is just so hard, you have to really know your way around, you need to know people, it's a hard society to tap into. London? We all know London don't we? One thing... There used to be these incredible parties organized by a society called Reclaim The Beach, and they'd throw a party every couple of months on the bank of the river Thames when it was at low tide. They'd throw bonfires and DJs and food on stands... it was amazing. You'd be on a silt beach on the Thames with the most incredible view, it would be out of a Richard Curtis movie. I don't know if they're still doing them. Let’s get them back. The last thing... Aloud was supposed to interview you weeks ago, but you kept getting stolen the fashion magazines. How fashionable would you rate yourself on a scale of Tesco to Manolo Blahnik? (laughs) I don't know, depends who’s giving me clothes for free. I always say the most fashionable people are people who aren't tied to labels. If you do a thing with a label then there's a certain point to it, but you never really want to be identified by it. I don't want to look at you and say you're wearing THAT and THAT and THAT. To be a season whore is pointlessly unfashionable and you might as well be eclectic and keep people guessing.

Part 1. Where have you been? This isn't some ridiculous trend you've fallen asleep and half-missed, this is MIKA, the most ebullient bundle of pop tunes you're going to hear all year! Mika, a former opera singer who used to end up being entertained by his own voice when queuing on the British Airways ticketing hotline, has featured on almost every tipster's list for 2007, and is releasing his debut album Life In Cartoon Motion at the beginning of February. Born in Lebanon, raised in Paris and London and now unleashing his cartoon pop stories on the world, believe us when we say that this isn't even hype - this is the real thing, done brilliantly. You’re getting quite popular now which requires stringent decision making. So, are you going to be a nice grounded popstar or a hysterical diva? I don't have any particular kind of hook ups about attitudes or that kind of thing, that drives me just crazy. At the end of the day you've gotta sit down and write another song and there's nothing more humanizing than that because you have to be in the same place. It's kind of like going to the toilet, it’s like everyone has to do it, it's part of the job. If you have too many quabbles about the way you're treated and stuff it's a bit ridiculous but at the same time I'm extremely controlling and fussy about the way that I work. Everything's gotta be done the right way, because I’m the only one who loses out it’s my life. It's funny, some people think I'm totally great and some people think I'm the biggest pain in the ass, the worst thing that's ever walked into their office. What's the worst thing you've ever done to somebody? Scrap websites six times, or remix my album. I went through eleven mixes of one song... not remixes, actual mixes. I remastered the album four times Did you ever make anybody cry? Yes. On my press kit, one of the last lines is "I've made people cry making this album and I'll probably continue doing that till I stop making records" but that's part of the job. I'm a solo artist so I fight my battles with everyone I work with as opposed to internally with my band. People either love you or hate you, there's no real middle ground. The whole Marmite thing? Yeah, I'm quite proud of it actually. What is it that polarizes people so much? It's very uncompromising, it's a very singular vision. Anything that smells of an artist that much is clearly going to be a smell that you like, or one you just don't like, there's nothing in-between. I think it’s a very good thing. Does the diva aspect come from starting off in opera? Not really, I just did that for a bit. When I moved over from France as a kid I ended up going to a French state school in South Kensington, I had a really hard time and I ended up leaving, so I didn't go to school for about six months. I didn't have anything to do, my mum was like "I need to get this kid back on his feet again, he's a bit of a mess, what am I going to do?" so she got me this very tough singing teacher. I was always into music but by then it was two hours a day it just kind of took over my life, I had nothing else to do and I got really good really quickly. How old were you? Eleven. My first ever gig was at the Royal Opera House doing the chorus for a Strauss opera and it kind of led from there. It was really fast, because when you're trained, taken out of school through circumstance, you get really serious about it. I never made any money, so to me it was really hard work for nothing, it was all just experience. It's not really that sexy either is it, opera at 11... Yeah, it doesn’t really make you cool, does it? It was cool to me! There’s no other building in the world that’s cooler than the Royal Opera House. It was a fake world that was great, great to make a living doing that. What followed on from that? I did session work. I was so cheap because my mother had no idea what we were supposed to be charging, so I got £45 for an Orbit chewing gum commercial. I got lots of jobs and I was really fast, I did everything from Royal Opera House to jingles to contemporary music in Warsaw. Then I went to the Royal College of Music, studying the classical scene, but I was always writing pop songs from a young age. Because I could never read music, I was writing my own stuff. I dropped out just over a year ago now and I'm making this record. That's ridiculous, it's so quick... Well, it's been quick but it hasn't. I've had my break about 48 times but it never really worked out. Now it seems to be pulling through so I'm happy. Your songs tread some line between Elton John, Freddie Mercury and Scissor Sisters, so is it old pop or new pop for you? Elton. The early Elton. But then again the Scissor Sisters did stuff on their first album that I hadn’t really heard before, that reworking of that Pink Floyd song is genius. I just have this thing about reclaiming pop, about making "artist" records, because there's not a lot of solo artists making records that sound "big". There was a trend that came in towards the end of the ‘90s that if you're a solo artist then you make singer-songwriter records that are anchored at an instrument, mostly a guitar or a piano. Unless you're in a band, you can't make big records. I was like "Wow, I'm a singer-songwriter, I'm not going to be anchored at the piano, there's no hope in hell of keeping me there for more than a couple of songs". I write at the piano, but I wanna make huge-sounding pop records. That's really my thing, and to get inspiration for that you go back to the ‘70s and the ‘80s, because that's the only time people were really doing that, it's disappeared apart from someone like Beck, I can't really think of many others. Hardly anyone actually. And pop's only just starting to rescue itself from that whole bland controlling boy group/girl group thing as well. And also you can say pop! I was reading an article yesterday about Alex Kapranos, and he's written an article about food. They referred to him as a pop star, and I was like "That's exactly what he is". I was having an argument with a friend of mine a few nights ago about how there are no rock stars any more. Is Pete Doherty a rock star? Over my dead body! Well, over his more likely. He's not a rock star, he's a pop star, he's in Grazia. There’s no such thing as rock star anymore, and that’s kind of reflected in pop music. What is rock music now? It could be death metal, but pop is stretched out so much, Bjork makes pop music, she says it herself, and it's getting very cool again. You would have worked so well on Top of the Pops, all that glitz and cartoonishness. Damn BBC1. I know. I did T4 last night, I had to sing live. There were bits that weren't live because they can't handle it. Gwen Stefani was on before and after me and she does all this stuff that no-one knows. It seems like she does all the singles in one go so when they release the next one she doesn’t have to come all the way back to record the performance. Why Grace Kelly? Why not Bette Davis or somebody else? Because Grace Kelly is more interesting than Bette Davis in terms of snapshot life, wasn’t she? She was this normal girl from England, then she became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, then became royalty, and then died. And the way she died, it's like "C'mon!", a soap opera on ecstasy. Interview continues in Part 2

We had to get ours through ebay in the end, couldn't find tickets anywhere else But at least we got some!

A very good evening to you too Gothy Hope you enjoy chatting with the rest of the gang

Kiki, it's lovely to have you here

[quote name='jemmalee']"With his five-octave vocal range and ambiguous sexuality, Mika looks and sounds like the collective, androgynous wet dream of girls, gays and grannies everywhere" (the independent) How true!:wub2:[/QUOTE] Awesome quote :) Kinda wraps Mika-up in one sentence :thumb_yello: But straight guys like him too, eh boys?? :biggrin2:

[quote name='mizzshears']okay my list here it goes: scissor sisters the beatles the kooks razorlight the killers goldfrapp kaiser chiefs franz ferdinand darkness james blunt james morrison pink queen[/QUOTE] mizzshears your taste is impecable :) Ditto on all of those for me :thumb_yello:

15 January 2007 MIKA'S TARTAN UP HIS SOUND Beirut singer boasts 'Scottish' accent Exclusive by Beverley Lyons & Showbiz Liz HE'S the 23-year-old Beirut-born singer/songwriter who has recently taken the country by storm. Described as the musical heir to Freddie Mercury and voted the sound of 2007 by a BBC poll, he's quite a talent. And now the Razz has managed to get an exclusive interview with the five-octave wielding vocalist billed as the 21st century's first superstar - Mika. He confessed he was told off by a sound engineer for sounding too Scottish when he was recording his single Grace Kelly. Mika Penniman lived in France and London after leaving Beirut when he was young, but he admitted: "Some people think I have a bit of a Scottish accent. "The engineer noticed it after I recorded one section of the album. He said, 'Would you mind redoing it without the Scots accent?' Even in Grace Kelly, it sounds a bit like The Proclaimers at one point. They are just amazing. They are not just good at writing pop songs, but they are organic writers who do complete pop records." Mika studied at the Royal College of Music before dropping out to pursue a career mixing pop with his classical training, but it has taken him years of wheeling and dealing to be recognised as an original tour de force. He said: "I'd beg, steal and borrow to get a demo. I did it on borrowed time and managed to get people to work with me in Miami, staying in the studio from 9pm until 2am. "I was pretty lucky and finally got four songs together, enough for a demo's worth." Although he's made the No.3 spot in downloads alone this week, Mika says it's only now that he's come into his own. He said: "I can hold my own now because I have sharpened my teeth. "Because of the kind of music I make I was pretty much, up until a couple of months ago, too strange for commercial music companies and too melody driven and commercial for the indie crowd. "I was rejected by all crowds and stood up on my own, found my own place. I was never cool enough to be in anyone else's band." Mika, who went straight into the No.1 slot on the iTunes singles chart last week, admits he's now amazed by the acceptance he's had from some of the bands he's always admired. He said: "I've got a lovely letter from Brian May (of Queen) and The Feeling have been fantastic. "Brian had found out about me because fans of Queen were sending him emails saying he had to check out my stuff, in particular Grace Kelly. "He had a listen and thought it was worth making a fuss about. "His was one of the first reactions I got and apart from that loads of other amazing musicians have been supporting me in the last year." Grace Kelly's full release is on January 29 and Mika's debut album, Life In Cartoon Motion, comes out on February 5. Mika has already sold out his gig at Glasgow's ABC2 on February 26.

Hi Paul, it's lovely to have you here Bring along your friends, the more the merrier!

Me too smaller venues give a more intimate atmosphere ...but... large venues can be very exciting too!

Hey Sara Lynnie is from the west midlands - check out her intro

I just had a quick look around, Mikasounds doesn't mention a venue change but all the ticket sites I just looked at say Mika @ Northumbria University Students Union - Sat 24th February 2007. Hope that helps?

Hi Lynnie So glad you found us

Hi Aglaie Welcome It's great to have you here

That is sooooo close!!! Unbelievable!! But there's still next week...

Thanks for all the pics you guys, they're awesome!! Mika really is gorgeous but don't tell Sunny Monkey I said so!!! LOL!!!