Cautionary Wife

CBBC NEWSROUND MUSIC Sunday February 04 2007 19:01 GMT Mika has held on to the singles chart top spot for the third week running with his track Grace Kelly. He saw off a challenge from Fall Out Boy's This Ain't A Scene It's An Arms Race, which moved up four places from six to two. Just Jack's Starz In Their Eyes was down one to number three. This week's highest climber was The Prayer by Bloc Party, which jumped up nine places to number four. Exceeder by Mason made up the top five. --- CW.

I just found this USA blog posting EW.COM - SNAP JUDGMENT: MIKA'S 'GRACE KELLY' VIDEO along with comments from American folks of what they think of the Grace Kelly in the US. I can't find whether the actual video has been discussed on MFC board? CW

Thanks all who have written about this, and specially Jemmalee. My pleasure. I came home very late last night and spotted the article and just couldn't take myself off to bed before I had posted. I had read some derogatory articles and was expecting the same from this and was so brilliantly surprised to find such an informative and beautifully treated piece. Ah - the naysayers.... (Guardian - Drowned In Sound - Observer) - don't even bother going there - as they seek to destroy this lovely boy.... call themselves critics, they purport to be style and taste setters. I was disgusted by their attempted character assasination. I thought the Sunday Herald was a great piece as it set the record straight. If I am remembering the right article - that the author of a novel is able to have their anonymity but a singer has to lay their whole life open for public scrutiny. Go figure. Happy Sunday. CW.

DIGITAL SPY Saturday, February 3 2007 By Daniel Kilkelly Mika has climbed to the top of the Irish singles chart this week with debut song Grace Kelly. X Factor winner Leona Lewis has finally dropped from the top three and is now at fourth position, while Just Jack and Jojo have remained at second and third place respectively. Fall Out Boy moved up 28 places, with This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race now at number eight. Snow Patrol's Eyes Open has remained at the top of the album chart once again, followed by Norah Jones who has debuted at number two with Not Too Late. The top ten singles in full: 1. (5) Mika: 'Grace Kelly' 2. (2) Just Jack: 'Starz In Their Eyes' 3. (3) Jojo: 'Too Little Too Late' 4. (1) Leona: 'A Moment Like This' 5. (4) Akon ft. Eminem: 'Smack That' 6. (6) Cascada: 'Truly Madly Deeply' 7. (7) Take That: 'Patience' 8. (32) Fall Out Boy: 'This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race' 9. (8) Damien Leith: 'Night Of My Life' 10. (9) Nelly Furtado: 'All Good Things (Come To An End)'

SUNDAY HERALD by Peter Ross 04 February 2007 Continued.... It would be seven months before he enrolled at Westminster School. However, he was not idle. He had already started working in music, for instance writing a jingle for a chewing gum advert. Grafting in the commercial music sector had been a refuge from the bullying; he was sick of being a child and enjoyed this professional adult world. He also took comfort in singing lessons with a Russian voice coach, Alla Ardakov. "She was coming to teach me to play piano," says Mika, "but quickly realised that I was a useless piano player; because of my dyslexia I couldn't sight read. So she started teaching me singing instead. She realised I could take it in and get good, so things became serious right away. I had four hours of lessons a week, and trained every single day. I fast-tracked the training process." Ardakov remembers him well. "Obviously a very talented little boy. His voice was angelic and he was a beautiful child. He was good natured, playful all the time. But I worked with him very seriously. I tried to teach him everything I knew. He was obedient and loved learning. His parents knew that the boy was exceptional and had a big future waiting for him." Mika recalls getting told off in Russian when he got things wrong. "I cried and it was amazing, like one of those cheesy films where people get good really quickly. It also gave me a sense of what really working on your craft actually is. Even now I'm not working as hard as I did when I was a kid." Under Ardakov's tutelage he progressed to singing Mozart arias, and at 12 joined the chorus of the Royal Opera production of Richard Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten. He remains addicted to the stage. "Cocteau called it red and gold syndrome, and I am very much a sufferer. I started collecting toy theatres when I was a child, and maybe when I get older I can actually get a real one. I want to own some theatres and restore them." There is something very theatrical now about his music. He considers his songs to be performed storytelling. That's why it suited him playing the Emcee in a Westminster School production of Cabaret - he was the narrator, which meant he was in control. I get a strong sense that not being in control is the worst feeling in the world for Mika, a reminder perhaps of the bullying and the forced absence of his father. "God, I shocked them when I did that," he says of Cabaret. "I went all-out. Even people who absolutely hated me just couldn't help themselves and had to come and congratulate me. It made me realise the power of being good at something. It makes you untouchable." On leaving school, Mika attempted to launch his pop career. Although he attracted record company interest, he hated the idea that to become successful he had to lose everything interesting about his identity. "I wrote Grace Kelly out of my frustration with the music industry. At that time I was having to find my feet in so many ways. I was trying to figure out who I was as a person in every sense of the word, from my personal life, to me as a musician, to dealing with money for the first time. I was really questioning myself and went through a bit of a personal crisis. That first line, Do I attract you, do I repulse you with my queasy smile?' sums up exactly how I was feeling. I started with that lyric and by the time I had finished the song I had come to the decision that I was going to take a risk and completely be myself." Through a mutual friend he met Jodi Marr. "He played me some songs," she recalls, "and on the fourth song I said, Oh my God, you're Freddie Mercury!' And he said No one's ever said that before! I love Freddie Mercury!' It sounds ridiculous now, but I said to him, If you can get yourself to Miami, I will sell my house to make you a rock star.'" They spent two years in Miami and New York, working on around 50 songs, trying to find his true voice. Marr introduced him to a lot of music. "I would say Take home this Harry Nilsson CD, and take my Cheap Trick box set, and listen to Elvis Costello,' and he would come back the next day, having listened all night long, with a new song idea. He'd absorb the whole thing and come out with something that was purely Mika. He's just one of these people who is special, like from another level of musical talent. Touched by God is how I describe it." Mika's debut album Life In Cartoon Motion is a pop masterclass, built solidly from potential hit singles, "like a really amazing piece of Lego construction". The music evokes Queen, Scissor Sisters, T-Rex, even some of the best songs by boy bands. There's a hysterical quality to some of the performances which Mika says reflects his personality. "Not all the time though. I can be completely normal for a whole day and then when I sit down at a piano I regress to what I was like when I was four years old and hyperactive. I describe my music as hyper-pop." The music sounds joyous and escapist, but Mika aims for depth in the lyrics. Relax (Take It Easy) is a love story set in the aftermath of the July 7 terror attacks; Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) is an attack on the size zero culture which fosters eating disorders; Billy Brown is about a family man with a gay lover; Any Other World has a spoken word introduction in which a family friend tells the story of losing an eye during the Lebanese civil war. "You can take a serious idea and paint it in primary colours and make it really approachable," says Mika. "That gives what you want to say so much power." He takes inspiration for this approach from cartoons and comic books. "If you look at the work of someone like Robert Crumb it is absolutely immediate, however he implies so many other things. He is a genius at that. It's populist art that doesn't compromise on credibility. Very much like a good pop song. There's a lot of soulless art and a lot of soulless pop music out there, but it can be done well. I am constantly referring in my head to people like Crumb." The album artwork, which Mika worked on with his eldest sister, Yasmine, is very cartoonish, and the characters from his songs are not only represented in the CD booklet but also have their personalities fleshed out on his MySpace site. "Some people call that marketing. I call it creating fantasy." Cartoons tie in with the overall theme of the album - the transition to adulthood. In Mika's head, coming of age has meant a conscious reconnection with his early childhood. He wants to be as happy an adult as he was a boy. "I am trying to recapture myself as a child. I had a charmed existence in France, then in London things went bad. Music was one of the things I took refuge in. So it's interesting now that music is my full-time job that I find myself going back to what I was like as a kid. There's an innocence that is great to preserve." Ironically, given Mika's strong visual sense, he is himself something of a blank canvas. With his culturally diverse background, genderless name and songs which celebrate male and female sexuality, he is a rather indeterminate figure. "As a storyteller, it's always good to be kind of unclassifiable," he says. "The tabloidy fame thing does kind of worry me. I never wanted to be a pop star. I just wanted to be able to write songs and record and perform them. "If you are a novelist then people stay out of your life and there is this whole mystery shrouded around the writer. But as a songwriter you are expected to lay everything about yourself out on the table, and at the same time create little imaginary worlds. I find it very difficult to do both. So people ask me, Don't you want to talk about certain parts of your life? Don't you think you are cheating your public? And don't you think you could be a role model for so many people?' But I am protecting and respecting myself enough not to lay myself out as fodder for any magazine or newspaper." "Is this to do with your sexuality?" I ask. "Oh everything. Sexuality. Even certain parts of my background. I don't want to talk about my surname all the time, not because I have anything to hide, but because I don't find it necessary. I think it's better to keep some of yourself to yourself. Why does anyone want to be like Jade Goody?" "So you're not interested in fame at all?" I ask. "It's weird because in my real life I'm not. However when it comes to performing I am completely obsessed with getting people to take notice, and being the centre of attention. I'm living a bit of a double life. When I go down the coffee shop and hang out with my friends I'm not interested in fame, but on the other hand I crave it." It will be fascinating to see what the future holds for Mika. He says he wants to take the public to "weird Alice in Wonderland places" and that sentiment alone indicates that he is a more interesting pop artist than Britain has had for some time. He will certainly have further hit singles and a successful album, but can he sustain it? He believes so, and for such a idealistic man is surprisingly hard-headed about the realities of the music business. "I had a lot of fun making this album, and the record company gave me the white card to do what the hell I wanted. In order to get that freedom again, I have to deliver on certain commercial quotas." He smiles and licks cake off his fingers. "I'll get there, and then I'll tell them to piss off, and I'll do whatever I want." Life In Cartoon Motion is released tomorrow. Mika plays the ABC1, Glasgow, on February 26 ENDS.

SUNDAY HERALD By Peter Ross Sunday 04 February 2007 IF EVER an artist seemed tailor-made for pop success, cut from the gaudy cloth of the mainstream, it is Mika. So it feels right that I meet him in Savile Row, London, where his publicist has an office. At the start of the year, within the media and entertainment industry, a consensus built around Mika - 2007 belongs to him. What's surprising is how quickly that prophecy has proved true. His single, Grace Kelly, rose to number one on downloads alone, and remains at the top of the charts. In less than a month, Mika has gone from a whisper to a star. "I feel giddy," he says. "I giggle in radio interviews, and my friends tell me off because my laugh embarrasses them." He has a shrill titter somewhere between Kenneth Williams and a six-year-old with a naughty secret, and his ambiguous accent - a real posh spice - reflects his multicultural background. His father Michael is American, his mother Jonny is Lebanese. He was raised in Paris and London. Goofier and younger-looking in the flesh than in his male-modelish official photographs, at 23 Mika retains the newborn-foal awkwardness of a teenager reeling from a growth spurt. Six foot two in tight blue jeans, white trainers, a red jacket and two scarves, one grey wool, the other striped silk, he resembles a French exchange student circa 1986. Somewhere in the office a phone is ringing; it's probably the young John McEnroe asking for his hair back. We are talking in a small glass-walled room. Mika keeps reaching on to the desk and bringing a scented candle to his nose. Occasionally he dips the index finger of his right hand into the top of a fairy cake then licks off the cream and sprinkles. On the bookshelf behind him I can see the complete novels of Gabriel García Márquez. That seems appropriate. Mika's whole life has been a balance of magic and realism. "You were asking me how does it feel to be doing so well with the downloads and the chart," he says. "Well, the pressure's there, but I have so many things in my bag that no one has heard yet, including all the songs on the album. I feel like a child who still has half his presents to open, and it's two months past Christmas, and he has kept them under the dying tree." He's certainly enjoying the success of Grace Kelly, a song aimed at a record company exec who once suggested he attempt to become the new Craig David. Its ubiquity is an act of revenge, "a perfect example of sustained, planned passive-aggression". I ask whether he will suit being famous. "I don't know. People have asked me that on air and I go uncomfortably silent." Jodi Marr, a US songwriter and producer who has worked intensively with Mika, including co-writing Grace Kelly, believes his unconventional upbringing has prepared him for life in the public eye. "He was born to this," she says. "If you meet his family, any one of them could be a star in any arena of the arts. They are such colourful people. I'd say they are like the von Trapps from The Sound of Music, but it's more than music. Some of the sisters speak Chinese and Mandarin. One was an MTV DJ. He comes from a big family so he is certainly used to the theatrics involved in that, the dramas and storytelling." Mika is the middle child of five. He has a brother Fortuné and three sisters - Yasmine, Paloma and Allegra. "We are a little bit strange," he grins. "We've had so much reality shoved down our throats, because of circumstances growing up, that we react as a family by being very unreal and kind of bohemian and artistic and trying to find all the ways in life that you can create an alternate world to survive in. We are a pretty fantastical bunch of people to be around. God help you if you ever end up in the same hotel as us on holiday." "You're noisy?" I ask. "We are the kind of family that people get really annoyed about then they are really sad when we leave. It was always like that when we changed schools when we were younger. The teachers gave us so much trouble but would cry when we left." Mika was born Mica Penniman in Beirut in 1983, during the Lebanese civil war. "My family was evacuated to Cyprus and then we ended up in Paris," he recalls. "So many family members went there. Growing up I was surrounded by Lebanese people. There was this whole community with typical cheek-pinching and hugging and loudness and speaking Arabic. So I got both cultures. I was a little French Parisian boy but at the same time I was very much Lebanese. "If you walk into my family house now it's obviously a Lebanese household. The food, the smell, the warmth of it. There's always people hanging out. Even when I'm on the road, friends of mine will be hanging out with my family. It's very loud and embracing and there's always something to get excited about or have a big family argument over." Although his father worked in finance, and was himself the son of a US diplomat, Mika denies being a rich kid. "My parents spent every penny they had on our education and my music teachers and art teachers for all of us. My father had a good job most of the time, but he also got into a lot of trouble because my mother always overspent on us. We weren't glamorous. We didn't have a fantastic lifestyle. But we certainly got the education they wanted us to get." Creativity was emphasised? "Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't about number-crunching or playing chess. It was about being really stimulated and working hard." His parents weren't musical, but loved to play records. "When I grew up in Paris, the stuff that was on the family hi-fi was everything from Serge Gainsbourg to Jacques Brel to Joan Baez to Fairuz, so I had a very eclectic musical palate and that meant I've never been a snob about music." The Pennimans moved to London when Mika was still a child. They had recently gone through a very difficult time. "My father went on a business trip to Kuwait and the night he was there the Gulf War started. He was evacuated from the hotel and ended up being safeguarded in the American embassy, but effectively being taken hostage. If he had stepped out of the garden of the embassy he would have been shot dead. So he was stuck there for about seven months. It was really horrible. We never really knew what was happening. We got a few faxes once in a while, but it was a nightmare. I was young, and we were a big family, and we got into a lot of trouble financially because he wasn't around." In London, Mika attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle. In Paris, his naive quirkiness - turning up wearing a clown outfit or dragging a full-size Christmas tree into class - had annoyed the teachers, but endeared him to the pupils. In England, however, he was bullied. "I showed up in school wearing my bright red trousers and matching bow-tie. Instead of just getting into trouble for it, I was tortured and I recoiled." He suffered homophobic name-calling. He remembers it as being like Lord of The Flies, and recalls the fear of walking between classes; he fantasised about having a remote control which would allow him to fast-forward past the bullying. The psychological pressure exacerbated his dyslexia, and at the age of 11 found himself suddenly unable to read or write and barely able to speak. "So I left school in order to change to the English system, and that took a while because I was a bit of a mess." Continued.....

You might need to download the latest Flash 7 plug-in... or so it says on the UK page, once you get in. GET FLASH CW.

INTHENEWS In Focus Saturday 03 Feb 2007 Extract: In the charts this week Just Jack's Overtones is predicted to knock Hats Off to the Buskers by The View off the top of the album pile, while Kasabian will be hoping their new release Me Plus One can have a similar impact upon top-selling single Grace Kelly by Mika. The big album releases next week include the new offering from Fall Out Boy, Infinity on High, while Mika's Life on Cartoon Motion also goes on sale. CW.

SM How does one set one's self as attending, please? 'elp. CW.

OK! Magazine Reviews: Music Singles 6 February 2007 Mika Grace Kelly If you're not familiar with male model-esque Mika, you must have been holed-up in the CBB house. He's topped the charts on downloads alone with this high-octane, happy clappy frolic that's big on camp and pomp. **** (4/5) --- CW.

DAILY MAIL It's Friday! Music 2 February 20-7 MIKA: Life In Cartoon Motion (Casablanca) HAVING spent the past fortnight on top of the singles chart with Grace Kelly Mika reiterates his talent on an album that showcases his abilities as a tunesmith and a showman. His falsetto vocals shine on some big, bubblegum pop tracks. But there is soft introspection, too, in My Interpretation and Happy Ending. Elsewhere, his songs are populated by fictional characters, such as Lollipop Girl and Billy Brown, and bright euphoric books that evoke Prince, Queen and Harry Nilsson. ***** (5/5) ----- CW.

INTHENEWS.CO.UK Casablanca, out February 5th. In a nutshell… Eclectic. Fun. Glam. Energetic. Different. What's it all about? Following the success of his first single Grace Kelly, Life in Cartoon Motion is the debut album from Mika, the colourful new young star who has burst on to the UK scene in technicolor, causing a sensation among music lovers and experts alike. Highlights from the much-anticipated album include the current number one single Grace Kelly, Big Girl – an ego boost for the larger lady – reminiscent of Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls, and Relax, which cannot escape without Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boy comparisons. Meanwhile, the simplistic Billy Brown is a catchy Penny Lane-esque tune, which would have done the Beatles proud. Happy Ending is a beautiful song, which shows off Mika's musicality and brilliant five-octave range in a calmer manner than his more flamboyant efforts at the start of the album, joined by a choir crescendo making it the perfect end to a brilliant album. The 11-track album is jam-packed with tunes – each one very different to the one before, but yet each reminding you of some artist that has gone before, mixing electro-pop with glam rock, with 1960s ballad, with a little bit of gospel thrown in. Who's it by? Mika, a 23-year-old Beirut-born singer/songwriter, has already been hailed as the next Freddie Mercury. His fantastic range and rousing falsetto were perfected during music lessons organised by his mother after a period of difficulty at school when he was a young boy. Britain's next big thing even sang soprano at the Royal Opera House at the age of 15 as part of a production of Vaughan Williams' The Pilgrim's Progress. At a young age it was clear that the flamboyant youngster was destined for greater things. Knockbacks from record labels who requested that he tone down his image led him to write the current number one single Grace Kelly, with its lyrics "Should I bend over? Should I look older just to be put on the shelf?" sending out a message of survival to the media moguls who shut the door in his face. Now Mika has a lot of pressure on him to step into the glam, camp shoes left vacant by Freddie Mercury's death. Only time will tell whether he fills them. As an example… "Oh Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life Two kids a dog and then a cautionary wife While it was all going according to plan Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man." - Billy Brown "I try to be like Grace Kelly But all her looks were too sad So I try a little Freddie I've gone identity mad!" - Grace Kelly Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys The Americans probably aren't ready for a character as out-there as Mika quite yet, but he's sure to win a number of UK awards. What the others say "The disco-panto of Scissor Sisters; the retro-MOR of the Feeling; the over-milked moo-cow that is the Guilty Pleasures franchise: Mika takes these voguish sounds and gives them a fantastic, vertiginous ultra-pop spin." – The Observer "There's enough promise here to confirm that the hype about Mika is pretty much on the money. Expect him to be around for a lot longer than the next 12 months." – Music OMH So is it any good? Life in Cartoon Motion is one of the most refreshing albums to have come out of Britain in a long time. While drawing from a plethora of influences from the Scissor Sisters to Gwen Stefani to the Pet Shop Boys to Queen, Mika steals the best bits of these artists' talents and makes it his unique, flamboyant own. There are no fillers on the album and it is full of catchy tunes which you won't be able to get out of your brain, whether you like them or not. While it's great to see such an eclectic album with its innovative use of a variety of different styles, as Mika sings in Grace Kelly, he's gone "identity mad", and future efforts will need the star to show his own style, rather than re-branding styles gone by. 9/10 Chine Mbubaegbu

TRANSCRIPT by Cautionary Wife GMTV 2 February 2007 8.35-9.25am Entertainment Today Jenni Falconer and Michael Underwood chat to Mika - with a live performance by Mika and his band of Grace Kelly JENNI FALCONER: Well before all that, it's Mika time. MIKA: No, looks good though. JF: And congratulations, and for anyone that doesn't know, Mika's gone to number one, but you went to number one before your single was even released in the shops. M: Yeah, I was very lucky. JF: On downloads alone. M: On downloads alone. I mean I was kind of fostered by the internet and the blogsphere, so, you know, it's testament to the fact that the internet has a lot of influence nowadays. JF: Fantastic. MICHAEL UNDERWOOD: We know the Press has been going wild for you at the moment. I read in the papers this morning, is it true, have you let slip that your'e gonna be playing Glastonbury. Is this the case? M: I let it slip - yeah, I kind of announced it WAY before I was supposed to, but, yeah, I'm not very used to, you know, keeping my mouth shut. (giggles) JF: Okay, well, maybe you can also shed some light - are you also supporting Take That on their European tour? M: I, you know, I've never heard anything about that. JF: That would be a good one, I think. M: I didn't, I didn't know anything about that. MU: How do you feel about the whole thing - the whole media circus, 'cos it's just gone crazy. I mean from your point of view, what's it like? M: Well, it's happened quite quickly. I think that's the thing I'm having to get used to because it's kind of accelerated very quickly. I don't know. The whole thing feels very unreal, I have to be honest. I don't even feel like Grace Kelly is, you know, what's happening with Grace Kelly doesn't even feel real to me. JF: Well, what gets me is Grace Kelly is the only single that we've heard of your's yet, yet your tour, which you're doing later this month has sold out. You've actually even had to get bigger places to play because they've only heard one single. M: Well, no, a lot of people have heard more. Some people 'cos they come and discover me through the internet and the way they found out about me 'cos of reading about me, I was just kind of here immediately and got my songs, but we're keeping the venues small. We're not going too big because I think, you know, I disliked it in the past when I've bought tickets to a show and suddenly it was a different show to the one I wanted to go to, so we're keeping it small and it should be fun - a kind of good carnival atmosphere. JF: Well if anyone does go, they're gonna hear your FULL selection of songs? M: Yeah. JF: But this morning, you're performing the one that IS top of the charts at the moment - Grace Kelly. M: Yes, I am. JF: So, we'll leave it to you to take it away. MU: Take up positions. M: Thank you. JF: Here is Mika with Grace Kelly. <Performs GRACE KELLY> JF: Aw, that was fantastic and I must ask, did your trousers stay up? M: Yes they stayed up. They keep on falling off. JF: His trousers keep falling down, that's because you don't wear a belt. (laughing) Anyway, thank you very much. M: Cheers. JF: That's Grace Kelly, which was released on Monday and Mika's album "Life In Cartoon Motion" is out on next week. Thank you so much for coming in. M: No problem. ENDS. ----- CW.

Contintuation... Any Other World There is a little spoken introduction that many people may miss. It’s a family friend of mine who lost her eye during the war in Lebanon and I realised in everyone’s life their comes one point  or several points  where something happens and you have to completely change the way you have lived your life because of one event. And it really makes you readjust and rethink and rejudge parts of your life all over again. That happens to some people in a dramatic way like Rafa who lost both her eye and her husband within six months. Or it can be in a much quieter way like when you are 22-years-old and you finally leave university after being in education all your life or when you lose your job. Singer ... obsessed with Harry Nilsson I wanted to put that in the song, because when you’re 68 or 14, it’s still the same feeling and it’s still just as hard. I wanted to try to capture that quite difficult period that people have to go through at least once in their life. Billy Brown I just thought it was a brilliant story to put into a pop song  the idea of a man leaving his wife for another man. I really don’t know why it hasn’t been done before. When you’re writing songs, you always want to play with intrigue and you always want to pull certain strings. The point of writing pop music is that, in a way, you can write about anything. And it’s amazing how many younger listeners really love it and really identify with this little character Billy Brown, this cartoon character. A few of my cousins are all around 12 to 15 years old. This is their favourite song. They find it funny and sweet. Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) I was flying to Los Angeles and I can never sleep because I hate flying so much. So I was watching trashy television, it was two o’clock in the morning, a Victoria Wood documentary on Channel 4. It was about fat people in the United States and she visited a club called the The Butterfly Lounge, which was the first place of its kind, a club for larger women to hang out in. Skinny women were not being allowed in. The women were amazing and I absolutely felt as if I had to write about them. I muted the television and wrote it straight away. I never expected it on the album, but a few weeks later we recorded it and it’s now there. So it is one of my favourite tracks and brilliant to play live. Everyone sings along! Stuck in the Middle (Mika wanted the story of this song kept a secret but here is SFTW’s view). With its honky-tonk piano and bouncy tune, perhaps the nearest song on the album to the work of Mika’s hero Harry Nilsson. Clearly the lyrics are very personal to the singer, stuck in the middle of something turbulent but, for the listener, open to interpretation. Happy Ending It’s about a few things. In a way, it’s a kind of sad break-up song like My Interpretation. But, at the same time, it’s about a lot of other things. I’ll never forget when I was actually recording this song in Los Angeles, I would take this drive from where I was staying to the studio  which wasn’t in the city  and the amount of homeless people I saw on the way was absolutely shocking. Those horrible images of homelessness that I would see every morning really connected with that song. So it just comes to show you that a bright song in a certain mindset had a meaning that really evolves and changes as time goes by. I think that it is very important that other listeners find their own meaning to songs. So many people are very openly suggestive to the point of being abstract. It’s the most powerful thing when that becomes the song. ENDS. CW.

Mika's life in motion By SIMON COSYNS February 02, 2007 No time for lying around ... tousle-haired dandy Mika is a man in demand MIKA - Life in Cartoon Motion Rating - 4 SO Mika, how does it feel to be No1 with Grace Kelly? “Slightly surreal!†How has your life changed? “It’s all gone Willy Wonka!†How would you sum up your sound and style? “Psychobabble, schizophrenic, hyper-pop!†To say that Mika is excited about the success of his all-conquering new single is putting it mildy. But, as SFTW discovered this week, the tousle-haired dandy has also got his feet firmly on the ground. “I would be lying if I didn’t say it feels equally scary and amazing,†he says. “Although it looks like things have happened quite quickly, they’ve been in the works a long time. “I’ve got a lot of music to deliver over the coming months and that’s what I am looking forward to. Playing the album live through the rest of the year hopefully means there’ll be a few more people along for the ride.†“It was weird when I found out I was No 1. It was like an unreal dream.†Grace Kelly is an insanely infectious song that fits into a grand glam-pop tradition, a little bit Freddie (Mercury), a little bit Scissors, a little bit Elton. Mika ... life has gone 'Willy Wonka' “It’s funny because it’s a song I wrote on my piano at home in about 15 minutes and its still so weird and exciting to hear it on the radio let alone having other people buy it! It’s all got quite silly so I’m just going with it and having fun.†Ultimately, the song the work of a singular, refreshing new talent, justifying “saviour of pop†claims. Furthermore, his debut album Life In Cartoon Motion (out Monday) is loaded with future hits. There’s been much talk of the 23-year-old’s upbringing, first in Lebanon, then Paris, then London, but SFTW set out to get to the heart of his music. What, I wondered, did he make of the comparisons with those greats of popular music? “Actually, Harry Nilsson is my musical hero. I’m completely obsessed with his early work. Its often overlooked but its absolutely amazing, whimsical, funny, dark, childish yet fully grown up. He’s definitely an inspiration.†As for being mentioned in the same breath as icons like Mercury, he says: “When you come from nowhere, people have to compare you to something and I’m just glad I’m being compared to people I really like. “I aspire to the musicianship of a band like Queen, to be compared to Freddie Mercury in any way is a huge compliment. I’ve seen some similarities but I think its still early to make definitive comparisons.†It all seems light years from the day Mika was rejected by Simon Cowell who even told him to stop writing. He has few regrets though: “You really have to give him proper respect for what he’s been able to achieve. He’s a pop marketing genius. “But would he have been the right person to make the record with me? Absolutely not! And I’m thankful I never had the opportunity.†Another key aspect of the Mika package is the stunning visuals on his singles and album and on the official website. He says: “I developed it very early on with my sister, pen name DaWack. I was inspired by artists who create their own visual world like Bowie and Prince. Back then album artwork was so important. “These days you pick out albums and you can tell the artwork was designed to a formula  nothing to do with the musicians, just a means of packaging. “I didn’t want it to be about packaging. I wanted it to be very much part of a whole visual world completely linked to the music.†So was it Mika’s mission to shake the pop world up a bit? “My only mission is to have the freedom to make the records – I have no mission in terms of what other people are doing. "The only thing I didn’t want to be when I started was another singer-songwriter looking at his shoes making nice music for dinner parties.†Here, in his words, Mika guides us through the ten tracks of Life In Cartoon Motion. Grace Kelly I wrote this song as a little sticky to the music industry a couple of years back. I was working with a big music company in London that wanted to mould me into what they felt would turn me into a commercial success, which was Craig David at the time. They told me I needed to make a record more like what everyone expected pop records to be  and be like Craig David. I knew that would lead to complete disaster. So I came back home and I wrote Grace Kelly that night. From that point on, I made a decision to write in the way I wanted to and not how someone else told me to. Lollipop This was a message to my little sister, telling her not to have sex too soon  because it would mean something very different to guys than it would to her  and so be very careful. But I had a lot of fun getting my message across in the melody and lyric! The little girl is my cousin, one of the most hilarious girls I have ever met. So when the opportunity came up to use a child’s voice in Lollipop she was the only person I had in mind. I put her up in a snazzy Hollywood hotel and she was completely spoilt for about four days, like a true star. Grace Kelly ... written in 15 minutes My Interpretation This is a break-up song. It’s hard to write this sort of song. They often sound quite fake or trite so I guess I’ve Mika’ed it up so it still sounds like a good song with a darker lyric. Love Today I was really happy when I wrote this and when I’m in that kind of mood I always hope everyone else feels the same way. Everybody is looking for the same thing  to love someone and be loved back. Or just to get laid. It all depends on how you look for it. Love Today captures that, the euphoric feeling you get when those things go right. Relax (Take it Easy) I always wanted to write a dance song that wasn’t a really full dance track, that felt organic. So when I came into producing Relax I made sure that most of the sounds we used were actually made by real instruments. We used some great session musicians who had worked with Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson. And we picked up the strangest pedal combinations to get all these weird sounds. It’s really effective . . . you can’t tell if it’s a full dance track or really laid-back. It feels a bit weird electronically. The organic-ness gives a more classic field to it. So it was one of the harder tracks for me to produce, but also the most rewarding. THE SUN Continued.....

DAILY MIRROR 2 February 2007 MIKA’S fans seem to be as bizarre as he is... and show their appreciation by ballroom dancing at his gigs! At a show at BBC’s Maida Vale Studios on Wednesday, Mika – at No.1 with Grace Kelly – said: “We were playing in Ibiza at 5.45am and everyone started waltzing. It was surreal.†CW.

Here's a quick transcript I did - using Stop and Start on the remote - so hope it is accurate enough of what Mika had to say on the TV early this morning. Format was Mika just talking to camera, interspersed with snatches of a live performance of a handful of songs. CW. TRANSCRIPT By Cautionary Wife MIKA ON 4MUSIC: 4PLAY: MIKA 0.10am Fri 02 February 2007 (21 mins) Profile of hot new Freddie Mercury-inspired singer, Mika. LOVE TODAY People have a hard time trying to place my music and they always ask me, you know, “What do you do?” and I always just to say I make Pop music. But if I had to sum up my sound, you know, in a phrase I would, you know, call it 'hyper-psycho-babble pop’. Yeah. (laughs) That’s as close as I can get to a description anyway. I wrote ‘Love Today’ when I was really happy and it’s kind of a command for getting everyone to feel the same way that I was feeling. At the same time it tells really odd little stories about all these different kinds of people and everyone’s trying to find love, and everyone’s trying to, you know, find love or sex. But whatever way they go about it, everyone’s looking for the same thing. People have been comparing me with so many different artists. One name that keeps coming up is the Scissor Sisters, and people compared me to Queen and Freddie Mercury, which I think is an honour, but also terrifying. You know, I think Freddie Mercury was a genius, musically and technically. I think the best word to describe my musical influences is “psychotic”. (chuckles) It goes a little bit everywhere. I’m the worst person to play music at a party because I’ll always piss off a certain group of people. I’ll play some really hip, you know Cornelius electro music from Japan and then the next track I’ll play will be some kind of vintage original Disney recording. And that’s kind of found it’s way into my songwriting. LOLLIPOP I had a lot of trouble at school when I was younger. It got to a point when it was really bad. That led to me being taken out of school for about 6 – 8 months. I didn’t have anything to do during the day so my mother found me a Russian singing teacher. Her name was Alla, and she would terrorise me into practising, and it was the best thing that ever really happened to me. It was really hard. She trained me like an athlete. I didn’t realise what was happening at such an early age. I was about 11 years old. Within a couple of months of doing that I got my first gig, which was in the chorus of a Strauss opera at the Royal Opera House. In this other world you didn’t have to deal with reality in the same way that everybody else did and all the weird things about you actually became special and so I kind of really took to that kind of atmosphere. I first wrote ‘Lollipop’ as a message to my little sister, basically telling her not to go and have sex too soon and to stay away from the big, bad boys, because, you know, they only want to take advantage of you and you should be a lot wiser and, you know, it’s only gonna get you down. I wanted to empower that message and make it really, really simple, and of course play with it and make it dirty by using the euphemisms, and I kind of did that by making it almost like a nursery rhyme. It’s just kind of gone down so well live. I never would’ve thought that I would’ve been closing a gig with the lyrics “Sucking too hard on your lollipop. Hey love’s gonna get you down.” I mean, it’s ridiculous. I worked on the artwork with my sister. She goes by the pen name Da Wac. I started working on the visual aspect of the record about a year before I actually made it. I hadn’t chosen a producer yet and I was walking into the record company and going “Look, this is what the album’s gonna look like and I’ve come up with cartoon characters that are based on my songs”, like Billy Brown is a little cartoon character and Lollipop Girl’s based on ‘Lollipop’. I’m fascinated with the way you can deal with subjects in cartoons. The characters can deal with pretty much anything and get away with it because they simplify things. They make them funny and they make them accessible. I think that pop songs have a similar effect and can be used for the same reasons. BIG GIRL (YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL) I wrote ‘Big Girl’ at 2.30 in the morning and I wrote it in 15 minutes. I couldn’t sleep so I turned on Victoria Wood’s documentary about fat people in the United States, and she went to this place called the Butterfly Lounge, which is a real bar in Costa Mesa, just outside of Los Angeles and it’s the first size acceptance nightclub ever in the world, and I just saw the images on the screen. I muted the sound and I wrote the song ‘cos I felt like they needed an anthem and I really felt that I was the person had to do it. GRACE KELLY ‘Grace Kelly’ - I wrote it a couple of years ago as a little ‘screw you’ song to the people that I was working with – this music company in London. They wanted me to write songs just like everybody else, so I was furious. I went home and I wrote ‘Grace Kelly’, as you know, as a rant against them, but about 2 years later to have it do so well and to have it released as my first single, we all know who’s laughing now. (smiles, raises eyebrow) My album has a kind of coming-of-age to it. I deal with a lot of transitions - transition stories in a way on the record, except I connect – hype them up to a level where they’re almost unreal, and THAT is the cartoon quality which I refer to in the title of the album Life In Cartoon Motion. What’s in the future for me? I’ve absolutely no idea. I really wanna be in this for the long term. I think there’s so many fine musical things that you can do when you have the right support behind you and I hope that I can keep getting that support to make records with the same amount of freedom that I got to make this one with. ENDS.

MUSICOHM 01 February 2007 Mika - Life In Cartoon Motion (Island) UK release date: 5 February 2007 A few years ago, you'd probably be able to get pretty long odds on the possibility of the biggest pop star of the year being a Beirut-born Londoner, with Leo Sayer's hair and a bunch of songs hugely influenced by 70s disco and soft-rock. Throw in a remarkable vocal similarity to Freddie Mercury, and the bookies would be lapping up your cash. Yet that's exactly what's happened to Mika - winner of the prestigious BBC 'Sound of 2007' poll and widely tipped as the hottest new pop star of the year. The emergence of the Scissor Sisters over the last few years has undoubtedly paved the way for him, and the recent success of The Feeling proved that there's a huge market for 70s influenced soft-rock. One listen to Life In Cartoon Motion confirms that you won't be able to escape Mika this year. Each track is unashamedly commercial, blessed with hook-filled choruses that stick in the mind for weeks. You'll have already heard Grace Kelly, the Scissor Sisters channelling Queen hit single which has taken up permanent residence at a radio station near you. Grace Kelly is pretty representative of what Mika's all about in fact. Beneath the bubblegum pop surface lies some dark lyrics - "Should I bend over?/ Should I look older, just to be put on the shelf?" - apparently directed at record company staff who had turned down his previous material. It's big, joyous, dumb pop, and the only danger with it is that you'll be utterly sick of it by March - when it'll still be being played. Mika's voice may also prove to be a bit annoying to some. He has an unfeasibly high falsetto, which works on the Pet Shop Boys-like electro pop of Relax Take It Easy, but proves to be infuriating on Love Today. In fact by the time Stuck In The Middle rolls round, you're increasingly concerned about the tightness of Mika's underwear. Another problem with the album is that it relies rather too heavily on the big, brash pop songs. Sometimes, as on Grace Kelly, it's fine. Other times, such as the screamingly camp Lollipop, with it's cheerleader-style chorus and child vocals, you want to smash the stereo in with a sledgehammer. Similarly, Big Girls (You Are Beautiful), an ode to the delights of the larger lady, wraps up its laudable message inside a tune that grates in the worst possible way. Yet when Mika tries something a bit different, it sounds great. Billy Brown is a Beatle-esque number about a man leaving his wife and family for another man - it's both witty and poignant. Possibly the highlight of the album is the dramatic ballad Any Other World, which starts off like a Michael Nyman piano rendition, before building up a string section quite beautifully. If this had been given to Robbie Williams, it could have revitalized his career instantly. The final track, Happy Endings, also sees a wonderful vocal performance from Mika, sounding eerily like early Michael Jackson at one point, and working extraordinarily well with his backing vocals. It's the sort of song you can imagine playing over the final scene of an 'emotional' drama on TV - in fact, if it does, expect it to be downloaded straight to number one. Whether you enjoy Life In Cartoon Motion rather depends on what sort of mood you're in when you listen to it. At times, it's so relentlessly bouncy and upbeat that you feel like mowing down an entire shopping centre with an AK-47. Yet there's enough promise here to confirm that the hype about Mika is pretty much on the money. Expect him to be around for a lot longer than the next 12 months. - John Murphy CW.

THE SCOTSMAN Friday 02 February 2007 ALBUM REVIEWS FIONA SHEPHERD Mika is like a party hosted by the Scissor Sisters in honour of Freddie Mercury, Prince and Elton John. MIKA: LIFE IN CARTOON MOTION **** CASABLANCA RECORDS, £12.99 WHILE TV talent shows such as The X Factor attempt to breed the failsafe pop star, everyone knows it's not the safe copycats who capture the imagination, but the curveball freaks. If Mika didn't exist, you couldn't invent him. But one bar of his music, one yelp of his falsetto and one word of his lyrics tells you that this man is a natural-born pop star. Unsurprisingly, he was the hot tip for 2007 come the turn of the year and he is already coming good on those predictions with a Number One single - the demented, irrepressible Grace Kelly - on download sales alone. It is not that Mika is original - far from it. He sounds like a DayGlo party hosted by the Scissor Sisters in honour of Freddie Mercury, Prince and Elton John, so there's a pretty clear precedent for his camp, euphoric sound. As he sings himself on Grace Kelly: "I've gone identity mad... I could be anything you like" - though this is actually his sarcastic riposte to past record company attempts to mould him in the image of the latest success story. You really couldn't manufacture a character like this. For all its pantomime lyrics, helium vocals and plonking piano, the song spills out of him so naturally, so readily that you can even forgive him for that highly irritating "ker-ching!" coda. At the time of writing, it was a scornful, cynical comment on the "creative" goals of the music business; now, ironically, it sounds more like an accompanying sound effect for his extremely bright future. Still only 23 years old, Mika already has loads of material for the autobiography - brought up in war-torn Beirut, father held hostage at the US embassy in Kuwait, itinerant childhood, rejected by peers, child opera singer, misunderstood songwriter... will someone commission the biopic now, please? But he doesn't actually need any of that to command interest - just his acrobatic voice, fluent songwriting and flamboyant, statuesque presence. Life in Cartoon Motion is as bold, colourful, silly and dynamic a debut album as its title indicates. Its blend of disco, bubblegum and balladry is off-the-wall yet as commercial as they come. Be warned: these songs will be fixed in your head from the first listen. From that moment, you'll be fighting them off. The whole collection is so deliriously pop, so insanely catchy that it flirts with caricature. The chirpy, throwaway Lollipop borders on the cheesy - children singing, cheeky percussion, innuendo-riddled sweetie metaphors, it's got the lot. Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) is a springy funk nursery rhyme celebrating the larger lady, and possibly the gayest song ever written. At times, Mika manages to sober up enough to play the accessible piano man. My Interpretation sounds like Ben Folds writing for a boy band, while Billy Brown is a jaunty everyday tale of a married man embarking on a gay affair. His reference points are blatant, but that's part of the fun. The quite ridiculous Love Today kicks off like a mashup of Joe Jackson's Stepping Out and Malcolm McLaren's Buffalo Gals before skipping off into a heady helium baroque whirl which even The Darkness might have rejected as OTT. In fact, Mika most resembles Scissor Sisters in his ability to thieve gleefully, yet still produce a song which is worthy in its own right and, like his New York brothers and sister, his party face shields a more vulnerable core. Behind the stealthy disco exterior of former single Relax, Take it Easy is a lyric inspired by the emotional void after the July 2007 [sic] London bombings. Closing track Happy Ending is far from it, with its rueful chorus of "this is the way that we love, like it's forever, then live the rest of our life, both not together". He has not yet achieved the Sisters' masterful, bittersweet blend of party tunes and emotional resonance, but there is plenty of time for that. The only slight disappointment at this stage is that an individual with such a natural talent for distilling the essence of pop doesn't have something more sophisticated to say with it. There is a fleeting glimpse of an inherently more dramatic side to his music on the bonus track, a sparse, tremulous torch song called Over My Shoulder. Maybe in the future, he will exploit more of that operatic audacity, like a glitterball Rufus Wainwright. There are so many traditions he could draw on but, for the moment, Life in Cartoon Motion is a consummate celebration of pop music for its own sake. CW.

Mika revealed on Radio 1 Live Lounge yesterday that he would be 'dong Glastonbury' this year as well as Coachella. Reported here MUSIC ROOMS and similar at DOTMUSIC 01 February 2007 Mika has revealed he will play this year's Glastonbury Festival. He said: "I am playing Glastonbury this year. I think I will be doing a few little things everywhere but I know that I'll be playing one proper gig as well." He added: "I've always wanted to go so that's going to be one of the highlights of my Summer. I'm also doing Coachella in the States which is supposed to be amazing and Mount Fuji, maybe. I'm going from never really going to festivals to kind of doing the whole round in one Summer." This year's Glastonbury Festival takes place over the weekend of June 22-24. CW.

FLAMBOYANT new pop act Mika - whose debut single Grace Kelly tops the charts - has won the approval of the Princes of Monaco's youngest daughter Princess Staphanie. Not only that but Stephanie feels her mother - who gave up an Oscar-winning Hollywood career aged 26 to marry Prince Rainer in 1956 - would have enjoyed the track named after her. The princess, 41, says she has watched Mika perform his song via download and admits she's a fan. "He is very talented and handsome and I'm sure my mother would have liked the song very much," she gushes. Beirut-born Mika chose the Hollywood icon, who died in 1981 before he was born, as his muse because, he says, "The song is all about identity and what people expect of me and how I'm perceived. I think Grace Kelly was a rebel and I liked that about her, rather than the actresses like Audrey Hepburn or Sophia Loren. Maybe Stephanie will be summoning him to Monaco for a private performance of the ditty some time soon? DAILY EXPRESS 1 February 2007 CW.

I'm recording GMTV this morning in case it has moved to today, and Lorraine Kelly's half hour. Someone said they saw it advertised yesterday. CW.

The media are determined to put Mika into a stereotype. Pathetic really. CW. ---- THE SUN February 01, 2007 JUST when you thought MIKA couldn’t camp it up any more, he reveals his manbag. Mika, top of the charts with debut single Grace Kelly, was snapped after recording a performance at Radio 1’s Maida Vale studios in London. A manbag is an item only ultra-feminine blokes – like LIAM GALLAGHER and CRISTIANO RONALDO – would dare carry. Mika has been coy about his sexuality since hitting the headlines. And walking along the street sporting a fella’s purse is a perfect way to maintain the mystery.

I have an mp3 of Mika's `'Same Jeans". CW.

The Grace Kelly performance from earlier was repeated on BBC Radio 1 at approx 6.15 pm. They are still talking about it. Playing it again right now!! CW.