ganymede

Hi, welcome on board!

Hi Anna, welcome. We'd love to chat to you too.

Welcome on board, Odyne.

Welcome on board, Leah and Caitlin

Hi Dom, welcome on board.

Welcome on board, Jules!

Hi, welcome on board!

Welcome on board!

Welcome on board, Mikila. Sorry about the detention.

Welcome on board, Natalie!

Welcome on board, Emilio!

Hi, welcome on board!

hmmm... this sounds interesting... *strokes chin*

A friend, who I have been talking about Mika to incessantly, and who was a little bit tipsy, said as we were walking past a guy with long dark curls: "Hey, you've got Mika's hair!"

I apologise in advance because I think I'm going to get just a little bit controversial here... Perhaps Mika is playing them. It is my theory that he realises that, being the way he is, and the press being the way they are, they would of course pick up on the undisclosed sexuality thing and he is using them to generate at least twice the publicity he would have gotten if he was 'just' a guy with some good tunes - which is the only thing that should matter.

Welcome on board. Lucky you!

Welcome on board, Jennie!

A friend sent me the link. Guess me going on and on about Mika for the last week had an effect...

Welcome on board

A Prejudice Goes Pop Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2007 By HUGH PORTER You may not have heard of Mika (pronounced mee-ka) yet, but soon enough you may not be able to escape him. The 23-year-old Lebanese-born British singer topped a bbc poll of 130 industry tastemakers as the Next Big Thing for 2007, his music can already be heard on Motorola's RED ads in the U.S., his first video runs on mtv's top rotation, and his face will soon front fashion designer Paul Smith's spring/summer global ad campaign. Not too slouchy given he hasn't actually released a CD yet. Mika's debut single comes out on Jan. 29 in the U.K., but it's already No. 1 in that market by download sales alone. I loathed him on principle. Let me explain: he's charismatic, confident, talented, tall, young, handsome and has lots of hair. The press release issued by his publicist describes him as "debonair with a touch of degenerate dandy." He describes his sound on his MySpace page as "Beck via Queen and Elton John and a touch of Rufus W.[ainwright]." He appears to be having fun. Did I mention the full head of hair? I'd been given an advance copy of Life in Cartoon Motion, Mika's debut album due Feb. 5, but I'd been reluctant to play it. It's pop, therefore manufactured and disposable, right? What if I like it? When finally I succumb, I discover that Mika's opening line of the first song and single, Grace Kelly, echoes my dilemma. "Do I attract you?/ Do I repulse you with my queasy smile?" he intones. That remained to be seen, but what follows is an album brimming with grandiose, infectious, hook-laden pop. A sweep through the spectrum from '70s melodies and disco brought up to date with full orchestration, kids' choirs and gymnastic vocals. On Grace Kelly he nods to his Freddie Mercury singing style: "So I try a little Freddie/ I've gone identity mad." He also tries a little George (Michael), Elton (John), Leo (Sayer) and Robbie (Williams) too, with a good measure of Scissor Sisters and Bee Gees but without the name checks. It's catchy. Damn it. It wasn't hard to spot him in the London TV studio canteen. The place is like the science fiction movie Logan's Run: beautiful twentysomethings wandering around with clipboards who will no doubt be sacked when they turn 30. Even in these environs, Mika stands out. He's wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers, but the jeans and sneakers are bright white and the jeans an even brighter turquoise. He is, of course, charming. "Mixed reactions? Sure, I get them all the time. I'm a Marmite artist," Mika says, referring to the pungent yeast-based spread that Brits put on toast and is marketed on the premise that you either love it or hate it. "I've made a Marmite record and I'm expecting strong reactions either way." Though Mika wears bright trousers and makes fun music, he's suffered for the right to do so. Born in Beirut in 1983 to a Lebanese mother and American father, he was evacuated with his family a year later, "because the war got really bad." They joined the Lebanese community in Paris before Mika's father, on a business trip to Kuwait in 1990, became trapped in the U.S. embassy for seven months when the Gulf War broke out. A new job after the war meant a move to London, where Mika was bullied at school. "I was called everything from 'childbearing hips' to 'choirboy fag,'" he says. But that didn't stop him from developing his individual style that included, he says, "red trousers and matching bow ties purple Bermudas that I thought were ever so cool. I always prided myself on the fact that I didn't compromise my personality, even if I did drive other people up the wall." His music became another type of escape. He took singing lessons and taught himself to play piano; a severe dyslexic, Mika is unable to read music. His first proper gig was, aged 11, in the choir in Richard Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten at London's Royal Opera House. He went on to study at the Royal College of Music. At night, he worked on his pop songs or waited tables to pay the studio bills. Eventually a record company showed interest  but only if he did as he was told. "I wrote Grace Kelly as a kind of reaction to that, as a little kind of stick-you to the music industry," says Mika. On it he sings, "Should I bend over/ Should I look older just to be put on your shelf?" "That's the point that I really decided that musically as well as in my personality I wasn't ever going to dilute anything," he says. Eventually, he struck a deal with Casablanca, which  although backed by giant Universal  gave him complete control, even of the album artwork. "I was going in with sketches and cartoon characters and showing them to my record company and they were freaking out because I hadn't even chosen my producer," he says. Through his music and those accompanying drawings, Mika has created a 3-D cartoon world populated by surprising characters like Billy Brown: "Billy Brown had lived an ordinary life/ Two kids, a dog and a cautionary wife/ And while it was all going accordingly to plan/ Billy Brown fell in love with another man." Though it's taken a lot of pain to construct, it's still a fun world overall, and Mika built it to his own design. It's also big, sometimes overblown, and there are a few too many ingredients for my liking; too many hooks, styles and voices. But it is serious music. Commercial, yes, but original, and far from my misguided preconceptions. "There is a lot of cynicism around," shrugs Mika, "but it doesn't bother me because it is so easily disproved." I'm still jealous of his hair, though. source = TIME (a few days old but I didn't see it around, sorry if it's a duplicate)

The only camp artist in the pop chart In the week that Mika's Grace Kelly makes it to No 1, why aren't there more flamboyant pop stars like him around? Caroline Sullivan January 26, 2007 09:56 AM You've probably noticed that this week's number one single is Grace Kelly by Mika, the Anglo-Lebanese pop singer who's been hotly tipped, as they say, by nearly everyone. If you don't know the song, listen to it here before reading any further. Having done so, you'll probably agree that, despite the already soaraway success, Mika will never be to everyone's taste. Singing in falsetto is a surefire way to infuriate potential audiences (see Justin Hawkins, Leo Sayer), and being camp just splits opinion even further (YouTube viewers have already risen to the occasion by posting comments such as "Fag" and "Why are all the uber-cute guys gay?") Unsurprisingly, the Sun is already on his case about the campness. In an interview yesterday, it quizzed him about his sexuality, and when the "flamboyant, ultra-camp musician" deflected the questions, it settled for describing him as "unlike any other act on the music scene now." And that's the thing that makes his success interesting. He IS unlike any other current mainstream pop act. You'd think that a popular culture that has made stars of the Scissor Sisters and Graham Norton would find room for a fair number of "flamboyant" solo stars in the upper stratum of the pop chart, but Mika is the only one in recent memory to have made it. (Will Young? Lovely guy, but about as flamboyant as the bass player in Coldplay.) Moreover, he's made it with a song about identity - he doesn't mind being Grace Kelly OR Freddie Mercury, if it will just make the object of his affections notice him. At the very least, it's a thought-provoking song, particularly coming after the steadfast dullness of the previous number one, Leona "X-Factor" Lewis's A Moment Like This. So he's camp and sexually ambiguous. Is that actually a big deal, seven years into this century? Given the dearth of other Mikas in the chart, you'd have to say that it is. To many, "flamboyance" - being unsettling - sticks in the craw, in a way that being "arty" (see Rufus Wainwright) or granny-friendly (Scissor Sisters) doesn't. For a new singer to be saying, on his first hit, "I tried to be like Grace Kelly, but all her looks were too sad, so I tried a little Freddie, I've gone identity mad!" is worth a small round of applause, don't you think? source = Guardian blogs

Welcome on board!

Welcome on board, Pamela! And your English is just fine.

Oh, I wish! Although I'm not a fan of festivals - too big - but Rufus and Mika make it interesting...

welcome on board!