havingablast

You lucky! I'm glad he's nice, it would be a shame if he wasn't And your family is BEAUTIFUL, btw

Yeha, I just watched Grace Kelly and then a few other videos, and man, he does look different.

Yeah, we were bored, so yay, haha I'm the Asian girl and no, the boy in the video isn't gay... but yes, he's wearing a skirt...

I was inspired today because I was in NYC doing some shopping, and I went into this store called Strawberry, and right as I was leaving, 'Relax, Take it Easy' came on, and i nearly started screaming haha Anyone else's stories?

It starts on G, that's about as far as I've gotten, they don't focus on his hands enough when he plays...

I love how the intensity of his accent kind of comes and goes But yes, he is quite the lovely

I definitely enjoy Love Today and Grace Kelly. But I love Lollipop too

'Cause it's all in the hands Of a Bitter Bitter man...

Alright, good, that's what I thought Thankee

160x420- I also have it in 100x75 (which can be used for most icons in lj/gj/etc...), 320x240 and 640x480 Mike's just soo pretty when he does his little wave thing I just had to icon it

OK Go Placebo A Skylit Drive Bring me the Horizon Cute is What We Aim For Hellogoodbye Panic! at the disco Wheatus Green Day the Beatles Rocky Horror Picture Show Velvet Goldmine Soundtrack Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack Avenue Q soundtrack I've been getting into David Bowie, Queen and Iggy Pop. Ooh, Lou Reed! Grant Lee

Apparently ABBA did a song with the same title. Is Mika's 'Ring Ring' a cover? I'm naughty and I kinda illegallydownloaded the album butI'mtotallybuyingittoo,Ijustcouldn'twaittwoweeksforit

We've talked about the whole issue of sexuality in public figures in my english class, which isn't so much english as just like, a forum where we talk and then write papers about what we've been talking about I personally believe if there's someone who I think might be gay/bi *random!coughP!atd!Rydencough*, I'll tend to have even more respect for them for taking that step and coming out. I know how difficult taking those steps are, having done so myself personally, and it's extremely difficult, even being a non-public figure. But either way, I love Mika, and I know I'll support him no matter what

Well, he was and then I guess he said he was straight again?

He actually does a pretty good singing that bit of Killer Queen. i'm an ignorant American and I have no idea what they're talking about, but Mika's just too adorable

I definitely agree. I've picked up to listening to them in school in between classes and I literally dance down the halls singing in a terrible falsetto. I've gotten three of my friends addited to Grace Kelly though, and at lunch we all start singing loudly. But it's not embarassing because, hey, it's MIKA haha But yes, the whole album puts a smile on my face. Except for My Interpretation and Any Other World, where I normally burst into tears because they're so beautifully done

Well, in some article he was put against David Bowie and some other then-closeted rock star. And the article mentioned how part of the reason why people liked them was because it kept them guessing.

I've always been a camp show-off..the kids used to hate me atschool; [Final 3 Edition] Gordon Smart, Deputy Showbiz Editor. The Sun. London (UK): Jan 23, 2007. pg. 28 MIKA is Britain's biggest new chart star, yet he cannot read music, has crippling dyslexia and was relentlessly bullied at school. But he has overcome all the odds and is set for huge success. The 23-year-old pop sensation from London has landed an unprecedented No1 with debut single Grace Kelly -from music downloads ALONE. The recent change in chart rules paved the way for his huge online following to propel him to the top of the charts without selling even a single copy in record stores. There hasn't been a buzz about an artist on the same scale since Lily Allen exploded on to the scene last year with an army of fans built up on her page on website MySpace. And much like Lily, who has four Brit Award nominations to her name, most music industry pundits are predicting the same overwhelming success for Mika, who was born in the Lebanon. He is already drawing comparisons with legends such as Freddie Mercury, Elton John, David Bowie and Robbie Williams. But the flamboyant, ultra-camp musician is unlike any other act on the music scene now, proudly boasting about being his own man. He refuses to say whether he is gay or straight, claiming his sexuality is of no consequence to his career. He said: "I never talk about anything to do with my sexuality. "I just don't think I need to. People ask me all the time. But I just don't see the point. "In order to survive I've kind of shut up different parts of my life, and that's one of them, especially this early in my career. "I don't really feel that it's necessary to know in terms of my music. "Some people make records that are defined by their sexuality but mine really are not. "It does play a lot with campness. It has a theatricality to it. Why not? It's pop music! "If you're 14 years old and you're gay, well, just do whatever you want. I'm not confused and I don't have any barriers about the way I live my life. That's why I don't want to put it under the microscope." His camp personality and music tick all the boxes for UK chart success. He has tapped into Britain's obsession with high-glam pop, much like Scissor Sisters, the Pet Shop Boys and The Feeling before him. And he is incredibly good-looking, pulling off the androgynous appeal of David Bowie which has already earned him a megabucks deal with leading British designer Paul Smith as the face of a new global advertising campaign. And his success isn't confined to the UK. He is already earmarked for megastardom in the US after being picked up by music guru Tommy Mottola, the former mentor to Mariah Carey and one of the most respected figures in music. His resounding appraisal of Mika's potential couldn't be more glowing. He said: "In greatness he could achieve what Bowie or Robbie or Elton has achieved. He's in the league of those gentlemen." But behind Mika, real name Mica Penniman, is a torrid tale of bullying and an incredibly peculiar upbringing. He was born in Beirut to an American father and Lebanese mother. He spent most of his early years in Paris before moving to plush Kensington in London. And the severe dyslexia he suffered as a child caused chaos in his education as he skipped from Lebanon to France, then Britain. He attended the incredibly posh Westminster School then the Royal College of Music before dropping out to mix pop music with classical training. His parents believed all their five children should be privately educated. It cost them a fortune and they were once forced to sell their home when Mika's banker father hit hard times. Mika was an eccentric child with a strange taste in fashion from an early age - which he has carried into his adult life. But the odd look resulted in perfect material for the school bullies. Mika explained: "I was bullied throughout school. It was verbal bullying. I was a strange kid. "I would go to school in strange clothes -bow ties, funny- coloured shorts. Otherwise, I don't know why I got bullied. Some kids just get bullied, don't they? I was called the typical fag and all those other homophobic, horrible little comments that kids throw at one another. "If I'd known the reason, perhaps I wouldn't have got bullied. I was a show-off as a kid. A bit weird. I had that beaten out of me at school. "I tried to form bands at school but because all the other kids hated me they wouldn't play with me. "The only people I could get to be in my bands were the kids who got rejected from everyone else's bands. But soon they didn't want to play with me either because I was very dominating." When he was 11 he was pulled out of classes for seven months after a particularly bad spell of bullying. He describes having "a little breakdown" and was educated at home by his mother in the meantime. While he was off, his mother hired a Russian singing teacher who helped him discover his incredible, five-octave singing range. The boy soprano emerged and, before long, he graduated to perform in the chorus line of a Strauss opera at the Royal Opera House. He soon learned he had a talent for songwriting and started to sing jingles. He said: "When I was 14 I recorded one for an Orbit chewing gum advert. It went, 'Orbit Chewing Gum -and it's good for your teeth too!' "I didn't write the words myself, I just sang it. "This studio hired me to do it because I was very cheap and had no idea what I should be charging for doing this kind of work -and the studio weren't keen to educate me about that. "For the Orbit jingle, I sent in a bill for Pounds 45. "Apparently, you can actually charge a lot more for doing adverts. "By the age of 15 I had Pounds 2,000 in my savings accoun, from doing jingles and stuff like that. I thought that was loads." He provided the catchy bits of music for food producer Kuwaiti Danish Dairy Company and created muzak too, some of which was taken up by British Airways. He added: "I'll never forget calling up British Airways to get a ticket, only to be placed in a line listening to my own voice. "That was a painful eight minutes." Whether you love Mika or hate him, he demands your attention. His songs really are irritatingly catchy and outrageously colourful. But if you want to become a fully-fledged member of the Mika fan club, it will take a brave move to join the new dressing-up trend that has started appearing at his gigs. He said: "I have a cool set of fans who come to my live shows dressed up as the characters in my songs and the cartoons on my website. "There's Billy Brown, a married man who discovers he's gay, and Lollipop Girl, who wears a pink frock and licks a lollipop. "And Chew Chew is a monkey who's always trying to steal Lollipop Girl's lollipop. "It's really fun and makes people feel they're part of the project." And if Mika continues on the path of his meteoric success, he will have a lot more animated fans.

Take Freddie Mercury without the handlebar moustache; throw in equal dollops of Elton John, Robbie Williams, and Scissor Sisters; garnish with matinee-idol looks and the lyrical dexterity of a young David Bowie. The result is Mika, a young, London-based singer who has appeared from nowhere to go straight to the top of the charts. He's charming, he's 23, and if you believe the hype, he's the biggest thing to hit pop for a generation. On Sunday, Mika's debut single "Grace Kelly" became only the second track to reach number one on the strength of downloads alone (it isn't actually released until next week). His first album, Life in Cartoon Motion, will spark similar fireworks when it comes out in a fortnight. A few days ago, a BBC poll of senior music industry figures offered their own endorsement, picking Mika as the brightest "new hope" for the "sound of 2007". He's just clocked up 22,000 friends on MySpace, and was yesterday in New York attempting to crack America. In Britain, the Beirut-born prodigy has been signed up as a "face" of Paul Smith and is about to embark on a sell-out tour. He's done Jools Holland, met Cat Stevens, and recently received an unsolicited piece of fan-mail from a certain Brian May. Like any new pop sensation, he is about to enter the international celebrity stratosphere. He is, ladies and gentlemen, the official biggest thing since ... well, since the last big thing. "The appeal of Mika to me, and I would imagine many others, is simple: he's a proper star," said Q editor Paul Watts yesterday. "He's brash, arrogant, looks great and is already fond of saying foolish things. He writes proper songs, with daft lyrics and big choruses. Would that there were more like him." The single "Grace Kelly" is all these things, a catchy and extraordinarily inventive track (among other things, it samples the late princess of Monaco) about the difficulties of breaking into the pop industry. Yet, for all the praise now being heaped upon the track, its curly-haired singer is no ordinary plastic pop-poppet. He was trained at the Royal College of Music, plays piano like an angel, and writes and produces all his own songs. In an era of mass-market bubblegum pop, the boy is like a sore thumb. He's also delightfully eccentric, with a bizarre transatlantic accent, a polysexual persona, and a bizarre outlook on life (as detailed on his internet site). "In the past four or five years, we've been force-fed a strict diet of stars who don't write their own material, can't play instruments and hardly ever play live," said Mika's manager Iain Watt. "As this number one shows, he's different, the real deal." The singer is also cocky and opinionated. He boasts the most colourful of life-stories, and despite having struggled for almost five years to break into the music industry, is described by one recent interviewer as "so confident it's frightening". One interviewer said: "A lot of up and coming singers are excited about being interviewed, but with Mika I got the impression that he's been planning this his whole life. He's incredibly precocious." Mika Penniman, to use his full name, was born in Beirut, at the height of the Lebanese civil war to an American businessman and a Lebanese mother. The family evacuated to France in 1984, after Mika's father was taken hostage in Kuwait, and moved to London when Mika was nine. Although he came from an affluent family, who lived off the Cromwell Road near to South Kensington, Mika's early experiences in the UK were mostly unhappy. A dyslexic, he was bullied at a local French school, and spent six months outside the educational system. "I was the unconventional kid in school," he said. "I used to dress in bright red trousers, with a matching bow tie and shirt. Looking back, I was asking for it, and I had a pretty horrific time." Mika's mother pulled him out of the educational system, and allowed him to study music. He developed into a child singing prodigy, performing at the Royal Opera House and singing advertising jingles as a teenager. "It opened my eyes to this whole new world: this world where people work all day long, for weeks, to create an illusion. So you create a fantasy, and most people's jobs are rooted in reality. I realised that you didn't have to do that." He went on to Westminster school, gained a place aged 19 at the Royal College of Music, then dropped out in an attempt to launch a solo pop career. After years pushing demo CDs to music labels (no one said it would be easy) he was finally noticed during a few months in Miami in the spring of 2005. "His demo was originally pitched across record companies in the UK, and was completely ignored by them," said Watt. "So he went to Miami to continue working on songs and when he was over there he met a management company, Fuerte." They brokered a deal with Universal Records, and decided on a softly-softly approach to launching him. A mini EP, "Relax/Take it Easy", was released in August 2006. "We never ever wanted this project to be hyped and forced on people, because if you want a long-term career it's better if people just discover your work," Watt said. "He's intelligent and eloquent and like great pop stars there's an enduring quality to him, so we didn't want to suddenly ram him down people's throats." Radio One had other ideas, though. The station's head of music, George Ergatoudis, heard the debut EP and immediately decided to add it to the station's playlist. "We were the first station in the world to play and playlist him," he said. "In the first week of hearing stuff, we thought this guy is really going to go. The timing is just right. There's still a place in the market for a dynamic solo male pop star, and he's got that. Songs in that niche between Scissor Sisters and Queen work in public consciousness, and nobody else is doing that right now." "It was a quite straightforward case of my team, who I suppose number 14 people, hearing Mika's first four or five tracks and straight away saying, to a man, that there's something really going on with this guy. We were so confident it was going to go, and that we had something, we stuck him straight on air.'' The result has been a more-or-less overnight sensation, helped by Mika's sensitivity to the multimedia revolution in music. His Myspace site, which has received almost a million hits, showcases a cast of fictional cartoon characters that appear in lyrics of the debut album. They were painted by Yasmine, one of his two sisters (he also has a brother), who works as a professional artist with the nom de plume Dawack, and have been referred to in many of the singer's colourful interviews. "He's a great interview, articulate and opinionated and really self-confident," said his publicist, William Rice. "He's had a really fascinating life, which informs his music. Unlike lots of musicians, he's got lots of colourful experiences to write about, including a few really traumatic episodes which give him material that other artists don't really have." Mika's interviews often touch upon his disdain for the record industry that ignored him during the early stages of his career. "I was scorned by the alternative crowd, because of my obsession with good melodies," he once said. "And I was rejected by the commercial crowd, the big record companies, because they thought I was too weird." His rejection of what might broadly be termed "labels" crosses over into his private life. He is often compared to poly-sexual acts such as the Scissor Sisters, and likes to keep his sexuality ambiguous. "He's kept his private life private," says Rice. "We asked him early on whether he wanted to do that sort of ground in interviews and he said he'd rather not. But he's friendly about it if it gets raised in interview, rather than defensive. He is single though." Another friend says: "He likes artists such as David Bowie, and Mark Bolan and Prince, and one reason is that he likes their sexual ambiguity. Like them, he likes not quite spelling things out. I think he wants to keep people guessing." "He definitely doesn't have a girl or boyfriend. I'm pretty sure he's at least bisexual, but he doesn't spell it out, and in interviews when asked has just said something about how he doesn't like labels. He seems to enjoy the ambiguity." Yet remaining ambiguous may not be possible for much longer. Although Mika can still walk the streets of Earls Court, where he lives, without being mobbed, he's not got too many days of anonymity left.

the Razz: You can Mika my day, Annie; [streets Edition] SHOWBIZ LIZ & BEVERLEY LYONS. Daily Record. Glasgow (UK): Jan 27, 2007. CHART TOPPER Mika has been compared to Freddie Mercury but the singer says it's Annie Lennox who has been a massive influence on his career. And the Beirut-born singer, who crashed into the top of the charts last week with Grace Kelly, reckons he and Annie would form the perfect duet. Mika, 23, was recently told off by a sound engineer for sounding too Scottish when recording the single and his album, and now he's confessed it's Annie who is his ideal singing mate. He said: "Annie's voice is amazing. I can sing in the same register as her. "If we both sing in the same key it's really cool. She is one of my favourite vocalists ever and is so expressive." Mika got the chance to listen to Eurythmics star Annie in the flesh when they shared the same voice coach. He said: "I'd listen to her practising. I really like Scots people. My piano teacher is Scottish and we all came from the same Scottish-Lebanese background. There is warmth, a physicality where you can interact with anything."

It's for my school's little paper. I fell in love with Mika like, a day before the deadline for articles was due so I whipped this out. So yeah, Life in Cartoon Motion Review by me... British pop star Mika jumped to the top of the UK singles list barely two weeks after the release of the single ‘Grace Kelly.’ The artist admits the song is directed to a record company who wanted him to play by the current pop standards. Mika, the stage name for Beirut born Mica Penniman, is far from the standards. His debut album released in the UK on February 5th (US release is scheduled to be March 27th), Life in Cartoon Motion is, in the artist’s own words, ‘psychotic.’ While he’s been related to musicians such as the Scissor Sisters and Queen’s Freddie Mercury, his album holds roots to the Japanese electro-pop music of Cornelius (‘Relax, Take it easy’) to playful, child-like songs that will remind you of old-school Disney (‘Lollipop’). Even more startling than the clashing of different genres is Mika’s voice. Some tracks, such as ‘Ring Ring’ are as ambiguous as the 23 year old musician himself, who possesses a five-octave vocal range. The singer-songwriter is also responsible, along with one of his sisters, for the color cartoons in the album’s cover art. Nonetheless, Life in Cartoon Motion, Mika describes on his Myspace, is a coming-of-age story. The artist, born in Beirut, left for Paris as violence broke out, and moved again to London. Mika mentions in many interviews the horrific bullying he faced, which caused him to leave school for several months, during which he started performing in the theatre and began composing his own songs. He admits that many of his songs are just a politer way of expressing his feelings to people, yet at the same time, teaches great values (‘Big Girl (You are Beautiful)’), and, more importantly, expresses his own, true feelings Overall, Life in Cartoon Motion offers great potential for Mika, who’s already been named one of the best artists of 2007. The toe-tapping, catchy melodies will definitely provide Mika with a ‘Happy Ending’.

Ehh, nooo! I have a CIWWAF concert on Thursday And I can't go to boston on Thursday.. *cries*

I'm Anna from Maine in the States. My friend actually found Mika first and sent me the Grace Kelly video, which I fell in love with, and then I got a friend to send me some of his other songs, and I fell absolutely in love with his voice and style. I love how he's not afraid to do the music he wants to do, and he's not afraid to express himself however he wants. I think it's he's genious and fantastic, and I don't think words can relay my admiration for this man <333 Anna