dcdeb

Oh hoooooraaaaaaaaaay!!! :yay: dcdeb <waiting impatiently>

Where's Wendi??? What's going on now??? I need to know! dcdeb

OMG! I hope you're right, tootch! This is exciting! :woot:woot_jump: dcdeb

Woo hoo! :woot_jump: I'm so excited for them!!! dcdeb

Congratulations on winning such a FANTASTIC prize! Color me GREEN Hope you have a wonderful time! How could you not? And if I'd seen this sooner, I would have offered to mail a badge to you... but count on Freddie to take care of it! dcdeb

Thank you SO much! People had mentioned he was doing this song now, but I hadn't seen any videos of it done live yet! Thank you thank you thank you! dcdeb

I think the club in DC holds about 1200 -- so that's quite a bit less. Plus, I just have no sense how popular Mika is here... aside from that awful phone interview he did a few weeks ago, I have not heard Mika once on a DC radio station. Granted, I listen mostly to satellite radio, but still... you'd think I might have heard him every now and then... So maybe that means the club crowd won't be overwhelming. Well, there is that... more people do create a more electric atmosphere... Oh well, I'll just have to wait and see... although the anticipation is like to KILL me! dcdeb <26 days 16 hours to Mika in DC!>

I agree with Robertina! Monday was a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad day for those of us reading of your bad experiences. And we don't want a repeat! We want to hear wondrous, jubilant, ecstatic reports of an amazingly breathtakingly delicious show! I'm so excited for you all! Just as I'm excited for the Glaswegians tonight! Have BIG FUN! dcdeb <26 days 16 hours 7 minutes to Mika in DC!>

Yes, and I know in many interviews he has said words to the effect of "This is the big push, this is how I establish my career." And he's also said many many times, that this is how the next year and a half are going to be -- I think he knows this is the plan until the middle of next year. FWIW. dcdeb

I think you're right, bab, and that's such a good way to put it -- a story for the sake of a story. Oh well. At least it's not about you-know-what. Well, maybe it IS indirectly, but you know what I mean. dcdeb

LOL Robertina! I'll do a little bumping as well, just to be on the safe side. dcdeb

It WAS worth it, but I don't think I'll be able to manage that in June! Hopefully, our venue won't be as big/crowded -- about how many people were at Shepherd's Bush? dcdeb

Those are just fabulous! And you WERE close! How ever did you manage that? Thank you for sharing! dcdeb

Interesting column looking at both Rufus Wainwright and Mika and their potential... Mika is featured in the second half of the article, but read it all -- it's good! Ebony and Irony Thirty Years On It's Easier To See The Witty, Poppy Sons And Daughters Of Elton by Geoffrey Himes http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=13613 Elton John wasn't the first singer/pianist in rock. But he also wasn't at all like his contemporaries--not Mr. Meat and Potatoes Billy Joel, not cupid-as-genius Stevie Wonder, not one-man Brecht and Weill Randy Newman. John had more in common with rock's first generation of piano-pounders--over-the-top eccentrics such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis--but with a soft center that his predecessors lacked. He didn't fit in any obvious category. Only in retrospect is it obvious that John was a point at which gay culture was injected into the pop-music mainstream. The heightened theatricality of everything he did--from the weird glasses to the pumped falsetto, from the stage antics to the unabashed melodrama--came out of a culture where confession was often delivered via disguise. As a marginalized community, gay people had something different and valuable to offer mass culture, and John's knack for Tin Pan Alley hooks made that cultural subversion irresistible. The latest version of Elton John's greatest hits is called Rocket Man: Number Ones (Rocket/Mercury). It includes all seven of his singles that hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts, six more that hit No. 1 elsewhere, four more fan favorites, five songs from a 2005 live show in Las Vegas, and five music videos. Most of it is glorious, but old fans will find it redundant and even newcomers would be better off with Greatest Hits: 1970-2002. But any of John's compilations reinforce the same point: He was unlike almost anyone else in the '70s and '80s. In recent years, however, a number of gifted singer-pianists have emerged to extend John's genre--call it cabaret rock, or simply Eltonia--in new and exciting directions. Ben Folds, Rufus Wainwright, and Mika are all sons of Elton--and Nellie McKay is an obvious daughter. The most original of John's heirs is Wainwright, the son of folkies Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. The younger Wainwright lacks John's jones for R&B but substitutes a passion for opera, which can easily be as outlandish and unbridled as Little Richard. Like John, Wainwright builds every song atop seductive piano melodies and gorgeous chord changes and then elaborates this ear candy with ornate embellishments. And because Wainwright is a better and braver lyricist than John's longtime partner Bernie Taupin, the roots of this cabaret rock in gay culture are often explicit rather than implicit. Wainwright traveled from New York to Berlin to record his new album, Release the Stars (Geffen), his first in three years and his first self-produced project. Surrounded by old-world romanticism, he abandoned plans for a bare-bones recording and wrapped his new songs in strings, horns, and voices. Which is fine: You wouldn't want a minimalist confessional from Wainwright anymore than you would from John. He describes his trip to Berlin on "Going to a Town," which opens with naked, stabbing piano chords, as in John's ballad "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me," and unfolds into a melody that's just as juicy. But rather than offering clichés about romantic abandonment, Wainwright, who grew up in Montreal, glances over his shoulder at the United States, his adopted home, and fires off shots at its homophobia ("Do you really think you go to hell for having loved?") and post-Sept. 11 foreign policy ("You took advantage of a world that loved you well"). The song then turns personal, as Wainwright croons over swooning strings that he's "Making my own way home/ Ain't gonna be alone." Throughout this wonderful album, Wainwright mixes the political and the personal, the high culture of chamber music and the low culture of Top 40 pop. "Between My Legs" begins with a noisy guitar lick and drum smack right out of John's "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)," and backs up its infectious dance beat with this priceless couplet on the connection between sex and sentiment: "I'll write about dancing without you, and I'll shed a tear between my legs." On "Nobody's Off the Hook," he addresses the irony of a John-like gay man who attracts young female admirers: "Who would ever have thought/ Hanging with a homo and a hairdresser/ You would become the one desired in every woman's heart?" It's hard to tell how much he's joking and how much he's serious on a song like "Rules and Regulations," which uses a beguiling trumpet line to bemoan a fate that make some people cuter than others, or on "Slideshow," a dizzying, string-swaddled ballad where he pouts that his lover didn't feature him prominently enough in a slide show. During this year's South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, Pete Townshend and his partner Rachel Fuller hosted a live edition of Attic Tapes, their internet showcase for new talent. Its most startling revelation was the one-named Mika, a tall, gangly Lebanese-British kid with a thick mop of unruly dark hair in a white T-shirt. He sat down at the upright piano by himself, created a pumping rhythm section with his left hand, ear-grabbing hooks in the right, and warbled a bouncy melody that jumped up into a falsetto, just like John's "Bennie and the Jets." But Mika's lyrics were as sharp and witty as Wainwright's, taunting a potential lover or music executive: "Why don't you like me?/ Why don't you like yourself?/ Should I bend over?/ Should I look older?" Townshend came out to play guitar on "Love Today," and Mika's composition was so distinctive that the musicians could churn up a disco groove with just their acoustic instruments as Mika's giddy high tenor described universal brotherhood as if it were an out-of-control orgy. Both of these songs are on Mika's debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion (Casablanca/Universal), one of the year's strongest doses of pure pop pleasure so far. In the studio, Mika's co-producer Greg Wells backed up the singer's piano riffs and thrilling vocal melodies with fat, effective dance beats. And almost every song on the album works on that level--an intoxicating disco-pop marriage of Elton John and Sylvester that would satisfy even with the dumbest of lyrics. But the words are worth paying attention to, full of delicious double entendres ("Suckin' too hard on your lollipop," "Relax, take it easy"), fresh metaphors ("You play me like a kid with a crayon," "My troops are bigger than yours"), and conflicted feelings. "Billy Brown" is a Ray Davies-like look at life in the London suburbs, a chirpy sing-along that describes a happily married husband who falls in love with another man. "Stuck in the Middle," pushed along by a riveting piano hook, captures both the affection and resentment that a son harbors for his father as he leaves home. John accidentally created a whole new genre with his unembarrassed exaggeration of the rock 'n' roll piano-man tradition. He had no idea where it might lead, if it led anywhere at all, but it turned into a smart, artsy variation that's more comfortable on public radio than on the Top 40 airwaves. Mika's now come along to merge the ambitions of Wainwright, Folds, and McKay with John's universal commerciality. If Mika can make three or four more albums as good as his debut, he may become this genre's giant.

Great photos! Thanks for sharing them! Sivan has put all the tour dates we know so far here: http://www.mikafanclub.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3418 Do you mean T in the Park? If so, it looks like yes, he'll be there! Can't wait to see the rest of your photos! And welcome to the Mika Fan Club forums! dcdeb

You can be sure I'll poke my nose in now and again to give them a good yank up to the top! LOL! dcdeb

That's just lovely, Daz! Something to treasure, for sure! dcdeb

Hi RosieLou, you can listen to a recording of yesterday's Scott Mills show here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/scottmills/ Look where it says "Listen" then click on "latest show" and that will be Monday's... then you can fast-forward to about 50 minutes in to the show... and Mika is actually on for quite a long while... talks, then they play music, do news, then he's back and on for a while again. It's a VERY nice interview! dcdeb

Thanks for the thoughtful report, Akim -- I was wondering how you'd enjoyed the show! Again, hearing all this makes me so anxious for when Mika comes to DC! Although I hope that we won't have the crushing crowd problem... dcdeb <27 days 12 hours 30 minutes to Mika in DC!>

Well, they are just lovely! How nice of him to send them along to you! dcdeb

Loved your report, Lesley -- and the videos, too! Thanks! dcdeb

Who took these photos, Jemma? This one, and the one in the other thread -- they're brilliant! dcdeb

I think you have to cut them some slack... as a sometimes-journalist, I realize she was probably writing this on deadline, in a HUGE hurry... probably not even proofreading. For example, I would bet at the end where she writes "surreal age" it was really meant to be a "surreal *edge*" -- just a hunch I have. Maybe she even dictated this over the phone to someone, just to make sure it got in the paper/online by deadline. In any case, WE knew what she meant! dcdeb

It's an addiction... actually several... Addicted to the internet, addicted to Mika, and addicted to this forum... You have NO idea how many other things I'm SUPPOSED to be doing! Let's just hope no one from my real life ever catches me here! dcdeb <27 days 14 hours 51 minutes to Mika in DC>

Yes! I thought of her immediately when I read that! I'll need to point her over here when she gets online dcdeb <27 days 15 hours to Mika in DC>