Not so sure what to think of this...
Mercury rising
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
http://www.hour.ca/columns/3dollarbill.aspx?iIDArticle=18298
Mika and Bugs in Old Montreal
Mika turns to me, legs crossed and pretending to hold a cigarette, and does his finest imitation of Freddie Mercury.
"Yes, dahling," Mika says à la Mercury. "Hello, dear!"
Mika is looking somewhat, well, fabulously fey.
"And he holds his beer like this," Mika continues, imitating Mercury from the famous backstage British TV interview on the Queen - We Will Rock You: Live in Montreal 1981 DVD. "And he hardly drinks it!"
On this day, Mika is not backstage but, rather, sunk in an armchair at the rustic Auberge Le St-Gabriel, the oldest building in Old Montreal. And, I suspect, British pop phenom Mika shares more than just music with Mercury.
"You must get a lot of comparisons with Freddie!" I say.
"For being condescending?" Mika asks.
"No, for being fabulous!"
"Of all the comparisons with Freddie Mercury - which I don't think are fair because he was far more talented than I am - there was one I got from Brian May who came to my last show in London [this past June]. It was me on stage with 17 musicians, all acoustic, an orchestra with two classical singers, and [brian] went crazy! He said to me, 'You play the piano just like Freddie. You lead the band just like Freddie did.' Brian made me so happy, so proud."
Like Mercury, who was born in the onetime British protectorate of Zanzibar and raised in India, Mika was born in Beirut, in the former French protectorate of Lebanon, before he too moved to London.
And, like Mercury, questions about Mika's sexuality have dogged the singer
since his rise to fame.
But I was advised to only ask Mika questions about his new sophomore album, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, in stores on Sept. 22, and which features his current chart-topping single We Are Golden. (The album also features the openly gay Owen Pallett from Final Fantasy/Arcade Fire.)
"I'm not going to ask you any personal questions," I tell Mika, "but I will ask you this: You have always said your private life is private. But as a pop star, don't you think your private life is public property?"
Mika stares at me. "Because I don't offer it up for sale."
I say nothing. So Mika continues, "I'm [selling] my creative life. One must be careful with all that, especially in this day when everybody is selling everything. Just look on the Internet - sexuality has been cheapened. And I think girls are more the culprit than guys when it comes to that."
Mika turns in his armchair and his eyebrows burrow. "So why are you asking me this?"
"Because you've always said you don't want to talk about your private life."
What I don't say is that, in my experience, the only people who never want to talk about their private life are publicly closeted gay pop stars and movie stars.
"I'm not asking about your private life," I say. "I just want to know why you don't want to talk about it."
Talking about it, of course, would likely ruin his career in America. You can't be a million-selling rock star and be gay, unless you're Elton John. Just ask Rufus Wainwright, who once told me, "If I knew I could have sold more records, I might have stayed in the closet."
The closest Mika will allow himself to show vulnerability is when he discusses his favourite singers.
"I love Patti Page and Nina Simone, and my favourite male singer is Mel Tormé," Mika says. "I prefer female singers because they were allowed to do a whole lot more. There's more range. And they didn't have to worry about being cool; they don't have to worry about swagger."
Mika looks straight at me. "When you're a woman singing, you can evoke so many [poses]," he says. "You can be sexy, authoritative and ballsy. You can be motherly and confident, you can be strong or weak, in need. Traditionally male singers don't show vulnerability. Think of Sinatra, of Tormé, all the great singers [and] all the great [male] rock singers, they're never really vulnerable."
And here Mika cops another Freddie Mercury pose and says, "Unless they're playing with gender."