Mika - Sunday Telegraph 15/8/10 - The boy from Beirut

[Naectegale]

Hello

 

Mika is on the front cover of Seven magazine, free with today's Sunday telegraph - focus on his beirut background - nice pics

 

 

 

 

Article

Pictures

Pictures

[Soaring Simpson]

*goes to buy Telegraph*

[Droopsy]

Which pictures were used?

[Naectegale]

Hi Sosi

 

I'm half way through it

 

edit - where did my cute smiley go?

[Naectegale]

Which pictures were used?

 

New ones in beirut - with a fabulous view and walking along a steet - and one dr John, one with Ian mcKellen and one with Gaga

[Soaring Simpson]

Which pictures were used?

 

One I haven't seen before- white shirt, greige cutoffs (smartish) leaning against a wall with a panorama of Beirut (I assume in the background) :swoon:

 

And it calls him "prodigiously talented" and gives him first place in a big national (afmittedly rather stuffy) newspaper supplement

[Fmbm]

One I haven't seen before- white shirt, greige cutoffs (smartish) leaning against a wall with a panorama of Beirut (I assume in the background) :swoon:

 

And it calls him "prodigiously talented" and gives him first place in a national (rather stuffy) newspaper supplement

 

Please take pictures! You're killing us with suspense!

[Droopsy]

New pics, cool!

 

I'm sorry if there are still double sentences, this was a horrible and chaotic mess I did my best.

 

MIKA ON THE WARRAVAGED CHILDHOOD THAT PREPARED HIM FOR FAME

 

‘ When the shells came in we’d hide in the basement of the garage − with the cars, which all had full

tanks of petrol’

 

The sun-kissed Corniche, west Beirut. Perfect for a people-watching promenade, the waves lapping the rocks as fishermen haul wriggling flashes of silver from the surf. In high summer 2010, this waterfront walkway in the Lebanese capital offers glorious views of the eastern Mediterranean.

 

Back in the mid-Eighties, when Lebanon was in the grip of its 15-year civil war, the Corniche also offered, says Mika, a clear look at the gunboats that were trying to bomb his childhood home to smithereens.

 

‘ We lived on the fourth floor of that apartment building,’ says the Beirutborn, 26-year-old pop star, gesturing to a squat block on the landward side of the coastal road. Then, as now, the ground floor of the building was occupied by a car dealership.‘ When the shells came in we’d hide in the basement of the garage – with the cars, which all had full tanks of petrol.’

 

Hairy times. On one occasion the family emerged from hiding to find that Mika’s sisters’ bedroom wall had been blown out.‘ But west Beirut was deemed the safer part of the city,’ he says.‘ There were no snipers.’

 

Mika was born Michael Holbrook Penniman jnr in 1983 to a Lebanese dressmaker mother and American banker father. Four months previously, the American Embassy had been attacked by a suicide bomber, killing 63 people. Two months after his birth, the HQs of the French and the United States forces were attacked, killing 299. Not long after, his parents decided to evacuate the family. The Pennimans escaped, via Cyprus, to Paris on a US warship. They lived in the French capital until Mika was nine, at which point they moved to Britain.

 

Mika, twice exiled, grew up with his four siblings in west London, his family’s fluctuating fortunes meaning ‘ I was kicked out of [ private] school many times, for not being able to pay the bills – and my parents still refused to put me in state school, probably because I would have been pulverised,’ he says with a giggle.

 

These days the toothy, gangly, dyslexic former choirboy is a sevenmillion-album-selling international star, friends with everyone from Sir Ian McKellen ( he filmed – for free – a video performance for use in Mika’s stage set on his current world tour) to Lady Gaga.‘ Her integrity is special,’ he coos.‘ Lady Gaga has a very unjaded intelligence. It’s brilliant, ‘ cause it’s antisnob. She reminds me of Stephen Fry!’ he adds, fluttering like a luvvie.‘ When I sat down with him he gave me that same feeling.’

 

Now, a quarter of a century since he and his family fled for their lives, the goofily camp and theatrically flamboyant singer-songwriter has come home. It’s not his first return visit to Beirut after the family’s hurried escape. He came here four times in his youth, the first in his early teens – he remembers seeing Sting in concert and being amazed by ‘ this place I’d always heard about’.

 

In Paris and London, Lebanese culture was ‘ everything. It was assimilated into our new lives; a transplanted culture.’ He remembers the food, his mother playing Lebanese diva Fairuz in the kitchen and smoking the priest’s pipe twice a week from the age of four.

 

‘ Our household was eclectic. Things were always being made.’ His mother had a ‘ tiny [ clothing] label that ran at a loss, so the studio was in our dining room and living room. It was very normal to make stuff – if you want something you make it. You don’t buy it. So that became our culture. And music was our culture. Eclecticism became a replacement for culture – it was totally normal to listen to French music next to Shabba Ranks and Nina Simone and Fairuz. It didn’t matter. If anything, it was encouraged.’

 

DIY expression, pick’n’mix multiculturalism – this was the Pennimans’ culture and their identity. A safer identity in their household.‘ I think my mother was very afraid of patriotism,’ he says – patriotism, and nationalism, were what had people at each other’s throats at home in Beirut. And that rubbed off on us.’

 

He’s performed in Beirut before, an open-air show two years ago. But this year’s trip to his homeland is particularly important for Mika. This cartoon-coloured mix of Freddie Mercury and Leo Sayer is playing at the Baalbeck Festival, a 55-year-old arts event held annually in the Bekaa Valley.

 

‘ This one is more prestigious,’ he says in the plain-speaking, unthinkingly bumptious manner into which he can lapse.‘ Which is unfortunate, because the tickets are too expensive. And I know that all my fans aren’t the wealthy people in this country. But I did it because it’s an important event in a region that is still considered contentious. I was like, f---it, I wanna do something that I’ve heard about my whole life.’

 

It’s more interesting than that: going back to his roots, it will transpire, offers an insight into the make-up of a pop star who was almost too good to be true from the moment he reached number one with his debut single, Grace Kelly, in January 2007. Who was more artifice than art – his familial nickname from infancy was Mica, but he changed it to Mika ‘ because all the angles and lines in my name were straight, sharp angles. And the “ c” was weak.’

Who seemed an airy-fairy contrivance putting the false in falsetto and remained, it appeared, calculatedly coy about his sexuality. But Mika isn’t in fact a weirdly gifted man-child from Planet Kooky. He’s just a confused and perhaps lonely man with a slightly eccentric family. Ask him where he comes from, and all he can say is: ‘ I don’t feel like I belong to any country. It’s why I do what I do. It gives me a sense of identity.’ Coming from anyone else, that would sound like cobblers. But no one else has a background like Mika’s.

 

‘ Beirut feels completely special and different,’ Mika says as we stop-start through the city’s permanently choking traffic, past the derelict Co-Op store bristling with machine gun nests and barbed wire, past the new Porsche showrooms, fashion boutiques and construction sites of a city rebuilding itself ( again).

 

‘ Mainly because of the family significance of it I guess,’ he continues, adding that ‘ if we get lost we can call one of my 158 relatives who live here.’ He says the city ‘ puts a piece of my background in place. Admittedly a very storybook, mythological one [ Mika was only months old when the family fled]. I don’t know what percentage of my story that I believe to be true is actually true. But I don’t want to know the truth. I prefer the version I know.’

 

He says all this in the well-modulated English accent that speaks of spells at some of London’s finer schools. Curiously, when I listen back to him on tape, he sounds a touch American. However, he says that when he arrived in London:‘ I talked like zees all ze time.’ He worked hard to eradicate his French-accented English.

 

We stop at the oval shell of an old cinema. It was sited above a mall, which itself sat above an underground car park, making it a favoured spot for car-bombers.

 

Mika’s parents were patrons of this central Beirut landmark. They remember the vibrant city of the Seventies, when locals could ‘ water-ski in the morning and ski in the afternoon’. A keen student of architecture ( Mika likes all art forms, high and low, cinema and opera, comic-strip and cartoon illustration, theatre and fashion), he says that Zaha Hadid has ‘ adopted’ the building. The Iraqi architect, like his father, studied at the American University of Beirut ( AUB).

 

He describes his father as American, but he was actually born in Jerusalem to a diplomat father who then moved his family to Egypt.‘ I don’t know where my father is from,’ Mika says with apparent sincerity.‘ I just don’t. He’s lived in so many countries. Now he lives in Bahrain mainly and London.’ His mother calls herself Lebanese, but she was born in New York, albeit in a Lebanese community.

 

As we queue for the little cable car that will take us up to the hilltop Malachite church established by his great great uncle in 1947, Mika tells the story of his maternal great grandmother. When her son went to fight the Turks, she sat on the roof of her house in Damascus, waiting for his return. She died of sunstroke. As shaggy family stories go, it’s a good one.

 

Her distraught son – Mika’s maternal grandfather – duly decided to ship himself and his seven siblings off to a new, safer life in the United States. Thirty years after arriving at Ellis Island, Mika’s grandfather had a multimillion dollar textile business and was a commissioner of NewYork.

 

Mika’s father – studying in America after graduating from AUB – and mother met ‘ while crossing the road in NewYork’.

 

After his parents married, his father took a post in Beirut.‘ It used to be quite a banking centre of the Middle East. So they sent him here, I think, fully aware that there was trouble here. They needed people who had an affiliation with the place, a knowledge of it. He’d studied here and he’d loved it.’

 

Back in the mid-Eighties, when Lebanon was in the grip of its 15-year civil war, the Corniche also offered, says Mika, a clear look at the gunboats that were trying to bomb his childhood home to smithereens.

 

After the family’s evacuation to Paris, they lived ‘ in a really nice neighbourhood, the 16th [ arrondissement], in a beautiful apartment. We had a housekeeper. Then things started to change. My father went away and he got stuck there.’ It was 1990 and Mika’s father had ‘ gone away’ to Kuwait, just as the Iraqis invaded.‘ He was effectively a hostage in the American Embassy. They had to dig for water, stuff like that.’ He thinks his father was away for ‘ six to eight months’.

 

What was that like for the family at home in Paris? ‘ Um, well, it was hard. And we watched CNN hoping not to see him.‘ Cause we knew that if we saw him it was bad. And my mother would force us to do the rosary!’ he titters. ‘ I hate the rosary. I’m fascinated by religion but I’m not particularly religious.’

 

His mother’s small dressmaking business, which she’d run out of the living room, had already gone bankrupt.‘ So there wasn’t much money coming in. We got into financial trouble and had to leave the apartment. Bailiffs took most of our stuff.’ He smiles and shrugs.

Previously Mika has referred to a ‘ darkness’ that he experienced between childhood and adulthood, and how this fed into his second album, last year’s The Boy Who Knew Too Much. He unpacks this ‘ darkness’ for me: ‘ sexuality, identity, goofiness! Physical appearance. Cultural confusion. And social rejection. This desperate feeling – desperate,’ he repeats,‘ desperately wanting to create something else. Desperately wanting to create another version of reality. We had a lot of problems – we were always running out of money. And there was a lot of just general insecurity. So I was looking for a solution to that, anywhere I could.’

 

Mika collected toy theatres and spent his teenage years fantasising about the light show he would have at his concerts when he was a star and worked on perfecting his melodic gifts. Did he, I wonder, have many friends? ‘ Not than many,’ he dimples.‘ Some! When I got older I got some good friends. But no, not that many.’ He tells me he loves Zadie Smith’s

White Teeth, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Meera Syal – ‘ writers who write about the past and different crosscultural things. I love it, because it’s not Great Expectations. It’s nothing to do with fancy people. It’s to do with people who are coming from every different part of the world who arrive in a new place and have everything available to them. They’re not limited. They can achieve anything.’

 

Thus, when it came to trying to secure a record deal, after being initially rebuffed, Mika left nothing to chance. He didn’t just send demo tapes or MP3s to labels. I didn’t want to present my music empty. I wanted to present it finished. Completed. I wanted my clothes finished. My album artwork finished. And that was what worked. That was what launched me into a [ record company] bidding war.’

He recruited his mother and his sisters to help out.‘ The original demo was a handbound book with art in it. I numbered things and I signed them. I interviewed myself. And I got a photo shoot done.’ He beams.‘’ Cause I wanted people to think that I was important.’

 

We arrive at the Jupiter Temple at Baalbeck, two hours from Beirut in the Bekaa Valley. This stunning Roman site, the ruins of a firstcentury AD religious complex partly dedicated to Bacchus, is the venue for tonight’s Mika show.‘ And I can’t hear anything,’ says the artist, aghast, after spending an afternoon soundchecking in fierce Middle Eastern heat.‘ Cause it’s bouncing off solid stone, the slapback is terrible – there’s absolutely no absorption whatsoever.’ They might have given us viniculture, roads and central heating, but the Romans did nothing for camp pop theatricality. Although I imagine Mika is partial to a toga.

 

Never mind, the show must go on. Mika is not a man to be daunted by the poor sonics of ancient marble, nor the diminution of his normal stage set by the hot wind.‘ If we put up the backdrop tonight,’ he says, gesturing to netting covered with plastic sunflowers bought in China and individually affixed by his artist sister, Yasmine,‘ and the wind blows like this, it’ll act like a sail. The entire stage will fall on the audience – the PA, everything, all two tons of it.’

 

In any case, he has faced greater challenges while touring in parts of the world where religious and cultural sensitivities should be observed. When he recently played in Morocco, he belatedly learnt that a local cleric had been trying to ban fellow performer Elton John ‘ because he’s a man married to another man. I had no idea about this, and I was at a press conference and a journalist said:“ There was an article where you said you were bisexual and you agreed to the label, and this had very negative reactions”.’

 

Mika replied:‘ Look, I’ve always said in the press, I can fall in love with a man. I can fall in love with a woman. And I’ve always said that I have no shame in that. And I don’t think there was any negative reaction to what I said. In fact I don’t think there was any reaction – I don’t think anyone was surprised whatsoever. I don’t think anyone gives a sh--. I think people just want me to have a label.’

 

I ask him: is he loath to label himself sexually partly out of respect for – or even wariness of – attitudes in the Middle East to homosexuals? ‘ Absolutely not,’ he exclaims, cutting me off.‘ Why would that be the case when I am the way I am? When I dress the way that I dress? When I sing the songs that I sing? When I dance the way that I dance? It’s not consciously androgynous. But it’s certainly not a sellable version of masculinity.’

 

Earlier I’d asked Mika about the way he divides opinion – his Marmitelike qualities, if you will. ‘ This is what I’ve always said to anybody who uses me as a punchbag,’ he responded.‘ If you don’t understand my music it’s obviously not meant for you. My music is not calculated. It is a product of circumstance.

 

‘ It might appeal to you because of the life you’ve had,’ he continues,‘ or because you relate to the stories. But my music is not fashion. It’s not sound. It’s not scene. I was never accepted into a scene. I tried! And I would have liked it! But I can’t and I just don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to make any other type of music than the music I make.’

 

In the end, the glorious Roman columns – accessorised by plastic sunflowers and a brilliant full moon – provide a perfectly epic setting for Mika’s dream show. It’s a great and giddily OTT disco-panto show, with the homecoming hero scampering around in a floral coat with tails and top hat. The set ends with a procession of local girls coming onstage dressed for a Mexican Day Of The Dead ceremony, then Mika and his band ‘ dying’ in a heap, then everyone leaping back to life. But it finally ends, at the encore, with Grace Kelly, with everyone in the crowd removing the white cushions from their seats and launching them into the air, at each other and onto the stage.

 

 

[Soaring Simpson]

photobucket is being stroppy...

[Naectegale]

New pics, cool!

 

I'm sorry if there are still double sentences, this was a horrible and chaotic mess I did my best.

 

 

 

 

:shocked:Did you find it on the web? I couldn't

 

Or did you copy it?

 

Either way, I salute you

[Soaring Simpson]

I'll take better ones later, and even type up the article if need if they don't put it online

 

 

 

[Soaring Simpson]

And now I'm gonna read it...

 

Edit- notice someone found it online- well done- Icouldn't either

[eloise.shaw]

Oh wow. Nice pics. He look handsome

[Droopsy]

 

 

 

And bigger:

[dianaa]

thank you so much for posting !

he looks absolutely gorgeous.

i'm gonna read the article now.

[Fmbm]

Thanks for posting, Droopsy! One of the most interesting interviews I've read in a long time.

EDIT: And thanks to both of you for the pictures

[Droopsy]

:shocked:Did you find it on the web? I couldn't

 

Or did you copy it?

 

Either way, I salute you

 

From pressdisplay, tho I don't know what I did to get the text... All of a sudden I got it, and then it went away again

[CazGirl]

DAYUM those pictures are nice, even if the front cover is a little "pose-y" Looks like a good read too, will have to read it when I finish work. T4P!

[Kriszti]

Hello

 

Mika is on the front cover of Seven magazine, free with today's Sunday telegraph - focus on his beirut background - nice pics

 

 

 

 

Article

Pictures

Pictures

 

Love it! thanks so much for sharing!

[Foxxy]

Thanks for posting

[!xkirstyx!]

Sent my dad out to buy it

[Dark Angel]

i want that magz. how can i get it???

[babspanky]

i want that magz. how can i get it???

 

It's a supplement of a UK Sunday newspaper. It will only be available in the UK today. You are in Denmark, right? Maybe if you go to an international newspaper seller ( you usually get them in the centre of big cities) they may have a copy of the newspaper and magazine tomorrow or the day after?

[Treasa]

Thanks for posting:thumb_yello:

 

very nice interesting article. Must go see if I kan get it here.

[Dark Angel]

It's a supplement of a UK Sunday newspaper. It will only be available in the UK today. You are in Denmark, right? Maybe if you go to an international newspaper seller ( you usually get them in the centre of big cities) they may have a copy of the newspaper and magazine tomorrow or the day after?

 

I donno any around where i live who got that...