2019 Attitude Awards, Oct 9, London

[ellie]

1 minute ago, Mikaistheorigin said:

a) Tomorrow could have been a last minute addition

 

He talked about Tomorrow back in may in one of the first interviews he gave for this album so unlikely

 

3 minutes ago, Mikaistheorigin said:

b) we shouldn't believe everything he says

 

Agree lol

[mellody]

Well, you could also interpret it that way: the songs aren't about Andy - but about Mika's feelings (for Andy).

Or probably he just wants to make sure that everyone can interpret the songs the way they want.

[ellie]

1 hour ago, krysady said:

All his albums are personal, imo, probably the only difference is that in the past he was hiding behind some imaginary characters and starting with TOOL things have totally changed 

 

Agree that all his albums are personal and that his songwriting changed (well, I would rather say expanded) since TOOL, but I never got the point about imaginary characters I mean, 6/10 songs on LICM dont have any characters, hes always been upfront with what Big girl and Love Today are about and Lollipop and Billy Brown were obvious imo.

 

Writting about other people/from a double perspective just seems to be his preffered songwritting style, its more or less on all his albums.

[maggie112]

I also think that Tiny Love is not ONLY about Andy but inspired by all the love that he has in his life, so, his family, but Andy as well 😊 And some lines in the “first song” (not the reprise) refer more to a “couple” love, not to a family love   

 

 

Edited October 10, 2019 by maggie112

[ellie]

36 minutes ago, maggie112 said:

I also think that Tiny Love is not ONLY about Andy but inspired by all the love that he festa in his life, so, his family, but Andy as well 😊 And some lines in the “first song” (not the reprise) refer more to a “couple” love, not to a family love   

 

 

 

I thought Tiny Love was about his mom/family instantly but I seem to be only one who heard the first verse as him singing about how... he isnt singing about romantic love

 

[TTel20]

16 hours ago, Kumazzz said:

I don't know how to get Mika's cover issue of Attitude Magazine / November 2019. 

https://pocketmags.com/us/attitude-magazine

 

 

 

p

 

 

 you can order it here https://www.newsstand.co.uk/722-Attitude-Magazines/28801-Subscribe-to-ATTITUDE-315---MIKA-Magazine-Subscription.aspx

[Kumazzz]

5 hours ago, Just_Me said:

For you @Kumazzz

 

Thanks a million @Just_Me

[mellody]

46 minutes ago, ellie said:

 

I thought Tiny Love was about his mom/family instantly but I seem to be only one who heard the first verse as him singing about how... he isnt singing about romantic love

 

 

but it sounds so romantic nevertheless... Anyway, he also said in his IG live that it's not about a romantic relationship, and so I don't think anymore that this one's about Andy... actually I didn't anymore since I saw the cover and the video. But well, I've already told my theories about TL in the respective thread, so I won't go into detail about that here.

[kreacher]

6 hours ago, TTel20 said:

 you can order it here https://www.newsstand.co.uk/722-Attitude-Magazines/28801-Subscribe-to-ATTITUDE-315---MIKA-Magazine-Subscription.aspx

 

thanks, i just ordered mine. It says they only have 7 left! i had great success with them getting single issues of Paris Match & Vanity Fair Italia shipped to me in the USA.

[Kumazzz]

The highlights

 

[NaoMika]

Wow, MIKA sung five songs - I've watched snippets of GK and Relax on IG... does anybody know the rest of the  five-song set?

 

Virgin Atlantic

 

https://www.virgin.com/news/virgin-atlantic-attitude-awards-2019

 

The Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards 2019

 

Sam Smith, Taron Egerton and Christine and the Queens were among the winners at last night’s Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards.

Hosted at London’s Roundhouse venue in Camden, the Virgin Atlantic Attitude Awards celebrate the best of the LGBT+ community and its allies. Entertainment at the star-studded event included a roof-raising performance from Ava Max, who also picked up the award for Attitude’s 2019 Breakthrough Artist.

 

Tsemaye Bob-Egbe, star of Tina The Musical, delivered the class Proud Mary and classical music sensation Katherine Jenkins performed a goose-bump-inducing take on the Judy Garland hit Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Music Award recipient Mika closed the evening with a five-song set of his chart-toppers.

 

 

[Kumazzz]

15 hours ago, Just_Me said:

For you @Kumazzz

 

 

[Kumazzz]

Mika's IG story

 

 

Twitter

 

So proud! Thank you

@attitudemag

for the Music Award 2019 and the cover

So happy to be back in the UK after many years. Was v special, performing for a magazine I love, in a mythical venue with some of the coolest peeps in the city. X

@bydarrenstyles

#AttitudeAwards

 

 

[Kumazzz]

Mika's IG stories

 

 

[Kumazzz]

 

 

[Kumazzz]

Shutter Stock

https://www.shutterstock.com/de/editorial/entertainment/attitude-awards%2C-london-2019-10-09

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kumazzz]

Pink News

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/10/10/sam-smith-attitude-awards-2019-acceptance-speech/

 

Who else won big at the Attitude Awards?

Mika, whose latest music video sees him cruising for gay sex, scored the Music Award.

 

 

[crazyaboutmika]

4 hours ago, kreacher said:

 

thanks, i just ordered mine. It says they only have 7 left! i had great success with them getting single issues of Paris Match & Vanity Fair Italia

Fantastic 🎉 Thank you so much for this very useful info @TTel20

[krysady]

23 hours ago, mellody said:

That's possible - but "Ready To Call This Love" and "Stay High"?

 

22 hours ago, ellie said:

I dont hear Ready to call this love as a love song but as encouraging someone to believe in love

Agree, I also don't see Ready To Call This Love as a song talking specifically about his relationship. And Stay High... well, it could be about anything, even that song he mentioned about his fans 

 

15 hours ago, ellie said:

hes always been upfront with what Big girl and Love Today are about and Lollipop and Billy Brown were obvious imo.

It was obvious, indeed, but that doesn't mean he was the one explicitly talking out loud about it like it happened later starting with TOOL, at least this is my view 

 

 

Anyway, back to the topic, it seems that there's no more any copy of the Attitude mag with Mika available on their site, isn't?  

 

 

[ellie]

4 hours ago, krysady said:

even that song he mentioned about his fans 

 

I can see that

[Kumazzz]

Article

 

Spoiler

 

PDF file : Attitude 11.2019_MIKA.pdf

 

Heaven sent

 

After staring down homophobia at the start of his pop career, Mika is now making unapologetically queer music that also processes his past pain

 

It is impossible to present one’s self as a serious journalist while trying – and failing – to balance rainbowcoloured building blocks on your head. But, alas, this is the unexpected position I find myself in while visiting Mika at his family’s plush apartment in Paris (next door to Lenny Kravitz, by the way).

Immediately welcomed into the fold, I meet the singer’s mother and sisters, including Paloma along with her five-year-old son, the mischievous mite who stacked the blocks precariously atop my noggin in the first place and challenged me not to let them fall. I feel like the human version of Jenga and, sure enough, they instantly clatter to the floor.

Casting my failure to one side, I ravenously tuck into a buffet of Lebanese food laid on by my generous hosts – Mika’s mum is Lebanese and he was born in Beirut – before moving outside to the terrace, comfortably full, to soak up the sun with the curly-haired hitmaker. Oh yes, and also to interview him, I’d almost forgotten that part.

 

Divvying up his time between a spread of homes dotted everywhere from Los Angeles to Tuscany, Mika – real name Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr – embraces the nomadic lifestyle.

 

“When I was at university, there were two things that I swore I’d never become a victim of: Mondays and places,” he says. “When you allow yourself to let go of this idea that you need to be from a place, you open yourself up, you never know what’s going to happen from one month to the next, or the weird people who’ll pop into your life.”

 

And how is the “no Mondays” rule working out? “Well, it’s Tuesday today!”

The stats speak for themselves regarding Mika’s music career: a debut album, 2007’s Life in Cartoon Motion, that sold more than eight million copies worldwide, an Ivor Novello award, and a Brit award in 2008.

But the past four years have been a somewhat fallow period, with the 36 year old not having sown the seeds of any new songs since No Place in Heaven.

“I went and did TV [The Voice in France, and the Italian version of The X Factor],” he explains. “I was offered a massive contract for my own show in Spain, which would have launched me in South America, but I said no. I don’t want to be a TV person any more. I’m a musician and I have other things to say.

“I did television so I could rediscover the pleasure and joy in what I do.” Many other artists would be scared to take a break and step away from what they do best, particularly in the world of pop, which is more fickle than the date-promising dudes you chat to on Tinder — yes, that fickle. “I’ve never been driven by commercial pressures. I’ve never felt a victim of that,” he maintains.

“My career is so weird. I’ve had moments where my success and presence has been much stronger, but it’s not about that. “Can you develop your own style? Can you develop your own way of telling a story? That is more valuable to me.”

 

Time away from the studio certainly allowed Mika’s creative juices to start flowing again and they’ve spilled forth into his latest album, My Name is Michael Holbrook, his most intimate and raw output yet. “It is a reset in remembering what the most important part of writing music is. It is also more autobiographical in its content,” he adds.

 

Creativity, they say, more often than not springs from a place of pain, and Mika plumbed deeply personal depths during the making of the record. “Four people who were very close to me died in that period,” he says. “Instead of pretending it didn’t happen, I confronted it and put it into the writing process. Instead of getting colder, when sad

things were happening, I decided to make the music warmer and melodic. “There is nothing [like] writing something that makes you see the world a little bit better. Even the things that were painful or ugly, suddenly they have a reason for having happened. Everything becomes more bearable.”

 

That optimistic outlook encouraged Mika to re-open some emotional wounds, specifically working through the trauma of seeing his sister Paloma on the brink of death following a freak accident in 2010, when she fell from a window at a flat in London.

“There’s a song, called Paloma, that is about a really horrible thing that happened to her a few years ago at her house-warming party. She fell out of a four-storey window. I lived about 200 metres away at the time. I ran over and saw her impaled on these railings, dying. There is a line that goes, ‘I was standing there and I found you fighting in the darkness’.

“After watching someone impaled, you realise as you write through it, that even in the darkest place there is beauty. But if you don’t write about it and turn it into something, you’ll never discover that beauty.

“Doctors said she would be a vegetable or paralysed. Then they said she wouldn’t walk again. Then they said she couldn’t have kids. But you see the happy ending, that’s her son you met,” he smiles.

“There are other things that have happened in my family. My mother’s health issues, for example, started on the third day of writing. I can’t talk about it, but very complicated things. I don’t know if you have heard the last song on the album, Tiny Love Reprise.”

I tell him I have. “That’s my mum and Paloma singing. I thought: ‘let’s not hide the dark, let’s use the music to warm the difficult situation. It’s very cathartic’.”

Cathartic or not, putting pen to paper about his family’s woes has stirred up some domestic drama. “My brother is against some of the things on the album and he was very vocal about that. I’m just going to have to suffer those consequences.

“Paloma was [initially] really weirded out but then she understood that it wasn’t exploitation. It wasn’t about exploiting these stories, it was about liberating them.”

 

MAKING the most of the fine weather, Mika and I take a stroll in a nearby park, passing a tiny Punch-and-Judy-style theatre he used to visit when he was younger — he moved to the French capital as a kid, then to London — prompting a trip down memory lane as he reflects on his difficult childhood. “

I was the kind of kid who wasn’t aware he was disruptive. I was very shy but I could get carried [away] when I liked something.

“It got me into trouble all the time at school and I ended up having a lot of problems. I was dyslexic and had to relearn how to read and write at the age of nine. I also had an abusive teacher — physically, but more psychologically than anything – and in the end I, not she, was thrown out of the school.”

  During that chapter of his life, Mika took a vow of silence that lasted for almost six months. “I realised that every time I communicated, it ended badly, so I shut down.”

But he rebooted and found his voice again, scaling the heights of a few extra octaves, when his mum signed him up for singing lessons with a Russian teacher.

  Within weeks, he was performing up and down the country, including at the Royal Opera House in London.

“At school, I was treated like an idiot but then I’d go and sing in front of thousands of people and I was being paid. I was like: ‘I know which life I’m choosing’. It was a nobrainer. My mum would accept jobs for me in Canterbury, Ealing, Glasgow. “They wouldn’t pay for accommodation, so we’d drive and sleep [in the car]. She’d drag my siblings along too,” Mika reminisces. “Nothing’s changed. Look at us, we’re a gang.”

Music also came to be a safe place for him to explore his sexuality, and he is touched that that has been recognised with our music award. “It makes me happy because I think the idea of sexuality being a part of your process, your identity and your source of inspiration, is so important.

“If I didn’t have music, I would not have been able to understand or deal with my sexuality in the same way. It’s always been at the centre of my writing.”

 

Nothing more so than on his summer banger Ice Cream, designed to, ahem, whip fans into a frenzy. “It talks about receiving fellatio on the lawn,” Mika confi rms, with a naughty glint in his eye.

I have to ask… was that autobiographical? “It doesn’t matter, does it?” he grins, pointing out that he isn’t actually a fan of ice cream. “I can’t stand it. It gives me a stomach ache!”

Mika held off coming out publicly – he did so in 2012 – so that his nearest and dearest could get used to it fi rst. “Having such a close personal and working relationship with many of my family, it took quite a while to sort all that out. I didn’t like the concept of the people closest to me feeling they weren’t respected or trusted enough to have a chance to react in an intimate way.

 

“When it did happen, my mum said: ‘So what? I’ve always known’. It was difficult for my siblings, particularly one of my sisters, not Paloma, because she thought it meant that everything would change. She was disappointed, or worried, that the family unit wouldn’t survive or be the same, which is absurd and she’s realised that since.

“We’re the most traditional and untraditional family,” he adds. “I’m certainly not the only one with a non-conventional sexuality in my family but all that has come afterwards.”

 

Question marks over his sexuality, or, in some cases, a dogged desire to out him, plagued his early days on planet pop. “The process of coming out publicly, from a media point of view, was something that took a while,” he admits. “I was bombarded and there were so many opinions. I remember there was an article in Out magazine, that asked other openly gay artists to comment on me. I will never be OK with what they did.

“Why does it have to be [something] commented on by other artists, especially artists I admire? I found it really disturbing,” he vents.

Then was the entrenched homophobia within the music industry itself that Mika had to muck through at the beginning. “In America it was [an issue]. I’ll always remember some of the comments that were made at the record company. When I was trying to get signed, a [senior person] at a major label said that [my music] felt ‘a bit too gay’ and he wouldn’t sign me.

“He said that in front of me,” he balks. “My manager, who is now one of the heads of Def Jam, told him to go #### himself. {That guy] isn’t in the industry any more.”

Nowadays, more and more queer artists are riding the crest of the wave, from Sam Smith (see p40) to Hayley Kiyoko, and Mika vouches that the business has become a far more accepting place wherever you sit on the undulating spectrum of sexuality. “It’s less of a thing,” he says. “It is still complicated but I think it’s more joyful. The way people approach sexuality is more joyful.”

Setting seemingly unreachable relationship goals for those of us who are perennially single, Mika has been with his long-term partner for 13 years, and they share golden retrievers Melachi and Amira, “The names mean queen and princess in Arabic, which is as camp as it can possibly get.”

Talking about his partner, Mika continues:

“He is a cameraman and documentary maker. He’s just spent 18 months with a group of 18-year-old illegal Afghan refugees in Athens, following them as they cross the border, going into Serbia to try to get across Europe. I haven’t written any songs about him on the album but he’s very constructively critical and engaged with what I do.”

Mika hints that the secret to their longevity is being able to spend time apart.

“You don’t end up arguing about stuff where you’re just looking for an argument, ‘Where did you put my t-shirt?’ Proximity does breed contempt.”

 

HAVING already ticked quite a few boxes over the course of his career, Mika says there are still a few items on his to-do list such as fi nally having his idol Rufus Wainwright swing by to see one of his shows.

“Rufus has been such a formative artist for most LGBTQ songwriters because he wrote about sexuality, he wrote about love, and he wrote about desire. “There is a tenderness there that is so connected to a gay artist that is insanely important. Rufus keeps saying he’ll show up [to a gig]. He used to almost show up and then not, but it doesn’t matter, I never want to meet someone who’s a hero. I don’t want to know if he takes soda with his gin or vodka, if he eat peanuts or is vegan. He has given me enough.”

More pressingly, Mika needs to fi nd appropriate storage space for a shoe collection that would put most of the world’s greatest divas to shame.

“I probably have one of the largest collections of male shoes in the world, by accident,” he boasts. “I called Christian Louboutin to make me shoes for my shows and [his] men’s shoes didn’t exist at the time, the men’s sneaker didn’t exist.

“So he developed it on my foot, which means every single copy of Christian Louboutin, even the prototypes, are designed for me to dance in.”

Well, if you’re looking to donate a few pairs, Mika, I’m a size 10, a small 10…

 

As the clock ticks down to my departure time, Mika’s adorable nephew resurfaces with a cake, made entirely of sweets, from his recent birthday celebration, the perfect sendoff to a sugar-high of a day. Even better, I didn’t have to balance the treats on my head on this occasion.

 

My Name isMichael Holbrook is out now

 

 

[Kumazzz]

Unfortunately I couldn't get PDF-file of Mika cover version.

 

 

Image files

Spoiler

 

p.9

 

p.11

 

p.37

 

p.70

 

p.71

 

p.72

 

p.73

 

p.74

 

p.75

 

p.76

 

 

[TTel20]

Received the magazibne yesterday, really nice cover

[Kumazzz]

without watermarks

https://socialitelife.com/red-carpet-recap

 

 

[carafon]

On 10/10/2019 at 1:09 PM, mellody said:

 

That's possible - but "Ready To Call This Love" and "Stay High"? I'm still considering whether to believe that he just said this because he wants to sound more available to the readers (or other reasons), or to rethink my interpretation of some songs. For now it's the former, as I don't have enough time for the latter.

 I wonder if "Stay high" could be about his father loosing his job and starting a new life out of nothing

Or maybe something against the music industry ?

 

On 10/10/2019 at 4:19 PM, Just_Me said:

 

I can't think of anything on the album that his brother would object to besides talking about Paloma's accident. That must be what he's talking about right?

 

Probably  ,and in a French radio interview he said that his sibblings didn't understand the fact that he made his mother singing

(btw Joannie asked all of them to leave during the registration because they didn't understand the whole thing)