Mika in French Press and Other Media - 2023

[mellody]

1 hour ago, CharlotteL said:

It's just Mikamaths!!

 

Mikamaths, I like that.  And generally I agree with you - but he IS consistent over years in telling at what age he started singing at the Royal Opera house - for years / over a decade it was 11, then it changed to 8 and that's what he keeps telling since. So while I agree that it's very easy to mix up years and ages and what happened exactly when... I can relate, because when I say something happened when I was 10, it could as well have been when I was 8 or 12 - with age the memories just get a bit blurred. So while I agree that this is an issue, in this case I think it's deliberate, for whatever reason.

 

35 minutes ago, lormare73 said:

Fortuné was born on March 1991 in Paris (Mika told Pif that he was born in Paris) so I think that they didn't move to London before that date.

I think that in this interview Mika talked about real facts but messed up the years. 

 

Good point, I hadn't thought of his siblings. Ugh, but imagine, if they had to flee Paris in 1991, with a newborn baby, running from the people they owed money...  And if Mika's Dad was stuck in Kuwait and all those problems occured while Joannie was pregnant, that would give an even more heartbreaking view on the whole story.  But maybe it's not true that Fortuné was born in Paris, or they were back in Paris at that time for some reason - or just Joannie was, she might have known some midwife there whom she trusted ... many options, but anyway, it's a hint, but not proof that they only moved to London after that.

 

I remember in some interview Mika said he was 6 when they had to flee from Paris. Which would be somewhere in between 1987 and 1991. So yeah, maybe the truth is somewhere in between, and Mika's Dad was in Paris for a while after being stuck in the war. But @QueenBigFat that's a good point about Le Divan, like you say that one is very honest and unfiltered, I think I have to watch that again, it has been a while.

[QueenBigFat]

11 minutes ago, mellody said:I think I have to watch that again, it has been a while.

Prepare yourself. Those eyes will kill you.

[CharlotteL]

7 minutes ago, mellody said:

but he IS consistent over years in telling at what age he started singing at the Royal Opera house - for years / over a decade it was 11, then it changed to 8 and that's what he keeps telling since.

Ahh I see! I never noticed that because ofc I only discovered him last year and watched all the interviews I came across in a mixed order so for me it seemed completely random.

I mean maybe he realized at some point or other people pointed it out to him because that same questions gets asked again and again so he corrected himself. But it is odd!

A reason why it might have been messier in this interview than some others though is that they asked for the dates (as in year) and not what age he was.

[QueenBigFat]

It's certainly true about early memories confusing time frames and trauma often confusing victims but he also has the family as historian —- actually his mother, who was an adult, however overwhelmed and traumatized, and her memory can be assumed to be clearer…so I don't know what conclusions can be drawn…

Edited October 7, 2023 by QueenBigFat

[lormare73]

26 minutes ago, mellody said:

I remember in some interview Mika said he was 6 when they had to flee from Paris. Which would be somewhere in between 1987 and 1991.

 

He said in lots of interviews that his father was stuck in the embassy when Saddam invaded Kuwait and this happened on 2 August 1990, that's a fact. Before that invasion there wasn't any issue in Kuwait that could stuck his father overthere. 

Moreover he said that in Paris he went to a little private school, so if he attended one or two years of primary school, he should be at least 7 or 8 when they move. 

I think it's more likely that he messes up dates and ages rather than the reason why his father was stuck in Kuwait. So I think that they moved to London in 91 or 92. 

[mellody]

1 hour ago, lormare73 said:

Moreover he said that in Paris he went to a little private school,

 

Don't children start "maternity school" there at the age of 3 or so? I mean, I agree with you that it sounds more likely that they only moved to London in the '90s, but while I could understand why he was telling something wrong at the beginning of his career and then corrected it, it absolutely doesn't make sense to me the other way round.  Like I said, it doesn't seem like a random mixup of ages and dates to me, he keeps saying now that he started singing at the Royal Opera at the age of 8.

[lormare73]

5 minutes ago, mellody said:

 

Don't children start "maternity school" there at the age of 3 or so? I mean, I agree with you that it sounds more likely that they only moved to London in the '90s, but while I could understand why he was telling something wrong at the beginning of his career and then corrected it, it absolutely doesn't make sense to me the other way round.

 

I think that in this interview he simply didn't care too much about the correct years. He had his aneddoctes to tell and he put them a bit casually.

In 1987 he was 4. I don't think he could remember so much of that period of time.

I noticed that in lots of interviews he has troubles to collocate the facts in the right time (probably because of his dyslexia), about various arguments not only the move to London. So I think that sometimes he tells his facts without being too careful about the right collocation in time. 

[mellody]

3 hours ago, QueenBigFat said:

Sorry if you already discussed this resource re: these contradictions but in the Last Party thread Michelle (HoldingYourDrink) shared this link to an early-ish Le divan interview where Mika told his story in what seemed to be a very genuine (very real, veryvery connected with the pain, not yet edited) way….It's an hour long and tortured and so raw but because of those things I wonder if the dates and events may be closer to the truth you seek here? (Which I cannot address because I did not retain such specifics from it.)

 

 

So MO Fogiel says Mika was 11 when he stopped talking, and Mika corrects him that it was a little earlier. And he also says that his Dad got stuck in the US Embassy in Kuwait during the FIRST Golf war. But he also says that he was sleepwalking when they lived in Paris. That this started when he was "really young", but also that he told the caretaker a lot of weird things and she thought he was a maniac and was scared of him - I guess of a 3yo you wouldn't think that. And then, also MO Fogiel said that Mika's career at the Royal Opera House was from age 11-15. I've only watched the first 30 minutes now, so idk if later he says more about these things, but from what I heard now, it doesn't make things any clearer because it's MO Fogiel who talks about how old Mika was for certain events in his life, that's the filtered version which Mika also kept telling in interviews back then. Mika just replies about his memories, not about how old he was.

 

38 minutes ago, lormare73 said:

 

I think that in this interview he simply didn't care too much about the correct years. He had his aneddoctes to tell and he put them a bit casually.

In 1987 he was 4. I don't think he could remember so much of that period of time.

I noticed that in lots of interviews he has troubles to collocate the facts in the right time (probably because of his dyslexia), about various arguments not only the move to London. So I think that sometimes he tells his facts without being too careful about the right collocation in time. 

 

If he said a different age in every interview, or kept changing between 8 and 11, I'd agree with you. Anyway, maybe the point is that he's sure for some reason that it was the first Golf War and never asked or looked it up, and so at some point, maybe when someone told him that the first Golf War ended 1988, he started to think that he must have been 8 and not 11 when he started singing opera in London. I don't know if that makes much sense, but at least it's what makes most sense to me now at 2am, after thinking about this several times and far too long today.  I guess it doesn't really matter if he was 8 or 11 or anything in between. But you know, yesterday I was working at a literary event and I started to think maybe I should write a book about Mika, and that's probably why I got so obsessed with this today - I don't even need to start thinking about writing a book if I don't even know such basic facts for sure.   Maybe that's why Mika gave up writing his book - he is just too complex and too multidimensional to be put between two pieces of cardboard.  

[QueenBigFat]

1 minute ago, mellody said:

I've only watched the first 30 minutes now, so idk if later he says more about these things, but from what I heard now, it doesn't make things any clearer

The interview is in chronological order for the most part.

 

3 minutes ago, mellody said:

between. But you know, yesterday I was working at a literary event and I started to think maybe I should write a book about Mika, and that's probably why I got so obsessed with this today

Yes please! Not two weeks ago I was trying to find out if there were a book. If you do, please let me know if I can help. At the very least I can share what I learned dealing with publishers and agents.Although if you were at a literary event I guess you already know, maybe from the other side.

[mellody]

2 minutes ago, QueenBigFat said:

Although if you were at a literary event I guess you already know, maybe from the other side.

 

No, I work as a security for concerts and events, so no connections whatsoever to the literary scene. I only love writing (and reading). And putting things in order, which sometimes is impossible with Mika  - and that's part of his charm.  But yes, if I ever do write a book about him, I'll be happy to take your advice.

 

From what I remember, there once was a French book about Mika, not an official one and it was ages ago, maybe 2010 or so, I've never read it. Mika once signed a contract for writing a book himself, in Italian, and he read a chapter of it at some event in Italy - but then it got postponed more and more and in the end never happened. So no, there isn't really a book about Mika.

[QueenBigFat]

6 minutes ago, mellody said:

I only love writing (and reading)

Writing a book can kill your love of writing faster than  anything I know. No, wait. That’s publishing. Publishers.

[mellody]

1 minute ago, QueenBigFat said:

Writing a book can kill your love of writing faster than  anything I know. No, wait. That’s publishing. Publishers.

 

Haha, I don't doubt that. I loved drawing and painting when I was a kid/teen, until I picked art as an advance course at school for the last 2 school years. Haven't been drawing or painting much since.  Anyway, getting a bit OT here, guess I'm better off to bed now.

[lormare73]

6 hours ago, mellody said:

when someone told him that the first Golf War ended 1988,

 

I'm a bit confused. The first Gulf war started on the 2nd August of 1990 with Kuwait invasion by Saddam Hussein, the second Gulf war started on 2003. And these are certain dates. Why someone should say so? 

 

Edit: Maybe I've understood. The war in 1980-88 was between Iran and Iraq and it's also called Gulf war. But I found on several sites that when you refer to first Gulf war you talk about the Kuwait invasion by Iraq, while the second Gulf war started in 2003 between Usa and Iraq. 

I'm pretty sure that when Mika says First Gulf war he refers to the one involving Kuwait, otherwise why his father would have been stuck in Kuwait American embassy if Kuwait wasn't involved in the Iran Iraq conflict?

Edited October 8, 2023 by lormare73

[carafon]

It also caught my attention that Mika was only 4 in 1987 . I've always understood that he was bullied at the age of 8 at the " Charles De Gaulle" school at the very beginning of his stay in London 

He also said before  that the family had to move from Paris after  his father came back from  Koweit where he was stuck because of the beginning of the first gulf war .

Remember that he said that his father was sent to Koweit to close an agency and was surprised by the begining of the invasion .

If we consider the first gulf war 1980/1988 Mika was not born at the beginning . So I realy think that he refers to the 1990 war .

Also if you look at this picture , there is a french 1988 tax sticker at the right top car's window 

At the second one Mika seems older than in the first one , and unless they are just visiting they were still in Paris.

 The pictures are from "le divan" and were given by Jasmine who I'd trust more than Mika about dates .......

Btw I don't remember if there were any dates on the pictures of the US ambassy . It would solve the question then ....

He said several times that his dyslexia makes him being a bad calculator , that's probably the reason why. And I'm quite sure that the people who recorded it didn't check if it was right

Btw , in another recent French interview he said that the "Charles de gaulle lycée" was in Paris........just some mistakes because he has a very full life imo. Or he just don't give any importance to calendars , dates and everything related to time  ( explaining all the Mikasoon events .... )

The lenght of his father's "kidnaping" is also a bit different from one interview to another (from 6 to 9 if I remember correctly) . So it's very probable that they moved sometimes in 1991 . 

Btw I think the interview with the more details about the war is a Canadian one back in 2017 called 125 Marie Anne or something like that 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by carafon

[Paoletta]

beautiful family 

[dcdeb]

Ah, "MIKAMATHS". I love it! We can list that right alongside "mikasoon," I think!

 

Yes, we can always count on these interviews to keep us on our toes, as far as Mika's history goes. There's always lots of room for speculation.

 

Anyhow, I'm just going to quote from Mika's Wikipedia page -- which, I admit, I contribute to, but I feel it's pretty accurate. Or as accurate as it can be.

 

"In 1990 Mika's father went on a business trip to Kuwait and became trapped in the U.S. embassy for seven months when the Gulf War broke out. When the elder Penniman returned home, he had to take a new job, which meant a move to London.^[24]

The family moved to London when Mika was 9 years old. There, he attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, where he experienced severe bullying and had problems with dyslexia. In response to these experiences Mika was home-schooled by his mother and trained in music by Alla Ardakov (Ablaberdyeva), a Russian opera professional. He also studied with the Royal Opera in London and made his stage debut as a chorus member in Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten at the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden.^[22] He continued as a boy soprano with the Royal Opera and, at 15, he showcased his vocal range in a 1998 production of The Pilgrim's Progress by Vaughan Williams.^[25]"

 

The article referenced (24) is this one, from Time magazine, which I feel is a pretty trustworthy source.

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20070210061307/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1581479,00.html

 

I do think, based on everything else, that Mika was actually not quite 9 when they moved to London. If they moved early in '92, for example, a lot of people might say he was 9 without taking his birth date into account. (1992 - 1983 = 9)

 

I think there are some things you can't dispute, though, because they are a matter of public record, like Mika's first appearance with the Royal Opera, which you can see occurred in late 1992, when he would have been 9:

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/production.aspx?production=3874&row=1

and the recording of the Pilgrim's Progress in 1998, when he would have been 15.

 

 I also wanted to mention that I think Americans always refer to the 1990 war as "The Gulf War" sort of ignoring anything that might have come before it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

 

Maybe because our military was involved with it. Whenever Mika refers to the Gulf War, I have always understood him to mean this event. (When the Iraq War started in 2003, people started to refer to the 1990 war as "the first Gulf War". )

 

In any case, I really enjoyed his recap of his life so far -- and I think the "quickfire" nature of the questioning was great. It led him to make some interesting choices as to what his primary memories were for various years. Like he lumped 2010 in with 2009, not mentioning his sister's accident in 2010 (which we're coming up on the 13th anniversary of in a few days, believe it or not). And how he singled out 2016 as the year he became obsessed with getting fit and protein shakes -- whereas I remember 2016 as the year Casa Mika started, as Karin said, and also as the year of the big Bercy show that led to his Mika Loves Paris DVD. Like I said, it was interesting to learn what he associated with those years. Always fun to learn something new about him, for sure!

 

 

 

 

[mellody]

1 hour ago, dcdeb said:

I think there are some things you can't dispute, though, because they are a matter of public record, like Mika's first appearance with the Royal Opera, which you can see occurred in late 1992, when he would have been 9:

https://www.rohcollections.org.uk/production.aspx?production=3874&row=1

 

Thank you, I didn't know about this link. So that's interesting, it means he's probably right about starting to sing with them when he was 8, if you count in a few months of rehearsals before the actual shows. I assume he might have been part of the "Royal Opera Chorus". The piece was in German and I don't think that he had any knowledge of the German language before this, so he must have spent some time on rehearsing.

 

1 hour ago, dcdeb said:

 I also wanted to mention that I think Americans always refer to the 1990 war as "The Gulf War" sort of ignoring anything that might have come before it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War

 

 

Ah, so that one got lost in translation for me, because on German Wikipedia this is referred to as the second Gulf War, and the first one would be the 1980-88 one: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erster_Golfkrieg . I can see though that in the English as well as in the French articles it's different.

 

So the Gulf War started in August 1990, shortly before Mika turned 7, which makes sense for everything we know about his childhood in Paris. They probably left Paris in 1991, and then all the events in London - that they were living in a B&B, school, abusive teacher, singing lessons and going to the park - must have happened within about a year, maybe one and a half. The way he described it, it always sounded like it was several years... but that's the relativity of time, in a new environment, without all the things you knew and loved from your past life, with a teacher who makes your life hell, it probably seemed like years to him.

 

Anyway, this can't be right then:

1 hour ago, dcdeb said:

The family moved to London when Mika was 9 years old

but if it's from an article in 2007, that was when Mika still said he was 11 when he started singing at the ROH. I guess he just kept to that story until either someone from his family told him it was earlier and/or, as I said in an earlier post, because he wanted to give his Mum credit for training him as a child. So altogether the explanation for these different stories seem to be a mix of Mikamaths and maybe also him only acknowledging after years the role his Mum played in his career. 

[SusanT]

When it was mentioned that Mika seems to mix up dates at times, I was reminded of an exchange in this 2013 interview on Italian TV where he had trouble identifying the month when he started learning Italian. He laughed it off saying he was dyslexic (from 7.35).

 

 

 

 

I watched the Le Divan video for the first time yesterday and realized that the interviewer was attributing Mika's sleepwalking as a child to the bullying he experienced. Was Mika  bullied in France too or was the man unaware that Lycèe Charles de Gaulle is actually in London?

 

Edited October 9, 2023 by SusanT

[Kumazzz]

 

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[mellody]

The Riffx interview is finally here

Edit: It's not yet the one with questions by fans, they wrote on Twitter that that one will come later and that they made some more content. 

 

Anyway, I love this one, it brings across that he loves the concerts just as much as we do.

[Anna Ko Kolkowska]

1 hour ago, mellody said:

Edit: It's not yet the one with questions by fans, they wrote on Twitter that that one will come later and that they made some more content. 

Oh, I thought it was with questions asked by fans. And I didn't see them under the first Tweet. I was surprised seeing those short questions. SO let's wait for another video.

[crazyaboutmika]

6 hours ago, Anna Ko Kolkowska said:

Oh, I thought it was with questions asked by fans. And I didn't see them under the first Tweet. I was surprised seeing those short questions. SO let's wait for another video.

I was confused too. But I love his answers

[crazyaboutmika]

7 hours ago, mellody said:

The Riffx interview is finally here

Edit: It's not yet the one with questions by fans, they wrote on Twitter that that one will come later and that they made some more content. 

 

Anyway, I love this one, it brings across that he loves the concerts just as much as we do.

Yes

[Kumazzz]

L'AGENDA SPECTACLES

 

Could anyone please translate what Mika says ? Thank you.

 

 

[mellody]

4 hours ago, Kumazzz said:

L'AGENDA SPECTACLES

 

Could anyone please translate what Mika says ? Thank you.

 

 

 

He's talking about the tour and says it's "a completely new show, a completely new concept. Prepare yourselves for extremely intense evenings."