Mika in Q Magazine - June 2007

[FREDDIESDOUBLE]

Hes way way better than SS .. my opinion

[Sou]

Thank you so much for your efforts!!!!

 

But erm...I couldn't read a thing, the text is itsy bitsy Would it be a hassle to upload larger versions of the scans?

 

Thanks!!!!!

[Zahara]

Thank you so much for your efforts!!!!

 

But erm...I couldn't read a thing, the text is itsy bitsy Would it be a hassle to upload larger versions of the scans?

 

Thanks!!!!!

 

*has the same problem*

[Ms.Mewissa<33]

oooooohh...its new! its new!!

thank you very much

[Kriszti]

I can't say enough thank you to u!!!!

[JUlie]

What I shall do is copy the interview on these pages....If that helps:thumb_yello:

[Sou]

What I shall do is copy the interview on these pages....If that helps:thumb_yello:

 

As in, retyping it?!!!

[JUlie]

Good grief, no. Although if it comes to it then yes I would, I don't want to let you all down. No, what I am trying to do is enlarge the words then copy onto here....fingers crossed:blush-anim-cl:

[Gatagordinha]

Good grief, no. Although if it comes to it then yes I would, I don't want to let you all down. No, what I am trying to do is enlarge the words then copy onto here....fingers crossed:blush-anim-cl:

 

Good luck with enlarging it Julie - if for any reason you can't do it, I offer to help you transcribe it, as I could read it fairly easily (maybe we could do a page each!).

Me old eyes can't be that bad after all:naughty:

[hotdlp]

Must. Buy. Q. Magazine...how much is it? oh either way i'm still buying it

[FREDDIESDOUBLE]

Must. Buy. Q. Magazine...how much is it? oh either way i'm still buying it

 

3.80 ish?

[sunshine931]

good article, thx for posting ! I managed to read it, if you squint your eyes very hard you can do it !

[JUlie]

Please find the hand-typed first part of the above article. If there are any spelling errors I do apolgise but I have been typing for a while and I can no longer feel my fingers. Part two will follow shortly:

 

Pop’s most flamboyant new star lives in a fantasy world. No wonder Mika wants to escape: his childhood was full of war and nervous breakdowns.

 

Amid the hustle, bustle and Barbour jackets of Sanremo, Mika’s chauffered car slows to a standstill in the mother of all traffic jams. And so he sits, waits and occasionally snoozes. Halfway through a UK tour, Britain’s newest pop superstar has been spirited wth some urgency to this pretty coastal town in the northwest of Italy to be the special guest on the final night of the country’s biggest all-singing talent show. "I’m just before they announce the winner", he says, disbelievingly. "Millions will be watching. Millions." Festival di Sanremo is an Italian TV institution. On screen for more than 50 years, it has been respoonsible for bringing the likes of Bobby Solo (1967) and I Pooh (1990) to national - if not international - prominence. Much of Italy appears to have descendede upon the town tonight, with people either paying up to 3000 euros to be a part of the studio audience, or to throng the streets outside in the hope of glimpsing TV celebrities.

Presently, the limo arrives at the venue and Mika takes the stage in a pair of shiny white Dolce & Gabbana trousers and fake Converse trainers for a run-through of hit singe Grace Kelly (which he will eventually perform live at well past midnight). Having already spent five weeks at Number 1 in the UK earlierin the year, the song is now racing up the charts worldwide. It is number 1 in Russia, Norway and Hungary, and currently occupies the top spot here in Italy, hence his last-mnute addition to the show whose previous guests have included Elton John and venerable Gallic crooner Charles Aznavour.

 

Soundcheck over, plaudits rain down on him from the producton crew, each demanding snapshots and handshakes. He blinks back the heavily accented praise like a rabbit in the headlights, as if only just now beinning to realise the scope of his rapidly expanding fame. Thus, unnerved he will spend much of the evening tense and preoccupied, repeatedly gnawing on a thumbnail.

 

"It’s all becoming rather alarming", he says in a stairwell afterwards, his management team decideing whether or not to give into his wishes and drive him an hour west to his Cannes hotel room for a much-desired 15-minute power nap. "I often think it’s best not to dwell on it, because if I do consider what’s happened to my life recently, well..."

 

He shakes his head, bewildered.

 

In the few short months since the release of his debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, the man born Michael Holbrook Penniman has become one of the most talked about figures in British music. A charismatic, larger-than-life pop star in the grand tradition of Freddie Mercury, Elton John and George Michael, he has polarised opinion like few other artists in recent memory. "Why don’t you like me?" he pleaded in Grace Kelly. "Love, love, love me!" he urges in the follow-up single Love Today.

 

The 400,000 people who have bought Life In Cartoon Motion clearly do, as does Queen guitarist Brian May, of all people, whose website is full of Mika-related praise ("I like brave innovators," wrote May). But his detractors are equally vocal, pegging the singer as irritating, kitsch and overbearingly needy. The Guardian memorable compared listening to his album to "being held at gunpoint by Bonnie Langford".

 

"Good Lord, what a ****er!" was May’s unsolicited retort to the review: Mika’s own response is somewhat more philosophical.

 

"(The criticism) is only happening because I’ve connected commercially," he states, sitting cross-legged on a chair in his cramped TV dressing room, the schlep to Cannes having been deemed an indulgence too far. "A few months ago, when I was still a cult act, everyone was supportive. But mainstream success changes that, and you know what? That’s fine. The reasons behind my writing music are far too instinctive and personal to have anyone’s analysis of me matter very much."

 

He gets up to fetch himself a bottle of water, his body extending gradually untill it reaches its full height of 6’4". Up close, he is very thin, his pre-Raphaelite curls framing a pair of cheekbones so pronounced that the fashion label Paul Smith recently sought his services to model their new season. He sits down again, and the thumbnail comes in for more gnawing. It’s an image, perhaps tellingly, redolent of a baby sucking its thumb for comfort.

 

"Being Number 1 in the pop charts has suddenly given everyone the right to have an opinion of me and to spread all kinds of stories," he says. It was recently announced, for example, that he was to support Take That this summer on tour, only to pull out when he decided that he was too successful to support anyone. "All bollocks! You know, sometimes I just want to bite people, I really do. Just like Sylvia Plath did to Ted Hughes, I want to go up to certain people and take a big chunk out their cheeks."

 

Mika is the perfect modern pop star, and he comes with a backstory Hollywood would reject on the grounds of unbelievability. He was born in Beirut in 1983 to an American banker father and Lebanese mother. Within a year, the family - which would ultimately swell to five children: three daughters, two sons, Mika the middle child - were forced to flee the country at the outbreak of civil war. They were loaded onto a boat with other refugees and shipped to Cyprus, until his father managed to secure himself a new position in Paris. He doesn’t remember the details of the boat trip, though he was vaguely aware of "certain hardships" in his early life.

 

"But my parents hid them all from us," he says. "We lived in a beautiful apartment, where, if I may say, we were typically Lebanese - loud, flamboyant, creative - and so in many ways my childhood was a charmed existence."

 

But it wouldn’t last. When Mika was six, his father was sent on a business trip to Kuwait on what turned out be the night that Iraqi troops invaded the country, sparking the first Gulf War. "He had to take cover in the American Embassy," says the singer. "Outside, there were snipers ready to shoot. He was stuck there, effectively hostage, for six months."

 

When it was finally safe to leave, at the war’s bloody conclusion, the family decided on a fresh start. They moved to London’s moneyed South Kensington area where Mika enrolled in to the local French state school, Lycee Francais Charles de Gaulle. It would prove the undoing of him.

[avoca]

ohhhh , thanks julieeeee.... *hugs*

[JUlie]

You are most welcome. It wasn't even a chore as it was for the Mika Fan Club. I'm just really glad you appreciate it. Part two will come tomorrow, if that is ok.

[avoca]

it's indeed! thx again for taking this task!

[violet_sky]

Thanks a LOT, JUlie!!

 

*waiting for part2 and insisting in Mika being entitled to do with his nails whatever he desires...*

[JUlie]

Here follows the final part of the interview. Again, if there are any errors I do apologise. Enjoy!

 

"I’d always had my own way of expressing myself," he admits, recalling the bright red trousers he loved to wear, irrespective of the mockery they caused from his fellow pupils, "and I’d long accepted that I’d never be coll with the other kids. But when I felt that the teachers were turning against me as well, I became ever more of an outcast."

 

He began to skip classes, then played truant for days on end. Despite his pleas, his parents refused to remove him permanently. Only when he took an extended vow of silence at the age of 13, an episode he how descirbes as a "mini breakdown", did his mother take the problem seriously. She pulled him out of the school, allowing him to spend his days at the park and nearby museums. But she was adamant that he continued to recieve at least some kind of instruction, and so she employede the services of a Russian music teacher to nurture his growing love of song.

 

Six months laterm and now attending a "fabulous little prep school" he refuses to name on the gorunds of privacy, he appeared in the chorus line of Strauss’s The Woman Without A Shadow at London’s Royal Opera House ("Ah, my first gig," he sighs). He began singing jingles for £45 a pop for British Airways, BBC cooking shows and milk commercials. His blossoming career was the perfect subsitute for more typical adolescent activitives, such as making friends and developing a social circle. Relieved to find something in which he excelled, Mika quickly developed a searing ambition to match his growing self-confidence. He busied himself writing his own songs, something he’s characteristically immodest about.

 

"Did I think my stuff was good?" he beams, "I thought it was great."At the age of 15, Mika flew to Conneticut for a family wedding. While there, he gate-crashed a party thrown by the neighbour of the people with whom he was staying. The neighbour was Bob Jamiesonk, then head of RCA Records. In front of an audience that included Diana Ross, Mika sang five of his own songs. Jamieson’s response? "Kid, you certainly got balls."

 

Back in London, his "balls"continued to develop. He completed hsi first official demo - a piano-led mood-piece called Over My Shoulder, which has reappeared as the hidden track on Life In Cartoon Motion. He sent the track to every A&R department in town, convinced he was about to be discovered. No one was interested.

 

Undaunted, he continued bugging record company executives over the next few years, with limited success. He met Simon Cowell, who concluded that his voice had potential, but not his songs. "I couldn’t take him seriously," Mika says now, "Just over his shoulder was a gold disc for his work on the Teletubbies. I mean, please!" Another thought he could be moulded into the new Craig David, an episode he would later address in Grace Kelly: "Should I bend over/Should I look older/Just to be put on your shelf".

 

His saviour finally arrived in late 2005 in the shape of Tommy Mottola, the American music mogul who discovered, and later married, Mariah Carey. Impressed by his songs and by his drive, Mottola signed the singer to Casablanca Records (a "homage" to the legendarily debauched ’70s disco label, home of Donna Summer and The Village People). Mika had found somebody whose vision matched his own.

 

"In greatness," Mottola says, "he could achieve what Bowie or Robbie or Elton has achieved. He’s n the league of those gentlemen.

 

Allowed full creative freedom - albeit on a collaborative basis - he was dispatched to Los Angeles to work with songwriter Jodi Marr (Geri Halliwell, Ricky Martin) and producer Greg Wells (Paris Hilton, Celine Dion) on his debut album. He also brought along his 27-year-old artist sister Yesmine to help him create the cartoon characters that would appear on the allbum sleeve and continue to thrive inside his head.

 

"See, this isn’t just music for me," he explains, "but rather the creation of a whole world, my very own Alice in Wonderland."

 

So, an escapist fantasy made real? "No!" comes the instant reply. "Bollywood is escapism, hip hop videos are escapism. I’m not trying to separate myself from reality. I’m merely making my reality more bearable by putting my own colourful lens on it. It’s working rather well, wouldn’t you say?"

 

Back in Sanremo, Mika’s other sister, Paloma, 24, a tall, elegant woman with her brother’s eyes and a mane of jet black hair, is going through a rack of Dolce & Gabbana outfits for tonight’s show. Earlier, she was introduced to me as his unofficial manager. She prefers "helper".

 

"He likes to have his family around," she says in her hushed tones. "And that’s why I’m here. To make sure he’s happy."

 

"Happy" isn’t quite the word to describe Mika tonight. He has had a day of European press, and all the usual questions are beginning to irritate him: about his similarities with Scissor Sistorsm and his presumed infatuation with Freddie Mercury ("Infatutation? Hardly! I only know a handful of Queen songs") And then there’sw the continued speculation over his sexuality, which he bluntly refuses to clear up. Despite appearances that suggest the contrary, Mika is acutally a private man. And he wants it kept that way.

 

"Look, there’s no tabloid inches on my heels," he says, clutching the arm of the chair. "I’ve not got to where I hope to remain for the next 25 years by relying on scandal. I happen to believe that there is dignity and honour in not layiing every part of yourself out on the table. I mean, who wants to be Jade ****ing Goody?"

 

A sniff, a shake of the head, a dry laugh. "I don’t".

[violet_sky]

Thanks again! I didn't know that 'over my shoulder' was the first demo. (as it is not the most typical piece for the whole LICM record...)

[Mikamyloveexx]

...For sacrificing your time to share with us this interesting article!

[avoca]

thanks so much again, julie! it was a cool article! I didn't know paloma was younger and yasmine was older than him: they look the opposite to me, my bad.. I mean maybe cause of yasmine's angelic appearance: she looks younger that she is.. not that she's old anyway

[Monshi]

thank you thank you thank you

[Mika_forever]

I love you for the article Julie!!! Your the best:thumb_yello:

[FREDDIESDOUBLE]

Thanks Julie , great information and reading:thumb_yello:

[Mag]

Thanks for sharing:flowers2: