И английские чтения. Длиииинное и своеобразное интервью. Название меня сразило: Singer Mika
Там есть глубокомысленные скобочки: Childlike but not childish. (Mika is smart; he knows the difference.), про маму, про папу, про музыку, про отношения и вообще про все. Словом, "If you know how to get laid you can do an interview, sadly I do more interviews than I get laid". Pauvre chéri!
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Singer Mika
02 February 2010
By Catherine Deveney
There is, about the singer Mika, a quirky, fanciful quality, like a character in a fairytale or nursery rhyme.
Chestnut curls peek-a-booing from his woollen hat… a long, rangy frame that even at 25 seems somehow coltish… a small stuffed teddybear on a ribbon of leather round his neck. You look at Mika and wonder if Little Red Riding Hood – or actually the Big Bad Wolf, because there's always a sense of danger in a fairy tale – will suddenly leap from the closet of the hotel room where we're sitting. He's a man child, the-toy-in-the-lime-green-plimsolls, with a lime-green scarf to match. Childlike but not childish. (Mika is smart; he knows the difference.)
Two chairs. A table with a tea tray. He moves from standing to sitting, fiddles with his necklace and scarf. There are few things more irritating than self-conscious attempts to be "different", and few more interesting than someone who simply is. There is something of a force of nature about the singer who topped the charts with Grace Kelly: a sheer verve but also a sense of curiosity, as if he's placing everything around him under a microscope. It is not that he doesn't have conversational boundaries. (He is notoriously unhappy about being asked to label his sexuality, for instance.) But his instinct is to respond rather than retreat to safety. He once called himself the Marmite artist – people loved him or hated him – but when I mention that, he says intently, "Do you think I still am?" He feels that maybe he's finding his place more. When I say his music is mood-altering, he instantly says, "Why?" though that's exactly what he wants it to be. He perches on the edge of the table beside the tea tray. "I'll serve you," he says.
On the surface, people who engage so instinctively hand over their power. Yet they actually retain a much greater one: a solidity that comes from being at ease with themselves. Mika is what he is. But it's also very easy to see what he was: the child who felt like an outsider and created his own fantasy world in his living room. "I was really happy with my own world, happy with my music and rearranging my mother's furniture into what I would consider a movie set. Then I'd dance around like a little Billy Eliot and my mother would cry because she didn't know how to handle me." She actually cried? "She thought a boy like this either ends up a total f***-up and indulges in his eccentricities or he becomes something that he can do really well with. She told me I would either end up in jail or be successful. So she decided the way to handle me was to enforce the most rigid discipline on me and the most gruelling form of training."
That discipline was music which always affected him deeply. Even now he is not a casual iPod-user. "I can't just listen to music walking down the street unless I have a reason to. I can't just listen to music as a piece of junk in the background. It drives me insane.
"I see colours and feel really happy or sad depending on what I'm listening to. I think my family always knew I would be a musician because of the way I responded to music." As a child he would make tapes and categorise them by emotion: happy, sad, angry. His taste was catholic: Tino Rossi… Edith Piaf… flamenco… classical. "I was very anti-snobbery even at that age. I listened to everything. I was fascinated by melody more than anything. I am a whore for melody."
In January 2007, industry experts named Mika as the artist they predicted would encapsulate the year's sound. Most of us said, who's Mika? But within a month his smash single, Grace Kelly, a sardonic swipe at an industry that had tried to mould him ("Why don't you like me, why don't you like me, without making me try?"), was everywhere. Since then his debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion and his recent follow up, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, have sold almost eight million copies worldwide and he has become one of the most instantly identifiable sounds of British pop. Nominated for Best Male Artist in this year's Brit Awards, he is about to embark on a major tour.
Dismissed by some as manufactured, Mika is actually a classically trained singer and musician - and it shows. ("All my teachers were Scottish or Russian," he says. "Good at smiling but f***ing tough! Because they care.") He mixes the fun and exuberance of commercial pop with string orchestras and gospel choirs and layers of percussion to produce a distinctive wall of sound. As a singer, he has a huge vocal range. One reviewer said his music was like being held at gunpoint by Bonnie Langford. Funny but a bit harsh. More flatteringly, his range and theatrical performances have earned him regular comparisons with the late Freddie Mercury.
Right now, over tea, he's reciting lyrics like poetry, about "Lady Jane, the river fish, who became the world's most wanted dish". The song was based on music by Schubert and a story by Goethe, and it encapsulates the fantasy world Mika has created since childhood.
His was, in many ways, a strange upbringing: basically happy, he says, but also marked by periods of sadness and fear. His mother was Lebanese and his businessman father was American, though his father was born in Jerusalem and never actually lived in his home country. One of five children, three girls and two boys, Mika was born Michael Penniman in Beirut but his parents moved to Paris and then to London. He has that rootlessness that tends to make people feel either insecure or liberated. Freedom is important to him but he also feels there is nowhere that he truly belongs.
It was not just his lack of national identity that marked him out. He was dyslexic but also picked on at school for his "otherness", which many of his contemporaries interpreted as effeminacy. But it was when his father was taken hostage for eight months in Kuwait as part of Saddam Hussein's human shield, at the start of the first Gulf War, that life became unpredictable and financially precarious. "It rocked everything. Shortly after, we lost everything, our apartment, our furniture, so that concept of complacency was never in my childhood whereas most kids don't understand that."
He has often said how much he likes entwining upbeat music with dark lyrics. Looking back, that awareness of superficial normality laced with underlying threat began in childhood. "Maybe that's why I became obsessed with fairy tales, because fairy tales were about danger and fear. That's why I love them. They are there to instruct you about death and instruct you as a child about why you should feel safe and why you should feel lucky. They all deal with gore and impending danger, and I find that really fascinating."
The threat to his father was very real to them all. "We saw it because we used to watch CNN. And we all had to sit around every evening and do the rosary a few times. My mother used to make us and oh God, that's why I hate the rosary!" They were devoutly Catholic then? "It wasn't devout; it was desperate. We thought he was going to die. My mother was pretty convinced." As an adult, the policies of the Catholic church infuriate him but he still loves and visits churches because they are a refuge from the outside world. He likes his home to be like that and refuses to have newspapers there.
When his father was released, the homecoming was far from euphoric. "He had a big beard and was very skinny and gaunt and none of us wanted to hang out with him because he looked too different," he admits. He was almost a stranger? "Yes. And we had resolved ourselves to the idea that he was in danger and might not come back so his homecoming was actually a very disturbing thing."
His father was always away a lot working, yet Mika never had any doubt that he supported everything his family did. But it was his mother who was - and remains - the creative influence in his life. What's she like? "She's tough and very talented. Quite eccentric, I think. Very bohemian. She's a designer so we grew up surrounded by textiles and dressmaking and painting and art." (Art is still very important to him and he works with his sister on illustrations.) "There is not a single thing I have done that my mother hasn't seen or heard." Then he adds, almost warningly, "That's not in a motherly way. My relationship with my mother is not cute." In fact, he says, most people are astonished by it. He recently allowed a music magazine editor to follow them round and he dreads to think what the result will be because people just don't get their relationship. "He said, 'Isn't this a problem? Can't you go out?' I said, 'No, I do go out.' And he said, 'What does she do?' I said, 'She doesn't talk to me', but then she talks to me." I'm not sure if I'm following this but then, by way of explanation, he says, "We're not like mother and son." So they're colleagues? "Kind of. We work together. It creates a strain when we suddenly have to be mother and son, and I hate that. Then she gets upset with me." So she wants to be mother and son? "Not really. But sometimes you have to feign…" He trails off, as if it's all inexplicable. Like Mother's Day, I tease. "Mother's Day is non-existent," he says flatly. However unusual, it sounds an interesting partnership. And entirely apt that it cannot be neatly boxed and labelled.
Mika is not A man who likes to be hemmed in. Even the way he conducts the interview is interesting. Normally, interviewer and interviewee are left alone. But occasionally, a PR sits in and it's usually the journalist who rails against that. Mika is the first celebrity I can remember actively asking to be left alone. Sometimes there is a kind of childish dependency from celebrities, used to having everything handled for them. He doesn't need protection?
"If you know how to get laid you can do an interview," he retorts and laughs. It's just a quip, but given his reputation for not talking about his sex life, I'm slightly surprised he opens that particular door. "Sadly I do more interviews than I get laid," he adds quickly.
A hint of shyness. Most of the time Mika maintains eye contact but occasionally it's disconcerting to find him gazing into infinity over your right shoulder while he talks. I want to ask him about being dubbed feminine. Was he? Or was that just his creative, flamboyant side being misunderstood? "I don't think I was feminine. There was a lot of homophobic abuse. I think it was my inability at team sports, my very loud mouth and the fact that I came from many places. It gives you a hard time, ostracises you in some ways, but in actual fact that enabled me to concentrate my energy into writing the music."
"I don't think I am camp either," he says. "But it doesn't bother me that people think I am." He has consistently been likened to people like Mercury and Marc Bolan. "Two of the best artists this country has ever had," he declares.
Maybe he likes the allure of sexual ambiguity? "Does my music talk about sexual identity and almost gender-bend that concept? Yes it does. One hundred per cent and I love that because there is a kind of freedom, sexual freedom, within my music. I am staunchly label-less and I fight for that which infuriates the gay community – although it infuriates them less than in the past because I'm almost considered on my own terms now. But I think I discuss sexuality more than any other artist who makes pop music. It's in my lyrics, my songs. Its in the way I sing, the personality I take on, the stories I tell, from Toyboy to Grace Kelly."
Yet he has never labelled himself. "No, because people don't really care." (Not sure that's true. Before the interview, I asked a teenage pop fan what she would most like to know about Mika. "Is he gay?" she said instantly.) "Have I said," he continues, "that I am completely sexually free? Yes. And that I have no stigmas and do not operate from a position of fear when it comes to labelling sexuality? Yes." So he could fall in love with any person…? "Yes," he interrupts. Regardless of their gender? "Of course." That sounds straightforward. "It is," he says. I think back to one interview where the writer said Mika was probably bisexual even if he hadn't realised. Only a hunch, but I think Mika might just have worked that out all by himself.
"I am terrible at relationships," he declares. But why? "Not because I'm selfish. I'm not. And not because I'm stingy. I'm dangerously generous." That's true. Didn't he once Twitter fans inviting them to a pub where he spent £25,000 on drinks? "It was fun," he grins. "My accountant didn't think so but I have this idea that you should live every day as if you are going to die tomorrow. Every single day." He's also known for spending lavishly on his tours. "What's the point," he demands, "in selling eight million albums if you don't do a great show and give your fans a theatrical experience so that they can step into a world as concrete and complete as the one in your albums and art work?"
So he's not selfish and not stingy – what is the barrier to relationships then? "You can't really have relationships if you are obsessed with what you do. Is that a good thing? Probably not. Can there be time in future to correct that? Probably, yes. But right now I am glad that I don't have the time." Hardly surprising. People inevitably have different priorities during different cycles of their lives, don't they? "Exactly. It's very much chapters and I don't think I am into that chapter yet. Maybe I'll never be. I imagine I won't. That's my suspicion. Does that bother me? No, I really don't give a shit. Because I can write a song." He sounds completely exultant.
Music is power. The one thing he can do. Success isn't crucial, he says. (He is thrilled by his Brit nomination but although once nominated for a Grammy, never wants one. Never, he repeats fiercely. But why? Too political, he thinks. The Brits are less of a machine.) But wasn't he driven to be successful, famously bombarding record producers? "I was driven to be total," he corrects. "I know that sounds completely like I was deluded but I was. I had delusions of grandeur and still have them. I believe I can still do what I am doing in ten years' time." He looks expectantly at me, as if waiting to be challenged. Well why not? He's only 25. But usually, he says, journalists write about him as if he's mad for saying that. And does he retain inner belief when they do?
"It doesn't drain my confidence because I know what I am doing. I constructed a second album that was purposely less commercial than my first because I had to contrast some of the sweetness with an added layer of darkness. Anyone who creates things that are seen as naïve or childish or sweet, there's always this underlying darkness. At least anything good." Like his song Lollipop, an apparently childlike ditty that actually warns about the dangers of love. It's horror writer Stephen King's favourite song of the last decade. "He gets it," Mika grins. "All the four-years-olds are going like this," he says, smiling and swaying, "but he said it was his favourite song. It's hysterical isn't it? I love it."
Because he has so far written about childhood and adolescence, people ask whether he will write about the next stage of his life but he says he'll probably create other worlds. But what if the cynics are right and he doesn't last? Will he be content? "But that's not the fabric of me," he protests. "That's not why I bothered doing this in the first place. I will always be creating my world and I will always be adding to the statement. Everything I do, from the day I started to the day I decide – myself – to stop, will add up to one statement." Does he know what the statement is yet? "Yes." Well what? "That's for you to find out." Oh come on! No, he says, smiling. Silence.
"It's about building a world," he relents finally. "It's dealing with reality but putting it in a fantastic context. It's making everything that is shit in life feel fabulous, or not fabulous but full of life and wonder. It's making you feel there is always something to be in awe of. Even death. I am fascinated by the ceremony of death, which is why I love the day of the dead celebrations in Mexico with the fluorescent skulls and candied skeletons. It's amazing. How can you be comfortable with your life if you are not comfortable with your death?" he asks.
The Boy-in-the-Lime-Green-Plimsolls is like one of his own songs: candy on the outside but richer and darker inside. He values freedom and egalitarianism and partly because of that, values Britain. It has contributed more to his education and health than any other country and he believes the welfare state is its biggest asset. Though he might move to different parts of the country, he can't imagine leaving. Yet to some extent, he is still the quaintly-dressed character pressing his nose to Britain's window.
"I love this country but I will never be part of the fabric of it, never be truly accepted." People will always view him as an outsider. "It's not a race thing. It's a cultural thing."
There may be a hint of wistfulness but he sounds essentially unperturbed at the thought. It makes him free. There are other worlds he can inhabit and they are all his.