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Make a date with Mika
16/11/2007
MUSIC: Mika, Apollo, Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 – THE best pop music should always intoxicate as many people as it infuriates, and Mika – 2007’s most ‘love him or hate him’ pop sensation - has definitely followed those laws fastidiously to the letter.
Back at the start of the year, long before he’d had any chart success, Mika described himself to the press as being like, “Pop Marmite … because people will react to me in one of two extremes.”
It was a perfectly judged self-assessment.
By the time uber-pop anthem Grace Kelly sailed to the top of the singles chart and became the most played track on British radio in 2007, it was obvious Mika had fulfilled his early promises.
Though his debut album Life In Cartoon Motion has sold over two million copies worldwide (600,000 of those in the UK alone), Mika has firmly divided this country into those that adore this most flamboyant of new pop stars OR those that find him an irritant on par with the sound of fingernails being scraped down a blackboard. But by labelling himself as Pop Marmite, it’s obvious that 23-year-old Mika Penniman is a very savvy, self-aware pop star indeed.
His background is odd by any pop star’s standards: he was born and brought up in war-torn Beirut, before moving to England to study classical music – by the time he was aged just 13, he was a fully trained boy soprano performing at the Royal Opera House. However, none of that weighty personal history has gone into Mika’s absurdly extravagant music.
A bit like a one-man Scissor Sisters, Mika has made it is his job to inject excessive camp and kitsch pop music back into that charts.
In all his interviews, Mika has made it his desire to align himself with Freddie Mercury and Queen – indeed, in an age when Arctic Monkeys are the UK’s biggest guitar act, surely what is wrong with an OTT dose of gauche, flamboyant pop back in the charts?
Mika is overwhelming and nauseating but at least he does it entertainingly.
Last single ‘Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)’ might be the most patronising song ever written about the female form, but at least it’s done in the same exuberant, OTT camp style as his heroes Queen – and like everything Mika writes, it’s a damn catchy song.
See him perform live, and that excess is in greater abundance - garish stage props, his backing band dressed in drag, and at the centre of it all, Mika himself, bouncing around like a self-adoring brat who’s consumed ten litres of Red Bull.
Pop Marmite then – it’s frighteningly addictive stuff.
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17/11/2007 at 09:14