Gay&Night-ZiZo Augustus 2015

Interview / Mika
Yes, yes, Mika! You remember: he of ‘Grace Kelly’ fame, the
living, singing, 6ft-something cartoon with an exhausting
several-octave range. This quite unclassiable pop star
— half-American, half-Lebanese, but educated in France
and then west London — burst through in 2007 with his
multimillion-selling album Life in Cartoon Motion. He is still
going, thank you, with a new album about to be released,
but in the meantime he has been patiently sitting things out
in his sun-ecked garden in Chelsea, as pop goes through
a particularly boring, beige phase. In the late Noughties,
music was a bit mouthier, messier, more berserk, wasn’t it?
Lily Allen, Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga...
“It was more daring”, says the man born Michael
Penniman, sitting on one of two plush garden
sofas. Now 31, he is wearing a T-shirt, trainers
and chinos decorated with teeny-tiny tennis
racquets. Now and again, one of his two golden
retrievers wanders up to say hello. “I remember
Lily Allen made those audacious, sassy pop
records. It was unjaded music.” So what of the
current stuff? Now, Mika is chatty, in a languid
kind of way, but not for the rst time, nor the last,
he opens his eyes wide, gives a demented grin
and keeps pointedly shtum. Enough said.
We are here to discuss his fourth album, No
Place in Heaven, which will appeal to his fans
across the world. It’s apparently more stripped
back, but this is, of course, all relative; there’s
still that irrepressible Mika bounce, which makes
him so Marmite, plus a tribute song to Freddie
Mercury (yes, I know, not really his rst). He’s big
in Europe, he’s big in Asia, and actually, for once,
this isn’t only the publicist talking (he has 864,000
Twitter followers). He is just back from touring
Asia. Apparently the Koreans are fun because
they sing back every word, and I mean every
word: “Even the ones in French!”. This is quite
an achievement, isn’t it? After all, Mika hits some
seriously high notes. “If you scream it, you can
get away with it”, he says, shrugging.
Personally, I think the fans can do whatever
they want, as long as they keep him in his lovely
home. It’s idyllic; I spot the odd bit of gilt here
and there, possibly some taxidermy, but for Mika
it seems restrained. Just as he is himself: rather
than the look-at-me wunderkind you might expect,
what you get is a sweet young man, affable up to
a point, but with a stubborn streak beneath. He
entirely redid the house, which was, as he puts it,
“a bit daggy”. “I didn’t want it to feel like new. So
I got all these craftsmen from the countryside to
redo different parts of it, so everything is handmade,
old school.” So no Ikea at all? “There’s a
bit in there”, he giggles. “By the time I ran out of
money, I had to ll in some corners.”
The house, which he shares with his partner (politely
discreet on that point) and the dogs, is a little
hub of creativity. One of his sisters, who works
with him, is busy in the kitchen on one of his
many projects, in this case a second collaboration
with Swatch. The concept is inspired by ancient
Mayan culture — “A totem pole that has become
a human shape and walks around. It sounds
ridiculous, and it is ridiculous,” he admits, “but it’s
whimsical, and it doesn’t have any kind of commercial
intention as its priority.” (Poor Swatch.)
He also has a continuing collaboration with
Valentino, which provides the clothes for his appearances
on The Voice in France and the Italian
X Factor. Apparently, each out t “tells a story”.
It’s funny, you might have guessed he’d want
Versace. Again, the eyes, the grin; he manages
a horried “Noooooo!” Valentino, he says, is the
right t. “It is playfulness, whimsy, fantasy, color,
but all within the context of really good design.”
When he signed up for X Factor, he didn’t speak
a word of Italian. So he hired a young Sicilian
girl, took her on tour with him and learnt it in
two months. He is quite at home in the sheer
madness of the show, where he gets his acts to
sing songs by Nirvana, Dolly Parton, the Gossip
and Nina Simone. “It’s a proper f****** gala, every
week!”
Text Louis Wine / The Sunday Times / The Interview People / Photography Universal Music 209 015