38 MusicWeek 14.09.12 INTERVIEWMIKA
‘FIND ME THE WEIR M
Mika is back, with a collection of music’s zaniest characters in tow
TALENT BY TINA HART
usic industry praise doesn’t come much higher than being compared to Prince. And the source of that music industry
praise doesn’t come much higher than Lucian Grainge. Three years ago, on the dawn of the release
Mika’s second, darker-sounding studio album The Boy Who Knew Too Much, this kind of music industry praise wasn’t in short supply. Sadly, it didn’t quite equate to high sales. In the UK, TBWKTM ended up shifting
around an eighth of the 1.6 million-plus tally of Mika’s debut LP Life In Cartoon Motion – a work which contained smash singles such as Love Today and Grace Kelly. It was hardly a commercial dud (how the teams behind some of this year’s top releases would long for hundreds of thousands of sales), but it simply couldn’t match up to the might of its predecessor. Signals are that for Mika’s third album, The
Origin Of Love, the Lebanon-born UK act is adding a capful of fizzy pop back into his output. He’s teamed up with the ever ice-cool Pharrell Williams to write initial single Celebrate, which has been produced by Pnau/Empire Of The Sun man Nick Littlemore. There are a bunch of other creative types
involved in the album which Mika, real name Michael Penniman Jr., says are at the “weird” end of the pop scale – including Benny Benassi, Greg Wells (Katy Perry, Adele), Klas Åhlund (Robyn’s Body Talk) as well as some brand new unsigned musicians he found himself. With more than 500,000 views clocked up on
YouTube during Celebrate’s first day online and a Radio 2 Single Of The Week accolade, the public thirst for Mika’s long-awaited return is clear. Great things, and many more incidents of music industry praise, may just be set up for him this time round. Right now, however, the glamour will have to wait. It’s “shitting it down” in Lincoln, apparently – a not-so-exotic welcome back to the UK for Mika’s regional radio promo tour after a period taking respite in Italy, and the scene for his first interview with Music Week in years…
COMING UP
Welcome back… This is the start of my promo trip. It feels different for some reason, it feels really good to be plugging a record that I love. Sometimes, when you walk into studios you’ve got to talk about an album and if you don’t truly love it, if it doesn’t really make you happy, then you feel terrible doing it. That changes the entire vibe of the campaign.
You’ve said this album would be very different from the last one. Do you think it turned out that way in the end? I would walk into sessions and feel like I had no track record. And that inevitably put a fresh spin on the entire project. I had no ego, no preconceptions or expectations and that was very conscious. What’s the point in being able to make records if you can’t approach every project as a new artist? When I walked into Island and I was about to play them the first six months of work, I was like, “Listen to this like you’re listening to a new artist and then tell me what you think.” And it was a very healthy approach for the entire team, which was invigorating. Even in France, they said, “You can’t put a song out in French [Elle Me Dit], people will think it’s weird,” and I went ahead and did it anyway. I started getting people to work without purchase orders, without any kind of budget, and put it out even though we shouldn’t have. Then it turned into the biggest song of last year in France overall.
Do you feel like Island gave you more free reign this time? I got lucky with Island and they truly allowed me to make a tapestry, a multi-coloured record that certainly doesn’t follow any rules. They allowed me to make a mess and make the record that I wanted. I feel like I was really afforded an amazing amount of freedom with this record. I think they know that. I make alternative pop music. If you try and take an alternative pop artist and sandwich them into a format and make them work with track-record producers, you just end up killing everything original about the artist, but I think they understood that. They have a good legacy of investing in weird artists – it’s the right thing to do.
Album The Origin Of Love is out on October 8. It is preceded by single Celebrate, feat. Pharrell Williams, on September 30.
You’ve also said your records are sometimes not that easy to promote – why do you think that is? My songs often don’t fall into regular radio format. I can’t stick something online and just sit back. I’m touring incessantly and I like it that way. I promote them at the same time all over the world and it’s a situation that is a massive plus for me because somehow I’ve managed to establish myself to the point I can do a minimum of 2,000-people venues in any city in the world. From one night I could be doing 2,000 and the next I could be doing 20,000. For the next three months I am pretty much, on average, in a different country every 48 hours. Right now, they’re trying to get me to do two countries in Europe on the same day, [laughs] it’s ridiculous.
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