Star of wonder: Mika talks about his merry future
Mika's future is so bright you've got to wear shades. Then again, with a wardrobe like his - not to mention the eye-opening backstory - you'll need them anyway...
"I am very suspicious of people," Mika begins. He falls silent for a bit, replaying in his head some scene from his past. It's a habit of his.
"I was always told I was ugly. I still think I am ugly. I know I've got an odd face and you can't tell me otherwise. It's the same with what I do. Part of me sees myself as talented, and the other part sees me as strange. Ideas get stuck in your head and nothing changes them. Not even fame."
How screwed up do you have to be to be a pop star these days? At its most base end, the X Factor approach to stardom, you can't get anywhere without the X Combo: the suitably intriguing – yes, we're talking 'kooky' – personality and harrowing backstory.
And that's ironic when it comes to Mika, because he has fabulous examples of both and still Simon Cowell turned him down (and perhaps just as well, considering how few of Cowell's music-hall acts have achieved a career of any longevity or credibility).
Mika was born in Beirut in 1983, at the height of the Lebanese civil war. His family fled to London via Cyprus and Paris. Diagnosed dyslexic, considered autistic, certified obsessive compulsive (he still buys all his clothes in sets of three), he was bullied so completely he had a nervous breakdown.
His father was taken hostage in Kuwait City by Saddam Hussein for his human shield; he was 'adopted' by a Russian opera star, accepted amid fierce competition by the Royal College of Music (despite not being able to read so much as a semi-quaver of sheet music), only to drop out, pursue a professional singing career and spend years wading through an ocean of rejection slips. And then he used one of those slips to finally make it.
One particular record company executive was so disparaging that Mika wrote down his hurt feelings in a song, Grace Kelly, masking its meaning with upbeat melodies. The song went straight to No 1 in the UK for five weeks on the strength of downloads alone, and Mika became the biggest-selling new artist of 2007.
A classic ugly duckling becomes swan story? Not quite. "Lots of people don't like me," Mika says. "Lots of people don't like my music. There's not a lot I can do about that."
It would seem the bubbly onstage performer of cute hits such as Lollipop has major ghosts to slay. The story that emerges today is more of a revenge drama – and those don't always turn out too well.
We meet on the set of a photo-shoot where Mika will leap around brightly in an approximation of his stage act. His arrival is preceded by the distinctly tall, dark and glamorous appearance of his two sisters, Yasmine and Paloma. Mika goes nowhere without them.
"They always come with me to pick my clothes and fix me," he explains, following up the rear. "A stylist might say you look amazing in anything. Your family will always tell you if you look a complete idiot."
Mika is also – like his sisters – very tall (he stands at 6ft 4in) and rake-thin in jeans and a vintage black overcoat. Rather than bouncy, he's initially slightly edgy and uncomfortable. It transpires he hasn't eaten for quite some time.
He's nervous about having his photograph taken. He bends his head and upper torso to one side as he speaks, and occasionally stops altogether as if he expects you to start laughing at him.
"I'm totally used to standing in an alien environment and having to deal with it. My first ever gig was in a side room at the Manumission club in Ibiza. I walked on to this tiny stage and it was empty, just a few blank faces staring at me. I'm so used to intimidation I just dealt with it and slowly the room started to fill. That to me was a bigger thrill than getting to No 1."
More than any other pop star since, perhaps, Freddie Mercury, Mika is driven by a sense of difference. He always knew he was something special, and so did his peers – which was bad news for him.
At the age of nine, he attended the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London. Rather than hang out in jeans and cool, ripped T-shirts like his fellow students, Mika would turn up in bright red trousers and a bow tie.
"Oh, my school days were a nightmare," he says. "It was as if all the kids could smell there was something different about me. I was bullied all the time. It was all psychological and name-calling, the usual weirdo stuff.
"I was fatter then and they used to say I had child-bearing hips. That always stuck. Those are the scars you can inflict that don't ever show. The teachers were just as bad. They thought I was completely stupid.
"A lot of kids end up pretending to be someone they are not. You can learn how to dress like everyone else and learn to talk about computer games and football and the sort of music other kids like. I did attempt to do that a couple of times, but I couldn't stand it. I couldn't change the way I was. It made me even more extreme."
His family was put under pressure to have him diagnosed as autistic and tutored as a special-needs pupil, but his mother resisted. Parental support remains a crucial lifeline, with Mika explaining of his initial inhibition today, "I surround myself with my family and my oldest friends. I don't let new people in."
For someone so painfully honest about his unhappiest experiences, Mika is evasive when it comes to his family. He describes his father's job as "something in finance", and is unwilling to talk about why he was in Kuwait shortly before the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein's regime kidnapped hundreds of foreigners and forcibly used them as human shields around factories and military installations.
Mika's father was held for seven months before Saddam finally released the hostages under intense international pressure.
"I was terrified about my dad. He was an American in Kuwait. We didn't know what was happening."
That's all Mika will say on the matter – surely one of the formative experiences of his life. He returns to the subject of school, where the pressure of his dad's internment got too much for Mika. He stopped speaking, reading and writing altogether.
"That was a very bad time," he says. "I can see how weird I was.
One day I decided the school needed a Christmas tree and spent hours dragging this huge beast of a tree into school. No one was pleased. I got two weeks' detention because I was 45 minutes late and had made a big mess of leaves and soil all over the building. All the kids just laughed at me."
Mika's mother, decisive as ever, pulled him out of school and encouraged him to sing, welcoming the Russian opera singer Alla Ardakov into their lives as his trainer. He'd escaped from the school environment, but a part of his personality, it seems clear, was scarred.
"Even now if I was put back into that environment it would happen all over again. For the first few hours everyone would be happy for me and want to talk about my music. Then there would be the laughing. Then the jokes at my expense. Then the nasty comments."
For all that this borders on camp self-obsession, there are thousands of people who relate directly to the way Mika grew up.
"Generally, the people who like my music are the less conventional ones – the outsiders, the weirdos," he says. "It's amazing how many of us there are."
Mika's fans arrive at his shows dressed up as the characters in his songs: pink and cutesy Lollipop girl, kipper-tied closet gay Billy Brown and Big Girl.
A select few musicians are singled out as uniquely sensitive to their fans' needs, and Mika is one of them. Strangers give him presents.
"I get amazing things from sketch books filled with their drawings to hand-made kimonos for my toys and this incredible embroidered shirt that I wear."
His pursuit of recognition began in his teens when he was obsessively sending out tapes to every record company.
A chance meeting with Simon Cowell when he was 16 looked promising. Cowell told him his songs were 'too strange' but thought his voice (Mika has a five-octave range) was good. "I kept calling him for months and months," says Mika.
"He never called me back. He obviously didn't think I was worth it. I haven't seen him since I became successful. He probably doesn't care. That's fine. He just didn't get me."
Mika believes that what happened to him at school helped him avoid the trap of becoming the sort of artist Cowell would like. "I pushed on doing my own thing and just went round to clubs and festivals and gathered a core of people who understood what I was doing. It got bigger and bigger, which is why I got to No 1 before anyone in the mainstream had really heard of me."
Success firmly under his belt, Mika remains unwilling to conform to people's expectations of what a pop star should be, say or do. He avoids models and liggers, he doesn't do bling, he rarely appears in magazines and doesn't hang out with other musicians. He won't say whether he's gay or straight (Q: 'Are you gay or straight?' A: 'Boring!').
"I don't have anything flash," he insists. "I live in a flat and I spend most of my time working, drawing and writing songs (Mika is only able to write lyrics if he draws at the same time).
"I would like to earn money. Making a lot of real money would be cool. I think I could handle being rich. I'd definitely find something interesting to spend the money on."
Like a Ferrari? He looks stunned. "That wouldn't even occur to me," he says. Fame might prove to be Mika's biggest challenge so far. He's taken on the bullies, proved himself bigger, brighter and more successful than they could ever have imagined. But when Revenge Of The Nerd is the story of your life, what comes next?
Mika's album 'Life In Cartoon Motion' is out now, and the single 'Relax (Take It Easy)' is out on December 31
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