Mika: ‘Scrutiny over my sexuality was kind of brutal’

The Beirut-born pop star is back with his first English-language album in six years, the dazzling ‘Hyperlove’. He opens up to Roisin O’Connor about the lasting influence of his late mother, Joannie, his lambasting by music critics when he broke through in 2007, and why his pursuit of love and creativity are one and the same

Mika is preparing to release his first English-language album in six years (Press)

It’s impossible to feel stressed around Mika. I learn this after getting stuck on a train en route to meet the pop singer in south London, panicking that I’m going to be late for our interview, with the knowledge that he’s on a very tight schedule. Within moments, he’s instructed his cabbie to turn around and head towards the Southbank Centre instead, which is much easier for me to get to. Having arrived at this new location somewhat flustered, I’m greeted with a warm hug and his insistence that we get a cup of tea first, giving me time to compose myself.

It’s one of those perfect winter days in London – the sky is a clear blue, the air is crisp and boats are gliding serenely down the Thames. The place is virtually deserted, save for a gaggle of schoolchildren being herded towards a Gilbert & George exhibition by their teachers. We settle at a table outside, not minding the cold; Mika is dressed impeccably in a gorgeous wool coat and charcoal knit hat that’s pulled over his boyish mop of curls, a smart suede carry-all by his feet. He makes for charming company – our conversation is frequently sidetracked as we learn we live down the coast from one another in Kent, and that we possibly know the same lovely cab driver who often whisks him under the Channel to France.

Though it’s 18 years since his relentlessly perky hit “Grace Kelly” was blaring from speakers all around the world, it’s an exciting time to be the pop star born Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr. He’s preparing to release his first English-language album in six years, the dazzling Hyperlove, and is also returning as a judge on the new series of Channel 4’s The Piano. His Instagram feed shows a whirlwind of promo and globe-trotting, from awards ceremonies, hanging out with Bob Geldof and Lewis Capaldi, to a recent cover shoot with his hero, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood fame. His 2026 tour is selling out fast.

“I live in an eternal state of surprise, but at the same time I’m really happy to be doing interviews and stuff in the UK again,” he tells me. Born in Beirut to a Lebanese mother and American father, his family fled the escalating civil war when he was one, moving to Paris and then west London when he was nine. He is, unsurprisingly, the ultimate cosmopolitan, having released a French-language album, 2023’s lovely Que ta tête fleurisse toujours, served as a Eurovision host when the song contest took place in Turin, Italy, in 2022, and as a judge on the Spanish version of The Voice last year. London is still dear to him, a place he knows “like the back of my hand”. He looks delightedly over at the ticket booth: “This is where I was educated – queuing up to see Bobby McFerrin and Cesária Évora. Some of the classical recitals that changed my life happened at this place. So it’s strangely appropriate we ended up here.”

Mika has made a habit of doing things his own way. He first broke through in 2007 with his debut Life in Cartoon Motion, a gingerbread house built from sugary piano pop and a sprinkling of Queen-indebted rock. “Grace Kelly” was a riposte to record labels who didn’t know what to do with his cartoonish persona (“I could be brown, I could be blue, I could be violet sky/ I could be hurtful, I could be purple, I could be anything you like”), while the Bee Gees-influenced “Relax, Take It Easy” was a Grade A earworm. The album went on to sell over eight million copies, much to the dismay of sneering critics (one who gave the album one star and likened it to being “held at gunpoint by Bonnie Langford”).

Outside the music, too, Mika was treated cruelly by writers accustomed to the posing, leather jacket-clad rockers of the indie landfill scene (“Johnny Borrell was hot, probably still is,” he observes of the Razorlight frontman). Interviews branded him an “oddball” and “strange” – prompting Queen guitarist Brian May to write a blog post in his defence – others lambasted him for refusing to confirm he was gay (“Why won’t Mika give a straight answer?” ran one headline). Male writers – and it did seem to be exclusively men – loathed him for his anthem for fat women, “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)”. Had they asked, Mika might have told them it was inspired in part by his mother, Joannie, who died of a brain tumour in 2021.

Cartoon motion: Mika performing at Somerset House, London, in 2007 (Getty)

“She was a big girl, and she couldn’t wear clothes from the shops – she made her own,” he explains. “If I close my eyes, I know all of her outfits. She made every piece of clothing for herself, and ours too. My whole childhood, there was the sound of the sewing machine.”

He points to the walkway in front of us: “She’d walk across here in a pink and red fuchsia dress or an emerald coat, with a big ruffle and a bow in her hair.” Joannie was bullied her whole life, he says, and struggled with her weight. “She came from an abusive relationship with her mother, who was only 15 years older than her. Her one resistance was colour and expressing herself – she said that was freedom.” He smiles at the memory. “It’s so funny, because that’s such a stylish thing to say, yet it’s anti-fashion because she refused to conform.”

It was Joannie who encouraged Mika to pursue music, homeschooling him briefly when he was bullied due to his bright clothes and his dyslexia, and sending him to a professional opera singer. He soon proved himself to be a child prodigy, performing at the Royal Opera House and singing in TV jingles. “When you mourn a parent, especially one who’s been really influential in your life, I think there’s a kind of handover that happens in terms of being truly accountable for the things you feel, and the way you respond emotionally to the world around you,” he says. “That can happen at 15 years old, and it can also happen at 60.”

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As a songwriter, his answer has been to sit down at his piano – the same upright piano his family were able to retrieve after the rest of their possessions and home were seized in the early Nineties – and write. “It’s strange, this job, because you become emancipated so quickly and so young, but other parts of you lag really far behind. There’s a kind of arrested development that happens – but then that’s a great starting point for an album.”

Mika’s precociousness is a major part of his appeal. He’s 42 now, but still maintains a wide-eyed, childlike nature. You hear it in songs on Hyperlove, such as the glimmering “Immortal Love” and the bright, pulsating camp of “Modern Times”. Given women in pop have been doing so much of the heavy-lifting over the past five years, it feels as though we’ve been crying out for the return of at least a few male artists who can match that level of glittery, high-octane entertainment. “The thing about writing at the piano is you’re chasing a state of euphoria,” Mika says. “It’s what I did for my first album and what I did with Hyperlove, so while I’ve grown up a lot in that time (thank god), that same process gives a kind of joy that is as intimate as it is explosive and euphoric.”

‘Hyperlove is that feeling we chase when we’re writing songs, about desire’ (Press)

That sums up a little of what his album title, Hyperlove, means to him. “Hyperlove is this state of loving in the modern age,” he explains. “It’s that feeling we chase when we’re writing songs – about desire, the celebration of having it and wanting more, or the lamentation of not having it, or having lost it. That first time you’ve been kissed, then every time being kissed after that, getting that feeling again.” He gestures at the London skyline in front of us: “What I can taste in the air right now, in this city that I love, is yearning. It’s like, can you make me fall in love with the world again? Can someone make me dream again? You have to set your sights on it, chase it.” Love and songwriting, then, to Mika are one in the same.

He knows a lot about both. He’s been with his partner, filmmaker and producer Andreas Dermanis, for 20 years now, and they share their house in Kent along with a place in Miami and a 650-year-old farmhouse (“it’s falling apart”), in the Italian countryside, where Mika has his studio. They met at a pub called The Ring, which is still there, opposite Southwark Tube station, after Dermanis asked him out.

“He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life with me, that first day,” Mika says. “I thought he was mad, absolutely bonkers crazy! But it’s been 20 years – we had a break for six months, in that kind of wobbly bit after seven years, but we managed to overcome that.” What’s the trait he loves most about him? I can see him struggling to pick just one: “He cares. He’s very kind. And he loves animals.”

Andy told me on our first date that he was going to spend the rest of his life with me. I thought he was bonkers

Scrutiny over his sexuality was “kind of brutal”, he acknowledges, as was the branding of his music – colourful and eclectic – as “brazen”, a term he feels was linked to the demand for him to come out publicly (he told a journalist he was gay in 2012). “Of course, it was tricky to deal with, but I don’t see myself as a victim because unfortunately, I think it kind of goes with that territory,” he says with a shrug. “The problem was that it just makes life unnecessarily complicated – I wish I could have just removed that a little bit from my field of attention. It was a shame, but at the same time, I was so lucky, because I was working it out and I was addressing sexuality in every single artistic gesture, and I still do to this day.”

He’s enjoying his forties, and seems to have hit a fresh creative streak, working with Dermanis on a new music video, coming up with costume ideas and surrounded by like-minded friends and collaborators. “It influences this taking hold of your identity and saying, ‘Actually, I can decide – we can decide to be a bit weird.’ You can find your own path,” he says. “It takes a lot of work, but who cares? Everything’s a lot of work: being a really good butcher, or growing amazing vegetables or making really good wine, or being artists like Gilbert and George. But isn’t it so joyful to be creative?”

We finish our tea and get up, both taking one last admiring glance at the London skyline. Waiting for our respective cabs, we find ourselves chatting about Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness; his garden where beauty grows even in the toughest of conditions. Another hug and we part ways, and I think to myself how much duller the world would be without Mika in it.

‘Hyperlove’, the new album from Mika, is out on 23 January