The superstar singer on his itinerant childhood, brutally honest mother, and the moment of anger that led him to write Grace Kelly
Born in Beirut in 1983, Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr, otherwise known as Mika, was raised in Paris and London. He attended the Royal College of Music, before his breakthrough in 2007 with debut album Life in Cartoon Motion and its No 1 single, Grace Kelly. He went on to sell 20m records, and worked as a presenter and judge on TV shows such as Eurovision and The Piano. Mika now lives in Italy and in Hastings, East Sussex, with his partner. His first English-language album in six years, Hyperlove, is out on 23 January.
This was taken in our kitchen in Paris. It doesn’t surprise me that I am covered in chocolate. My earliest memories are of being on the floor surrounded by delicious food.
I don’t remember who I was at that age, but I know I had a strong sense of when I wanted to go to sleep. I would often eat a lot, then when I’d had enough, tap the person next to me, and stroll off to bed. After finishing that entire bowl of chocolate mousse, it’s likely I would have taken myself off for a rest. Dad used to call me the 90-year-old baby.
When I was one, we were evacuated from Beirut because of the civil war. My mum’s father was Syrian and her mother was Lebanese, and she wanted to give her children a better multicultural balance than she’d had growing up in America. Which is why we ended up in Paris, with our sprawling transplanted community. Our apartment was filled with Lebanese aunties with big puffed-up hair, smelling of cigarettes and hairspray. There was always music: a mixture of Nirvana in my sister’s bedroom and the Lebanese singer Fairuz in the living room with the grownups.
