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US FANS…EXCITING NEWS! Mika has been confirmed to play 3 shows in the USA this October!! He will be hitting Webster Hall in New York on the 15th, The Vic in Chicago on the 18th and The Fonda in LA on the 21st. With such a small amount of shows, tickets will sell out fast so make sure you get yours as soon as they come on sale… stay tuned for ticket links..
We will add a full list of the upcoming tour soon!
When you close your eyes and think of your mother what do you imagine? When you close your eyes and think of your first love what do you imagine? When you close your eyes and think of fear what do you imagine? For me, almost always, I imagine the one thing that is the hardest to remember: smell. My mother always used to wear an Yves Saint Laurent perfume called Champagne and it would mix with the history of her day, from the smell of her cooking the evening meal to the slight petrol tinge of our old Toyota Previa. It was this strange combination of smells which meant that I was home. Smell is one of the most powerful things in my life. Even as a musician, smell has a far greater ability to trigger memories than music. I once fired an old assistant on a tour because she wore the same perfume as a teacher who made my life hell at the Lycée Francais when I was a boy. The fact that she found the same perfume as my evil teacher appealing meant that she couldn’t possibly be a good person. I was proven right, and as the months unfolded so did she. I should have trusted my nose to begin with.
By 2015 the perfume industry is predicted to be worth over 33 billion dollars. Although this is mostly thanks to over commercialised and celebrity endorsed rubbish, there is no denying the fact that perfume is a major part of everyone’s daily life. In New York recently, I was faced with Rihanna’s enormous perfume advert on Times Square, every day as I went to the studio. I finally got a chance to smell it and was underwhelmed at the most. It smells fake, cheap and it’s clear that what you’re really paying for is not the quality of the ingredients but the cost of the bottle, the advertising space and most of all, the cost of her endorsement. Why is it that people have such a problem realising that smell and perfume are the same thing. How you smell is as important as how you look. From a purely chemical point of view, it’s not the floral top notes that will get someone to fall in love or sleep with you, but the muskiness of your natural body smell. Obviously it’s not ideal to sleep with someone that smells only of B.O. as that would be too overwhelming. However, it’s when the mix of your body smell and that of the perfume is just right, that a branded perfume turns into your perfect scent. Personally, smelling of strong body odour would be just as bad as smelling too much of Rihanna’s perfume.
In a nutshell, here is how the basic perfume making process works today. Most of the time, a big brand or celebrity will decide to sell and market a perfume. They will hire a production company who will in turn select a marketing company as well as a perfumer, or ‘nose’ to create the scent. The marketers will do countless studies and market analysis to figure out what perfume would sell best, and who the scent should be aimed at. With this very precise brief they will then commission a perfumer to take all this research and mix a scent that would please the targeted demographic the most. Often, perfume bottles and even add campaigns will be designed before the perfume even exists. The ‘nose’ will sit at a desk and make endless blends of hundreds of scents, some precious and most synthetic. Every perfume is decided into three layers; the Top Note the Middle and the Base Note. The first smell you get is the Top Note, this is mostly light and floral or citrus. This will quickly evaporate however leaving the Middle and lastly the Base note. The Base note is actually what will react or adapt most with your skin and when its smelt on its own can often smell awful. These often smell woody or musky. Yes! Similar to the body odour you’re trying to cover up in the first place!
Unfortunately, most really commercial perfumes are all about the top and middle notes. The base notes are often seen as too ugly or off-putting. Think about it, when you put a fresh cut lily to your nose and smell it, there are so many deep and musky smells, almost bad smells, that combined with the light top and middle notes smell perfect together, but more importantly smell natural.
I have collected smells for years. I have calmed down now, but I went through a phase of storing anything that I thought smelt good or interesting in small brown glass vials. From rose oils to pieces of tarmac and even the hand of a plastic doll. You can imagine how excited I was to come across the work of eccentric New York perfumer Christopher Brosius. His perfumes range from traditional scents to ones called Doll’s Head, In The Library or Burning Leaves. Self taught, Brosius did not go through the insanely rigorous and competitive training that you must now endure to graduate as a top ‘nose’. He even goes so far as calling his brand “I Hate Perfume”. He is more of a renegade who fights the normal commercial limits of making scent. If I had the chance to have a perfume custom made, it is clear that my main ambition would be to evoke a memory. If it was the memory of childhood for instance, then it would be the smell of my mother, but in my perfume memory of her, the Yves Saint Laurent would be as important as all the other “ugly” smells of a normal day. I would want the Cooking and even Toyota smell in there. My perfume would evoke a memory, and that would smell better than a million roses.
A woman with dark brown hair, sits on the subway on a January afternoon in New York city. She is conservative looking, wearing khakis a sweater and a long black coat to shield her from the January cold. As she reads her book, she has no idea that she is being secretly filmed and that she is about to star in a piece of absurdist theatre that would make even Ionesco proud. The train stops, a man walks onto the carriage and stands in front of her. He is normally dressed, wearing a coat and backpack. The only thing missing are his trousers. Over the next 6 consecutive stops, 6 more men are waiting to get on to the same carriage, all of whom are also not wearing any trousers. As they each get on to the train, they do not react to each other, leaving the brunette baffled and somewhat intimidated. It is only when, 10 minutes into the video, she makes eye contact with the person sitting in front of her that her nervousness disappears and she breaks into a smile. By sharing this moment with another observer like herself, she is able to enjoy the absurdity of the situation and no longer feels threatened. It is this moment, where she shifts from being a solitary whiteness to part of a group sharing a remarkable experience, which makes it one of the best pieces of street theatre I have ever seen, and it set my mind spinning; could more moments like this actually help make the world a better place?
The rain is falling in Los Angles. Today I woke up again in my hotel room and for the first time it dawned on me. I have been away from home for almost 11 months. As the end of the year is coming I thought I would round up, where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. It all started in november last year. What started off in 2009 as a 3 month tour, pilled up into almost a year and a half of traveling and performing. It was now the end of November 2010 and I was done. I hadn’t written a song in months and had no idea where I would even start. Touring has a different effect on everyone. Some artists are able to write on the road, but I found it impossible. As the show evolved and changed around the world, there was hardly any room for anything else. It was worth it of course. My show’s had never sold as many tickets and I had been given a once in a lifetime opportunity, to perform in person to all my fans that had supported me from the beginning as well as making new ones along the way.
Over the past few months I have been splitting my time between the USA, Montreal and Stockholm. I am now half way through making my new album, which will be my third. There are certain things which are almost unavoidable when working intensely in the studio. Firstly, you go slightly deaf, or in my case, even more deaf, and secondly you live at the mercy of a takeaway menu and most of all takeaway coffee. Coffee gives me a break from music and more importantly a break from the people I’m working with. We all have coffee ceremonies, and mine is a solitary one. I sit, drinking and bitching to myself about everyone around me, think about how everything going wrong is everyone else’s fault and list their never ending habits that drive me crazy. Once my cup is finished, I’m ok again and re-enter the studio in a much healthier state of mind with all my negativity thrown away with the paper cup. All this coffee drinking has made me increasingly curious about how so many of us have ended up addicted to this black brew. Coffee is today the most traded agricultural commodity in the world and in 2004 the total value of retail coffee sales was over $80 billion. What do we really know about coffee?
It is with great sadness that we announce Urban Festival in Switzerland has been cancelled.
Mika was due to perform at the festival on 1st July and wishes to convey his sincerest apologies to fans hoping to catch him live.
Please contact your ticket vendor for information on ticket refunds.
Stay tuned for more Mika live announcements. Hope to see you soon at the next one.
On a cold January morning this year, I made my way up the winding roads of upstate Connecticut. I was nervous, not only because I was the one doing the driving (I am a terrible driver), but because this felt more like a pilgrimage than a meeting. After getting lost I finally found a discreet painted wooden house, secluded in the middle of a dense forrest. I had arrived at the home of ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ illustrator, Maurice Sendak. Walking into the house, I came across a short, elderly man, dressed in his pyjamas and sitting at the dinner table talking loudly on the phone. When finally presented to him, he looked at me softly and smiled – “you’re very young”, he said, “I’m 82, have a seat”.
