It goes without saying that all proper pop stars should be extroverted, attractive and maybe, just maybe, a little bit camp. Michael Holbrook Penniman – that’s Mika, to you and I – ticks those boxes with aplomb. The Beirut-born musician sure knows how to dazzle.

Yet, speaking down a crackly phone line from his London apartment, it quickly becomes apparent that Mika is not your ordinary pop star. For starters, he may only be two albums into his career, but he’s already well-versed in the machinations of the music industry. So well-versed, in fact, that one might say he sounds slightly world-weary at the tender age of 26. Still, if there’s one thing that Mika is, it’s a man who know’s where he’s going in life.
“You have to, because nobody else will know for you,” he says semi-defiantly. “You have to think about what you’re going to do when you’re 35-years-old. At 30-years-old, why would I wanna be writing a song like ‘Lollipop’? I’ve done that, I’ve got it under my belt. Let’s write about something else, something that grows, takes me further. At 35, if I was releasing records like ‘Lollipop’, I think it’d be a little bit disturbing.”
The classically-trained singer and pianist has certainly advanced since he exploded onto the scene in 2007 with worldwide hit ‘Grace Kelly’ and a chart-topping debut album. His new record, The Boy Who Knew Too Much, showcases a more mysterious side of his personality – or, in his words, “a fascination with gore and fairytales.”
“It was definitely consciously darker, a little less commercial than the first,” he adds. “I felt like I needed to balance out the first. But because it’s darker, it takes a little longer to get into, and if anything, I think that’s a good thing.”
The album’s success has also been slow-burning in comparison to Life in Cartoon Motion. Although it charted highly the world over and continues to sell extremely well, that steady build must have been hard to adjust to, after such an explosive start to his career.
“It’s just about building slowly, that’s what happens,” he says nonchalantly. “I’m sitting here looking at all these other people who are new, and thinking, ‘Haha! You don’t know…' When you get to the second record, you don’t have that propulsion of ‘the new’ behind you. No matter what you do, you just don’t have it – so you have to build in a different way. But that’s more stable. If you’re on a second record and you can sell two million, you know you’ve got a career. That’s what’s important.”
It doesn’t bother the well-spoken Londoner, as a writer of pop songs in the traditional sense, that the word ‘pop’ has become something to be embarrassed by over the last decade. He draws a clever analogy between illustrators (“They’re always seen as the ‘lesser’ artist’”) and pop music, claiming that value cannot be immediately placed upon something that’s a naturally subjective art-form. “You can’t judge it instantly – you have to give it time, which is why I hate over-effusive opinions. It’s like, ‘Well, how’d you know?’ we could sit here and trash so many types of music, but what do you know? What do I know? I don’t know how that’ll fit in to what’s going on in ten years’ time.”
Blimey, this Mika chap is one deep thinker. In a way, it seems that the mop-topped musician is a mass of contradictions – the main one being the outlandish, carefree performer that’s in conflict with the ‘serious’ songwriter with his eye on a long-term career.
“I think the performer in me hates being a songwriter, and vice-versa,” he chuckles. “I think I am a songwriter – but that person is very anti-press, anti-promotion kind of person, and that’s how you write songs, in a bubble. And the performer is the one that uses the stage as a boxing ring, and confronts everything that’s ever said about them.”
When he takes to the proverbial boxing ring for his two forthcoming Dublin dates, however, he’ll be pulling no punches.
“What can you expect? It’s like you’re jumping into my artwork, it’s like you’re hallucinating some kind of psychedelic party from ‘80s New York, where the line between sweetness and fairytales is blurred. It’s anarchic and people lose themselves for two hours. I always wanted a live show that would represent my world, that did it justice - and that’s what I’m trying to do now.”