Mika

Artist Michael Holbrook Penniman, known as Mika, was born into a Lebanese family of many children and got Lebanese, Syrian and American roots from his parents. However, when the future performer was only one year old, his family had to leave the motherland due to the dreads of the civil war. They firstly went to Paris, but left it for London, England. The reason for this move was a terrible incident - Mika's father was a hostage in the American Embassy of Kuwait. For the moment of all these events, the future singer was about nine years old. He wrote his first song in France, being inspired by the music of Nirvana band. His classmates mistreated Mika - school bullies lead him to the nervous breakdown at the tender age of eleven. The mother took the boy, suffering dyslexia, from the school and made him study at home.

The parents cheered up Mika's love for music in order to turn his attention from his problematic relations with the peers. Famous opera singer from Russia Alla Ardakov (Ablaberdyeva) taught him at home. Mika proved to have an astonishing voice - about five octaves according to some sources, though the artist acknowledges humbly only three and a half. Soon after the start of trainings with the opera diva Mika began performing in the Royal Opera House and writing music: he scored the advertisement jingle for the Orbit chewing gum and compositions for the British Airways. His flashy dance single Relax, Take It Easy was performed firstly in the well-known show Later With Jools Holland and conquered the hearts of British listeners at once with its original and unforgettable tune. Released in the beginning of 2007 Grace Kelly raised Mika to the international star level.

The musician crowned such an instant glory with the debut album Life In Cartoon Motion, devoted to the problems of transition from childhood to adult life. Life In Cartoon Motion proved to be an extremely qualitative pop disc and Mika started to get handfuls of awards. Thus, he became the first musician to receive three World Music Awards at once. He was compared to such world celebrities, as Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and Elton John. One of the reasons for such comparisons was eccentric, even provocative themes of the songs: for example, homosexuality (Billy Brown) and attitude towards big women in the dedicated to Mika's mother composition Big Girl (You Are Beautiful). The musician was extremely secretive about his new creation he was working over. Eventually, in the mid 2009, he released it under the title The Boy Who Knew Too Much.