 | | Mika |
When a song sits at the top of the charts for six weeks and is hammered to death on national prime-time radio, you can’t begrudge people for wanting to go along and check out the artist live. However, lesson one for the rising star: you can’t then keep folk waiting until nearly quarter to 10 to make up for a shortfall in material. Mika’s a talented bloke but he’s just starting out. As such, what he presented was 45 minutes of pastiche 80s disco, Scissor Sisters’ demo tunes, leftovers from his GCSE composition unit, an obligatory ‘slowy’ (sort of Aqualung meets Elton John), before topping it off with the money-song, Grace Kelly, and an encore of Lollipop, complete with glitter and balloons. Someone somewhere has turned a bloke with real promise into a cynically packaged show-pony. There’s no consistency; he doesn’t have his own sound and that can’t be countered with chants of ‘but can’t you appreciate his crazy eclecticism!’ If you like Grace Kelly, there’s really no guarantee you’ll like anything else; he’s got one song that started off so similar to Sesame Street, you were surprised when The Count didn’t turn up to join in on percussion; his cover of Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talking would have had Mister Cowell snarling that he’d made no attempt to make it his own. Mika’s clearly having a ball on this tour; he looked genuinely astounded by the size of the crowd. At the moment, he’d make a fantastic support act to a bigger band; he’s got presence and, at times, he really can hold the attention, but when it comes down to a summer of headline gigs before slipping back into obscurity versus a profile-building Take That support slot, it might be an idea to rethink his decision. | 
