Holiday Habits Mika

The globetrotting pop star says he could live on a plane

“I FLY SO OFTEN THAT GETTING ON A plane is no problem for me. If for some reason someone told me I needed to spend four days living on a plane, I could easily do that. I’m so used to being on a flight that I don’t even notice whether or not I’m on one any more! I’ve been working as singer, one way or another, since I was 12, but for the last few years I’ve been travelling constantly. I don’t even own a house.

“Because of my touring schedule I don’t get as much downtime as I’d like, to visit friends and family abroad for fun. But my dad, who is American, lives in Bahrain, and I do go over to see him quite a lot. I also consider myself an honorary Frenchman because I lived in Paris as a kid, so I feel at home there. I used to sleepwalk as a child and there were several times when the police found me wandering the streets alone in my pyjamas. One of my favourite shows when I was touring Life in Cartoon Motion was a concert in Paris with a circus-themed set. It feels great to go back there to play.

“I’m Lebanese – I was born in Beirut, and my mum’s Lebanese – but ended up spending my teenage years living in London, so I’m also an honorary Londoner, and that’s still where I’m based. One of my new songs, Blue Eyes, has the lyrics “If your heart got broken on the Underground, go find your spirit in lost and found”. I wrote that about London Underground’s lost-and-found storage area – among people who’ve been there, it’s notorious. There are rows and rows of unclaimed diaries, and rows of walking sticks – all kinds of objects. I imagined the idea of rows of hearts, so that if yours had been broken you could go and try to pick it out of a line-up.

“The British press doesn’t seem to find me very easy, journalistically, to define. I don’t fit into any London scene – I’m not part of the Shoreditch or the Camden scenes. When I first went to Japan people thought I was a British artist, but in fact I’m also Lebanese. I think people there actually liked me more when they realised I was not a wholly British artist!”
INTERVIEW: SOPHY GRIMSHAW