All-Access with Mika Before His Show

Welcome to Young Hollywood.

Hi, I'm Mica and you're watching Young Hollywood and you are backstage at my show at The Palladium on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. I mean, the thing about my gigs, right, is that they're not just gigs, they're not just concerts, they're kind of theatrical shows as well. So the whole concept for this show is that it's 1955, um and I I am bored with life on Earth and so I've sent myself up to space. And so this kind of my imaginary family comes on, it's my band. They come on at the beginning of the show and they watch uh some kind of I Love Lucy program. And then they tune in to watch a special broadcast from Houston, Texas where I'm sending myself up to space. And Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings, comes onto the screen and he goes, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm joining you from Texas." And he takes us through this whole kind of news broadcast. And so I'm sending myself up to space but it all goes wrong and my rocket explodes and I die. So the show starts with this very bizarre death. Uh and then I kind of come out in a massive astronaut space suit and I climb out of that and I'm just in my boxers and I'm very confused-looking and I run off to the side of the stage, put on a whole outfit and run back on for the first chorus of the first song, which is "Relax," and I'm holding my little suitcase. And inside the suitcase are all the props that I'm going to need to take me through the whole show. So from the very beginning of the show, you kind of expect that you're in for something a little bit strange and very much you're in my own world for two hours. You can forget about the world outside. Baby on the boards. Baby on the boards. Baby on the boards. To kind of make this happen we use different things like we have puppet makers that we work with in the UK. And uh in in my suitcase, I've got this little puppet of a teapot. And my my miniature teapot that I use as my kind of servant gets annoyed with me and she pulls me off stage and then on walks on a giant teapot holding a marionette, holding a marionette of me. And the the roles have been reversed. Uh and there's lots of little moments like that throughout the gig. It's very much like a kind of Alice in Wonderland world where very weird things happen often completely out of the blue. And I like that because it kind of shocks everyone. I work a lot with my family. Um a lot of the artwork that I do, I do it with myself, with my sister. Um and a lot of the costumes that we wear and all of our clothes are made by my mother and by my sisters as well. I come from a family of five kids, I'm the one in the middle. What we did was, is because we are talking about outer space and stuff like that. I wanted to have a set that was made up of all these different moons. And uh we were in Montreal and we found these giant styrofoam spheres and we've put them up all around the venue and then we've covered them in UV paint. So you push a button and you turn off all the lights and you get all this black light. And so it looks like all these spheres of different sizes are kind of floating all around the venue. Gives it a very kind of, I don't know, weightless in space feel and then we project on top of it and we do all this stuff. So it's all very handmade. It's very simple but from a distance it looks so expensive and it looks really magical and I think that's that's the secret, you know? It's like illusion. So even before a show like now, we got some more balls because we need to top them up. And we cover them in UV paint and the show is starting in like three, two hours or three hours and we've got like hundreds of people waiting outside. But our set, part of it anyway is still drying like over here. If you follow me. So this is some of the set that we are drying. And although these are like very simple balls, they're all covered in UV paint. So when you take this little black light and you shine it on it, the UV paint shines through. Do you use the things that you know? It's really simple but it looks amazing. And then we cover our faces in UV paint as well. Stuff like face painting where when we put it on you don't see it, it's invisible but when you shine black light onto it, it all kind of illuminates so we look like weird other-worldly creatures. If you come in here, there's the costume room and we travel around with all our own costumes. And, here this is my sister Yasmin and she does all the artwork and she goes by the pen name Dewack. And uh she also works with us on our tours. So my mum makes all of my costumes and uh she makes everyone in the band's clothes as well. And because we use a lot of UV light um to kind of make our our tricks happen, uh a lot of the clothes are UV. So when you put these on stage, they just shine in them in kind of black light and they're totally fluorescent which looks amazing. We have costumes for all these girls that come on and dance with us. These big girls, they come and do the the song, the dance, during the song "Big Girl." Uh and all of my shoes for all the tours are made by a French designer called Christian Louboutin and he makes all our shoes um like these for instance. Uh and they're good because they're all made to my kind of foot because I dance so much and I do things like dancing on my toes. And when you dance on your toes, that when you do stuff like that all the time, it's it kind of goes, it gets really hard on your feet and on your knees and so I used to rip all my muscles. So he made me shoes that kind of hold up my feet and all my muscles. So, it has its perks. Uh, yeah, and the the whole idea is that it's kind of 1950s psychedelia. So you've got these quite Beetlejuice-esque Zoo suits. This is my favorite. Just because it's got forks and spoons and knives on it. It's so random. So the whole thing is that everything I do is really homemade. Um and the more homemade something is, no matter how successful it gets, if it's homemade it comes from the heart and you can always tell the difference.

Hey, this is Mika. It's been an honor and a privilege.