Music / Bristol Sounds
Review: Mika, Lloyds Amphitheatre – ‘Queer joy simmered through his performance’
I bought MIKA’s Life in Cartoon Motion on CD in a Woolworths in Birmingham when I was six years old – and, listening to the chatter of the crowd while we wait for his set, it’s clear I’m not the only one.
I overhear someone explaining how they learnt the alphabet in French to the tune of We Are Golden while someone else jostles past us, adamant that they’re the ‘biggest MIKA fan’.
We’ve all grown up alongside MIKA, and 16 years after the release of his debut album, none of us have forgotten any words.
is needed now More than ever
The performance is bursting with noughties nostalgia, and tracks like Lollipop and Grace Kelly sound just as sweet over a decade later. He only has to sing one word for us to legitimately lose our minds, taking care to tease us with Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), repeatedly pausing and playing the intro.
It turns out that he kept us waiting for an outfit change, so we aren’t too mad. In the most MIKA fashion, there’s at least four, including a giant cape, a tiger mask, and an ungodly amount of sequins. He jokes that he looks like “that one crazy guy in Sainsburys at 2pm”. We can’t believe that he knows what Sainsburys is, and wonder if we’ll ever catch him at the one in Clifton Down shopping centre.
Charged by the summer solstice (“I love the daylight nighttime, I can see all of your faces!”), he somehow breaks free of the stage.
Running through the crowd, he’s still singing Big Girl while security try to catch him. He changes the final words to “Bristol, you are beautiful” and we’re all reeling that MIKA is real, not just a figment of our hazy 2000s imagination.
It feels incredibly special to see MIKA during pride month. There’s a queer joy simmering throughout his performance, erupting with final track Love Today and the triumphant lyrics ‘Everybody’s gonna love today, gonna love today/Anyway you want to, anyway you’ve got to’.
Before beginning Billy Brown (‘While it was all going accordingly to plan/Then Billy Brown fell in love with another man’), he shares that though Billy’s tale is a hard one, it was one that was easier to tell through the support of his fans.
For lots of us, it suddenly clicks why Billy Brown was our favourite song aged ten. The crowd hasn’t only grown up alongside him – we’ve been figuring out our sexuality alongside him too.
At Bristol Sounds, MIKA solidified himself as enduring pop royalty. He bears the pop crown beautifully, and even more boldly.
Main photo: Mia Smith
Read next:
- Self Esteem on her love of Bristol art and politics and being her authentic self
- Self Esteem to play Bristol Sounds show
- Long-running music festival cancelled with ‘heavy hearts’ and ‘deep regret’
[become-a-member
Listen to the Bristol24/7 Behind the Headlines podcast:
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
