Mika will be releasing his 4th album “No Place in Heaven” (due June 16 via Casablanca/Republic)… Billboard asked about Freddie Mercury influence on the track ‘Last Party’.
BILLBOARD
26 May 2015 by Andrew Hampp, New York
Extract:
BILLBOARD: Tell me about how Freddie Mercury inspired the song “Last Party” from No Place in Heaven.
MIKA: It’s about, in a sense, Freddie Mercury when he found out he was HIV positive, and had this very strong reaction that kind of manifested into him closing himself up in a nightclub for a couple days and having this mad party. It’s probably a myth, I don’t know how true it is, but certainly it’s a story that’s quite well-known. It made me think about when you find out terrible news, how do you deal with it? I wanted to put that into a song as best I could, and tried to make it as intimate as possible and this thing that I crafted and the way I produced it, I tried to make it as out-of-context of contemporary pop music as I could make it.
And it’s weird because with pop music, you have a particular opportunity to describe the things that are really hard to describe a normal daily life or normal words. This strange combination of terrible news and that rush of adrenaline — I know because in my life I’ve had all these awful things happen but this strange rush of adrenaline at the same time and trying to convey that in a song is almost one of the most representative ways of that strange clash of emotions. And you find that in a lot of these songs — “All She Wants” and “Good Wife” also have this mix of sweet and joyful with the bitterness of life.