Mika – ‘Grace Kelly’

1 February 2007

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like Queen, and those who’d sooner listen to roadworks. I’m in the latter, correct camp. Mika is clearly in the former: aside from name-checking Freddie Mercury, he could just as well have named this whole Freddie-style flamboyant piano-driven track after him instead. Maybe that would have been too obvious even for a Queen fan. Whatever about his Freddie impression, it’s not clear to me why he’s trying to be like Grace Kelly, of all people, in the first place: has he designs on marrying into minor European royalty? No, he’s “gone identity mad” – meant as a cri de coeur from all music acts who are told they should be more like someone else, though it now reads like a British right-wing news anchor reviewing tomorrow’s front page headlines.

In fairness, ‘Grace Kelly’ clears the low bar of being better than Queen. Essentially it’s a fun and frothy pop song, buoyed by its rolling piano chords and playful lyrics. Mika sells it with theatrical swagger and light-operatic bombast: sound familiar? His falsetto gibberish in the chorus (it’s “I could be hurtful, I could be purple”, mondegreen fans) even harks back to the riper stretches of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Still, even if for all his Freddie aspirations Mika is more like a ’00s Leo Sayer, this jukebox musical version of Queen without any actual Queen songs is the best it can be.