MIKA - MIKA'S BULLY MOTIVE

MIKA'S BULLY MOTIVE

'We Are Golden' singer Mika draws on being bullied when writing songs, saying he always hoped his insulting words would stick in their heads through his catchy melodies.

Mika writes catchy songs to torment his school bullies.

The singer - whose new album 'The Boy Who Knew Too Much' focuses on his troubled teen years - admits his original inspiration when writing easy-to-remember melodies was to irritate the pupils who had made his life miserable.

He said: "When I was 14, I thought to myself 'I can do this' and I thought that if I was a freak, I was going to become a beautiful freak. If I was going to write insults to people who were mean to me, I was going to do it in a pop song because then it'd be stuck in their head. Writing songs was all about empowerment.

"With the new album, I wanted to write from the perspective of where I first started writing songs from. I wanted to go into it and embrace the darkness and the toughness of that period of my life, too.

"It's so hard being 16. Or 15 even. It's hard looking at yourself naked in the mirror and thinking 'Who the hell's ever going to want to sleep with this?' But that's the truth."

The 'We Are Golden' singer says he survived school with the knowledge that he could gain success through his fledgling music career.

He added to the Flintshire Chronicle newspaper: "It's hard not having money, it's hard wondering what you're going to do with your life. It's hard being picked on, it's hard being screamed at for a million different reasons. All those things are terrible. But then there's so much joy in realising it all, coming home when you're 14 from that first night out when you've snuck out and it's like 'Oh my God! I have potential and power'.

"Back then my music was me saying to the world 'I know you laugh at me, but I can do something you can't do. I'm making my home-made bomb and I'm going to launch it in your face one day'."

"That was a really powerful thing growing up."