I can be brown, I can be blue

Over the last couple of weeks I appear to have seen a huge number of gigs live and not managed to blog about them, so here is a frantic catch-up

If you've not heard of Mika yet, then you probably will be soon.  He's Universal Records big hope for 2007 and has already been signed up to soundtrack an American 'Red' advert as bizarrely as the new face of Paul Smith.

Mika's is originally from Beirut, but now lives in London and is a dead cert for your new favourite pop artist of the year if you like the Scissor Sisters. He's tall, good looking, very colourful and seem to be channelling the voice of Freddie Mercury. I don't know if he's gay or not, but he's certainly fabulous.

Last Wednesday, we headed down to World Famous jazz bar, Ronnie Scott's, in the middle of Soho for the very first time to see Mika get a bunch of press people together at lunch time and sing to them. To make us like him more we were fed some chicken with very salty chips and as much free white wine as we could all guzzle down our ligging throats.

We'd had the amazing dancetastic Cutting Crew-esque Relax - Take It Easy through on a DJ promo list early in summer, but had only just got the album sampler for the forthcoming Life in Colour Motion the week before. This was a good thing, as we knew the songs and could sing along as we all know pretending we are the pop star ourselves at gigs makes them 100% better. But, even if we hadn't this would have been fun as one newbie to Mika declared upon leaving "Bloody Hell, that sounded like a greatest hits set."

Mika sang 5 fabulous songs (and 1 bizarre one), including the aforementioned Relax - a song which is so good that if you'd not heard the rest of his material, you'd expect to be the greatest thing on his album. Amazingly everything is this good. Love Today goes all Beck on our asses with Mika chatting away before it turns into a big stomping chorus, Grace Kelly talks about his love of the great screen legend and features the best Freddie impression we've ever heard; Billy Brown is a cute, tear worthy tale of a man who gets married but has a secret gay lover and the gigantic Big Girl (You Are Beautiful) sings about his love for the non skinnies among us and is getting pummelled, courtesy of us, on the Popstarz dancefloor. His vocal range is incredible and it's very easy to warm to him. The only somewhat strange thing about the gig was his encore - a song called Lollipop which wouldn't seem out of place if sung by Gwen Stefani accompanied by part of a musical.

And as for the venue - well we'd never been to Ronnie Scott's before, but if you ever get the chance, I'd totally recommend you go. It's exactly as you might expect - chairs and tables and lines of seats surrounding the stage as if you were back in the 1940s - it's very like a much smaller version of Blackpool's Funny Girls venue. I'd love to see it on a proper night, but I can imagine it's unbelievably smoky.

Finally, if you're in London, I'd recommend you can catch Mika at Dingwalls next week, otherwise you can catch him on Jools Holland on Friday, or at regional dates round the country next week.

Update:

iTunes have Billy Brown as their free download this week.

Check out his Myspace
Download Relax and  Grace Kelly

and use this funky music player to

listen to two acoustic tracks from forthcoming EP Dodgy Holiday