Mika: Grace Kelly

Queen, as anyone's dad will tell you, were a great band. They had a great drummer, a great guitarist, the prerequisite boring bass player and in Freddie Mercury a brilliant, flamboyant showman of a singer. The trouble is that Queen didn't have a whole lot of credibility. Their pop sensibility and dertermination to dress up and look like they were enjoying themselves means that even today rockers and indie bands shy away from mentioning Queen as an influence. The efforts of The Darkness didn't help.

Luckily, pop stars don't go in for all that moody, artless authenticity and thanks to them we get to listen to dizzy, silly pop songs like Grace Kelly which marries all the best bits about queen-the flamboyance, the soaring tune, the energy-with a very silly lyric.

Mika doesn't try to hide that he sounds a lot like Freddie too, which is really no bad thing. In the Youtube clip above you can hear Grace Kelly for yourself. Although it is possible that that is not the official video. If his other songs approach this standard, I would be promising big things for Mika this year, even if I didn't already know about the big publicity machine gearing up behind him.