Perfume Genius

It is a warm day in June, and Mike and I are at the Barbican Centre in London. We’re here to catch an exhibition entitled ‘Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction’, partly because he’s always had a thing for the genre’s wilder imaginary futures, and partly because the musical (and visual) universe of his fourth and latest album, ‘No Shape’, contains such distinct, other-worldly influences, among them 1980s movies such as ‘Labyrinth’ (the cult David Bowie vehicle) and ‘Legend’ (Ridley Scott’s fantasy epic featuring a 22-year-old Tom Cruise).

The slightly built Mike, 36, is dressed casually in jeans, a denim jacket and black boots with wedge heels – a far cry from the dresses and jumpsuits that characterise his on-stage persona. He’s at the beginning of a European tour, and his career – 750,000 monthly Spotify listeners at the time of writing, performances on ‘Letterman’, critical plaudits in all places from ‘The New Yorker’ to totallydublin.ie – is rocketing.

Alan, who plays keyboard in Perfume Genius (along with Tom Bromley on bass and Hervé Picard on drums), is both the title and subject of the album’s closing song. Indeed, the stresses, strains and rewards of everyday life it describes, especially in relation to long-term relationships, offer some of its most poignant lyrical moments. “It’s not real to want too much contentment,” says Mike. “I think it’s about realising that things are never going to be perfect in either direction. Maybe that’s less dramatic, but it can be as beautiful and sacred as young love.”

Live, Mike plays ‘Alan’ alone at the piano. For a song as personal and emotional, it’s interesting to note that the classically trained Alan gave Mike exacting comments as he worked on it in their hotel room in Los Angeles.

“What I love most about Mike’s voice is the way it comes at you in shards,” says Blake Mills, producer of ‘No Shape’. “Even at its driest and most bare moments on the record, it’s still this shimmering thing. Working with Mike is the most open-hearted and creatively rewarding experience I’ve ever had being a producer.”

The bullying may be in the past, but Mike still feels its effects. “I feel like my whole view is shaped on it. The way I think about people, I still expect the world to treat me the way that it did when I was 12. You know what I mean? It’s an embarrassing thing. Even if the world has changed, I would never know.” Has it made it hard for him to accept love, to be in a relationship? “Yeah. I mean, because in some weird, twisted-up way, with all that bullying, it almost feels right somehow, or how it’s supposed to be.” There’s a moment of silence, the weight of the past hanging in the air, before he touches on a thought that contains a kind of salvation. “I make music now and enhance all the qualities that I got shit for growing up. There’s something really cathartic and free about it.”

Mike’s parents divorced when he was a teenager, but his childhood home doesn’t sound like it was a particularly unhappy place. In fact, it was a place where Mike could perform and be himself (among other things he created a website solely dedicated to the Icelandic singer Björk, whom he calls “my first true obsession”). But still, he dropped out of high school in his final year to escape the aggression of his fellow pupils, only to be hospitalised after being attacked on the street.

His mother and her husband are both recovering alcoholics. Mike describes her as “a very spiritual, magical kind of lady, who taught deaf and behaviourally challenged kids.” When he was a child they had a kitchen witch, a doll on a broomstick that people keep as a good luck charm, a tradition he has continued into adult life.

Mike’s father was once a wrestling coach and is now a salesman. He is, Mike says, “very practical, very serious. I was a little more emotional and strange. We didn’t understand each other and we fought a lot when I was growing up.” It’s different now. “Weirdly, I feel the least judged by him out of almost anyone ever. I feel a lot of compassion for my dad. I think he really thought about what it would be like to be me and I think he really understands me.” “Not to call my dad out, but I went to see ‘King Kong’ with him, the remake, and he was crying. I walked out and I was, like, ‘Why are you crying?’ ‘Because King Kong died’. I was, like, ‘You’re not King Kong. If you’re sad, you can talk about your feelings. You’re not just some fucking gorilla,’ you know what I mean?!”

It wasn’t until he was in his twenties, in 2005, that Mike, by now living in Brooklyn, started recording music. “I was doing it by myself at home. I didn’t think anyone else was going to hear it,” he says. In 2008, he started a MySpace page under the name Perfume Genius. The UK label Transparent released his first single. He was then picked up by indie label Matador, and his first album, ‘Learning’, was released in 2010. Since then, there’ve been three more: ‘Put Your Back N 2 It’, ‘Too Bright’ and this year’s ‘No Shape’, each gaining him more fans, more acclaim and bigger production budgets. “Now, I’m going to studios, and they are progressively more fancy,” he says. “Before I just wrote for piano and voice; now I’m writing for an orchestra. Or at least one dude that plays strings over and over in order to sound like an orchestra.”

He feels too much of the exhibition’s focus was on square-jawed American male archetypes conquering other planets. These are men who could really belong in any genre, who aren’t specific to science fiction. Put them in the Wild West, put them on a Second World War battlefield, they are the same person: an American masculine archetype that’s hardly interesting or otherworldly. This hyper masculine world is not the world of Perfume Genius, though Mike says: “I’m still attracted to that idea of what a man is supposed to be. When I see a withheld, stoic dude, that’s kind of hot to me. I wish it wasn’t. As much as I rile against it, I’m kind of into it.” Mike laughs, saying that Alan “tricked me into thinking he was really confident and easy-going, but he’s not! No one really is, though. That’s the secret about those dudes too. The more stereotypically masculine and strong they are, the more of a little bitch they are in real life.”

Speaking of masculine exemplars, Bruce Springsteen has been a song-writing influence lately: “I was trying to write an American dude song. I kind of tried to think of writing music in that Springsteen way. Bruce is so everyman and yet he has such a line to his emotions, and somehow it’s not threatening to anyone. Men are not threatened by it even though it’s emotional. I don’t understand why. Maybe it’s the tool belt, or the jeans, or whatever.”

If he’s some way away from Springsteen’s level of fame, Mike is at least becoming increasingly familiar with playing to bigger audiences. His 2014 appearance on the ‘Late Show with David Letterman’ was followed this year with one on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’, beaming him into yet more mainstream living rooms. Last year, Prada asked Mike to record a stripped-back cover of the Elvis Presley classic ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ for a fragrance ad. “They just reached out,” he says. “They wanted that song. They wanted it dark and sexy and they knew I could do that. I really like Elvis. I consider him an influence, especially on this album. I’ve always been slightly obsessed with him and his look and the way he sings, which is so campy, so overly masculine that it goes full circle and becomes feminine.”

A former addict (“Everything except heroin” is his line), Mike has been sober for eight years. The timeline coincides neatly with the rise of his creative alter ego as Perfume Genius. “Drugs do soothe the same things that the creative thing soothes, and they’re way better and way easier,” he laughs. “They make everything feel like a big experience, like something dramatic is happening.” The last time he took drugs, Mike says he found himself “really willing to die. Then I woke up and I cared again. I didn’t want to ever get there again. I still crave that kind of thing, but music kind of gives you that same feeling.”

What about happiness? Is there a danger that it’s boring? “I think so. It’s not very cool. I think it’s just basic. And my ultimate fear is to be basic. It also seems like an end. Happiness seems like an ending to me.”

Mike looks every inch a gay icon, his body rising, bending and popping out of his Jacquemus jumpsuit, shimmering in a flamboyantly ruffled satin shirt made by his friend Amber Smith. The crowd is captivated. I watch as Mike, resplendent in his fabulous outfit, puts his pain, his anger, his bitchiness, his love and his contentment on display for us. I watch as he soars beyond the hatred thrown at him through his childhood, as he holds a blazing torch up to light the way for anyone who has been violently marginalised and as, finally, he sits down at the piano with Alan, telling a story that’s dark, complex, invigorating, hopeful.

During the show, a single voice in the audience sounds out: “Mike for prime minister!” It’s picked up by the rest of us. “It’s too hard to do, though,” he replies before the punch line, delivered with a shy campy shrug.

“I’ll do it.”