Since Mika’s wildly successful debut in 2007 with the album Life in Cartoon Motion, he has often described his career – and its accompanying eight million sales – as an extended plea to be accepted. “I used to dance in my room,” he once said of his early years, “like a private ceremony of begging people to like you.” 

To achieve this he has gone to ever more extravagant lengths, even coating himself in coloured paint for one promotion, in a sort of Jackson Pollock-goes-to-Benetton moment. But to launch his fourth album, due out later this year, the flamingo-legged showman has forsaken the day-glo and found an unlikely ally in the shape of fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh. This film is the 70-year-old German’s first ever music video, and like many of his portraits, it reveals his subject in a previously unseen light.

Mika as observed by Lindbergh shares many similarities with the images that made the photographer’s name – in particular, his original ‘supermodels’ shoot for US Vogue in 1988, which featured Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz. The simple styling of Mika in a plain shirt and the use of monochrome are Lindbergh’s calling cards: “When you use black and white, you take it out of the real world, out of the banal,” he says.

It’s unclear how Lindbergh first encountered Mika, though it seems unlikely he had his 2007 stomper “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)” as his ringtone. But the inquisitiveness and sense of calm that epitomize Linbergh’s portraits have allowed a different side of the singer to emerge – stripped of kitsch disguises, Mika’s vulnerability is tangible. Lindbergh’s best photographs have a narrative quality that can give still moments the feel of a silent movie. It is ironic that in his pop promo debut he has made a movie that feels like a still-life. For Mika, the locked-off camera puts his face – and his lyrics – under unforgiving scrutiny. What we find is heartfelt, bittersweet and rather poignant. Who knew he had it in him.

Tom Horan is Culture Editor-at-Large at NOWNESS