Mik Artistik: 'Just because I’m 70 next birthday doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say'

Tomorrow he’ll back in more familiar garb fronting the band Mik Artistik’s Ego Trip at an instore gig at Jumbo Records to launch their new album, Pop. The title, he says, is deliberately ridiculous. “I’m 70 next birthday and Jonny (Flockton, his long-time musical sidekick) is nearly 50 and we’re two tired old men. Pop is about youth and vigour and optimism and this album is not that optimistic, it’s very dark in places and it’s quite reflective,” he says. “It’s also a bit manic in places and angry. There’s a track called Panic in the World which has a really hardcore techno drumbeat and I’m talking about ‘three wheels on my wagon...help me breathe’.”

In another song, Old Guy, he muses on two older men meeting in a street. “We look at each other, we’re both going to die,” he says, recalling the lyric, adding: “That’s the flavour of (the album), so Pop seemed a contradictory title, but at the same time there’s hope and optimism as well there. There’s another track called So Many Things which is a long, epic ballad and it’s about my love of the little things.”

Elsewhere in Squishy Squishy, he talks about his occasional frustrations as a painter – something he’s returned to lately after 30 years of drawing portraits of people on paper bags – a pay-what-you-feel sideline for which he became renowned. “We’re running the gamut, leaping from one extreme to another and ‘pop’ is just a nice word to encapsulate it because all human life is there,” Mik says. “Just because I’m 70 next birthday doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say.”

Iggy Pop, a steadfast admirer of Mik’s, recently played another album track, Bin A Long Time, on his BBC 6 Music show, while Gideon Coe also gave Flumptious City an airing. The latter is one of a number of songs for which Mik has co-designed animated videos with his friend Dan Weldon, who teaches film studies at Leeds Beckett University. “I did the drawings and I gave him some rough stop-motion animation and he trimmed it and married the track to the images.”

As well as the album launch gig, Mik will perform at Armley Festival on September 14 and is touring again in November and December. Recalling a recent festival appearance in Cumbria when he recited poetry and performed acoustically when there was a powercut, he says: “I delight in stuff like that. I actually like it when things start to fall apart, that’s when I come alive.”

Mik Artistik’s Ego Trip will play at Jumbo Records, Leeds from 6pm on Friday August 30. https://www.mikartistik.com/home