Mika at Wembley Arena

He makes his entrance sealed inside a massive suspended wheel, spinning like a hamster. The image is absurd and faintly Chaplinesque, but before you can decide what to make of it, the voice arrives. That unmistakable high tenor, vaulting without warning into a piercing falsetto. It hasn’t weathered much since the early 2000s, when it first turned up on the radio. It is, of course, the voice of Mika, born Michael Holbrook Penniman, who returns to London, the city he grew up in, for the second night at Wembley Arena on his Spinning Out Tour.

The tour began in France and is set to travel across Europe, the United States and Canada. The Lebanese artist is promoting his new album Hyperlove, released last month, a theatrical, synth-laden examination of love in the modern world. With Mika, the message has never been especially obscure. Love is the engine. Love is the answer. Love, in various shades of neon, is the point.

The stage is relatively sober. A few factory-size gears hang overhead, evoking our “modern times”. The band, a drummer, two guitarists, one pianist and a duo of backup singer-dancers, is crisp and unobtrusive. A screen at the back of the stage flashes colourful visuals recalling his early “glam-pop” aesthetic. Nothing distracts from the main act, Mika himself, who carries the show with a kind of delighted authority. At 42, he moves with the nervous energy of someone half his age, twisting, jumping, rarely still.

He opens with Modern Times from the new record, a song about the friction between romantic longing and the chaos of contemporary life. Soon, the first notes of Relax, Take It Easy trigger a roar in the audience. It is clear that the older songs still land with particular force, yet the new material is hardly treated as filler. Fans are already mouthing the lyrics to Hyperlove with surprising fluency, greeting the new songs with the same unembarrassed joy.

The goofy noughties showman is never far from the surface. He reintroduces Lollipop as a gentle nursery rhyme before detonating into the familiar, sugar-rush version, climbing onto the piano with a mischievous grin. In Spinning Out (also from Hyperlove), a song about the sensation of everything tipping beyond control, he literalises the metaphor, rotating inside that suspended wheel like the hands of a clock. “When you spin out,” he sings, “take comfort in the sound.”

There is, throughout, a great deal of dancing, onstage and off. During his French hit Elle Me Dit, he instructs the audience to dance with one another; this critic complies, somewhat awkwardly, with the reviewer sitting next to her. When he reaches Big Girl, You Are Beautiful, which he says he wrote in his flat in Earl’s Court after a woman on television reminded him that everyone, regardless of appearance, is beautiful, he descends straight into the pit, dancing among the crowd. He makes his way to the back of the room, up into the wings, determined to distribute his attention evenly.

Flamboyance frames the night, with three costume changes: black, then pink, then a green, glittering suit. “I wasn’t going to wear black all night, was I?” he jokes. A giant rainbow inflates from his piano. Later, he sings his hit Grace Kelly into an enormous candy-coloured megaphone. What Mika offers feels rare: unapologetic fun, uncomplicated pleasure, and a genuine belief in the power of love. He still knows how to land a hit, and more importantly, how to make a crowd feel beautiful. It’s impossible not to hyperlove Mika.