A guitar at five years old, a school report with an E in music, and a studio floor that needed scrubbing. The Czech pop singer Mikolas Josef built his career from exactly these unpromising pieces. Born in Prague on the fourth of October, 1995, he spent his childhood in Znojmo and a small village in the south of the country, far from any music industry machinery. What he had instead was a stubborn sense that songs could carry him somewhere bigger. Mikolas Josef was born on October 4, 1995.
An E in music class
The early signs were not encouraging. He started guitar lessons young, but between 2006 and 2008 he attended an art school for guitar and never managed to finish. Then came the gymnasium, where his music grade was an E — the kind of mark that suggests a teacher saw little future in the subject. Yet around the same time, at seventeen, he won a gold medal for solo acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. The boy who could not pass music class could still hold a stage.
Money was scarce, so he turned to modelling, walking in shows and posing for brands like Diesel, Replay and Prada. But he walked away from that world, unwilling to accept how it operated. What followed was less glamorous: busking on the streets of Prague, Oslo, Zurich, Hamburg and Vienna. He also cleaned a recording studio on weekdays so that once a month, when the place sat empty, he could record his own music there. The mop paid for the microphone.
He also cleaned a recording studio on weekdays so that once a month, when the place sat empty, he could record his own music there.
First singles and a Eurovision refusal
The first result of those late-night sessions came in 2015, when he self-released a debut single called 'Hands Bloody'. A year later, 'Free' climbed into the top fifteen in Czechia and suddenly the busker had a chart hit. He moved to Vienna at the invitation of producer Nikodem Milewski and kept writing. When Czech television offered him a shot at Eurovision with a song called 'My Turn', he said no — the song did not fit him. He would rather wait for one that did.
That song arrived as 'Lie to Me', released in November 2017. It won the Czech national selection and carried him to the Eurovision stage in Lisbon the following year. Against far more established performers, Mikolas Josef finished sixth, with 66 points from the juries and 215 from viewers. No Czech entry had ever placed that high. The kid with the E in music had just delivered the country's best result in the contest's history.
The song refused to stop. By May 2020, 'Lie to Me' had reached 30 million streams on Spotify, making it the most played Czech song on the platform. That spring he signed an international deal with Sony Music and RCA Records in Munich, then released 'Me Gusta' and landed on a Forbes list of inspiring people. But the major-label machinery did not hold him for long. He and his family founded their own independent label, Vivienne Records, and took control of the music themselves.
The first release on the new label, 'Acapella', came out in May 2019 and went straight to number one in Czechia — his first chart-topper at home. A year later he sold out the Forum Karlin in Prague with a show called My Name Is Mikolas, backed by six African vocalists. From a school report that said E to a sold-out arena in his own capital, Mikolas Josef had turned every rejection into a reason to keep moving. The studio floor was clean, and the songs were finally his.