Mark Ronson

Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading creative figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the music producer and songwriter Mark Ronson. Having spent his early years in London, he grew up in Manhattan, began working as a DJ, as a teenager,

and quickly made a name for himself on the New York club scene of the nineteen nineties. He moved into music production and in two thousand and six co wrote and co produced the Amy Winehouse album Back to Black, The record won five Grammys and Mark Ronson himself scooped the producer of the year award. Since then, he's released five solo albums and has worked with some of the most successful names in pop to create massive hits.

The winner of 10 Grammys and two Brits, he added an Academy Award to his list of accolades in 2018 as co-writer of Shallow from the film A Star Is Born. He was also Oscar nominated for his work as executive producer, composer and songwriter for the soundtrack to the film Barbie. More recently, Mark Ronson has written a book called Night People, a memoir about his time as a DJ in 90s New York. Mark Ronson, welcome to this cultural life.

Thank you so much. It's very nice to see you again. Great to be here. Um DJ record producer, songwriter, musician in that order? DJ ra they all blur together for me. Uh because my passion I mean, growing up I played in band in school, then I became a DJ, then I became a producer. I still love DJing. It's still Something I can't seem to give up, even though it's now my ears are battered in my back and it's so bad I'm fifty years old, but I would just say all of those things.

All of those things. So if you met somebody on a plane they say what do you do? Say I say I make music. I I it's just the easiest thing to say usually.

On This Cultural Life my guests discuss the most significant creative influences that have informed their own career. And you've chosen your parents. Tell us about your earliest memories of home life as a young child.

My parents were quite young when they had me and they liked to party. They went to clubs. They were out in this is like late seventies London. They were a cool young couple. Um So I'd wake up a lot of the time in the middle of the night, walk out into this crazy reverie that was going on and like

fifty people partying. I mean I I don't remember seeing specifically Keith Moon and Christopher Reeve and these people, but like they I know that they were there. I th that was their my dad worked in music and so that was his circle. Your dad was a music publisher. He was a music publisher, yeah. He had a music publishing company and his claim to fame at that time was he signed the songwriter who wrote Bucks Fizz Making Your Mind. Which one? Eurovision. Which one Eurovision?

So that was like his big hit. He later went on to manage Andrew Roachford, he discovered Roachford. So he d he had a great ear for music. He just didn't play. But my earliest memory is really being woken up by Robin Williams in the middle of the night. It was the era of Mork and Mindy, my mother knew I was a huge fan, she probably brought him back to the house from the club, like they were probably a bit wasted. Like, Come on, Robin, you gotta come into my son's room.

And it's strange that, you know, to of course to wake up and be like, Why is the guy from television in front of me? But I was And I think he kind of was like tucked me in and was probably ready to get back to the party and he was leaving the room and I was like Robin and he knew exactly what I wanted as a little kid. He just turned round and went nanu nanu. He just gave me the Finger gesture thing.

I think with the finger gesture thing. Um and And I remember night being this time of excitement and loud music and to be honest, daytime was the opposite because we know what goes up must come down and daytime if you're partying is the hangover and So your parents were on a come down a lot of the time?

Yeah. I don't wanna disparage them and w th they talked about it but yeah, they were and they were really good people but they were not good together. There was a lot of shouting and just it was a volatile atmosphere in our house. It was not nice. A lot of music in the house generally, I mean not just when parssies were on.

I remember it in the night and I remember it in my dad's car. It was always music. In the daytime I actually don't remember it. I just remember it just being quiet and sort of shouting intense. I might have found music anyway, I might have become a DJ but I'm sure there's some kind of link between this idea of night is fun, day maybe not so much. My dad had amazing still does. He has

the incredible taste he loved Slying the Family Stone and Graham Central Station and Steely Dan and Parliament Funkadelic. And in fact when I showed my dad the book I was like, Are you okay with all the things that are in here? And he said, Yeah. He's like the only thing is

I never listened to hot chocolate. I just love that my dad's whole takeaway from the whole thing about the book was and that's no dist hot chocolate. I actually really like them and I DJ their music. But yes, he he loved great music. He was, you know, in that first wave of British adolescents who listen to Radio Caroline and Pirate Radio and would race to the record shop.

There was a record shop on South Moulton Street where he'd pick up little Stevie Wonder, like just that just the caricature of like the English soul fanatic in the in the early sixties. So I got a lot of my love for that kind of music from him.

This is St John's Wood in North London. So a very affluent child. I mean overall looking back at that period of time, a happy childhood? I wouldn't say it was happy. I know there were I don't have a lot of memories from zero to five because who does really? I mean I have flashes and things, but I remember just always walking on eggshells around the house, especially in the day, it was it was not a happy place to be. When my parents split

things got very different. My mum a few years later married and met my stepdad, who's a a very t talented musician from the band Foreigner and um They also liked a party and they had that thing but it was more jolly, I guess what it was. It was a little less So you moved to New York City when you were probably seven or eight years Seven, yeah.

From St. John's Wood. I mean that was the was there an element of sort of culture shock? I mean, did you feel how you Well you Greeted by the other kids with Yeah. Oh no, it was crazy'cause in nineteen eighty three in New York, I mean in America in general there was the the red scare, the cold war and so

You're like, how does that apply to someone from St John's Wood? But the he the people called me call me because I had a funny accent, even though I was from Because you're European. Not Estonia. Yeah. So I remember Oh, the kids seized me for having this English accent, so I obviously ditched it as quick as I could, came back to England, saw all my English friends two months later they're like, Why do you sound like a Yank already? you know, so I'm just like, Whoa definitely

three months in, I don't fit in in either of these places, but I I did make good friends quickly in New York. But I was I definitely stuck out like a sore thumb when I got there. And so there's a new family unit formed in New York because your mum remarried to McJones, who is the guitarist and uh the founder and chief songwriter and producer, actually co producer of the band Foreigner, who were massive in the eighties.

He had a Hope Studio as well where you so did he let you in there? Was that a kind of Aladdin's cave for you at a young age? Yeah, no, it was amazing. He was he was so generous at showing me like his equipment and some of the equipment was d insane, like this the Sing Clavier which was this nineteen eighties

programmer sampler that were like Trevor Horn used to make Frankie goes to Hollywood relax. Like this was like the top of the line equipment. And as a nine year old kid I had no business putting my grubby mitts on it. But he showed me how to do it and I remember Stumbling through sounds and finding the lead melody sound from Terrence Trent Darby Wishing Well by accident. The doot doot do.

So I c was like, Oh so I wonder if I could remake the entire song so I slowly reprogrammed the drumbeat and, you know, it was so exciting to me and I remember My parents were probably having some crazy party and bringing some one of my stepdad's musician friends in the studio and be like, Look what I did And then just person just being friendly, like, Yeah, it's wishing well, kid. Like what do you want me to say? But I was I was so

I loved being in his studio making those demos and he was on tour a lot so he let me use the studio while he was away. Coming back to London once or twice a year to visit my dad, I would hear these things like whether it was Terrence Trent Darby or EMF or Brosso the Wonder Stuff where Stone Roses, these great things that were happening are very exciting in England. Wouldn't we heard in New York? It's um and taking them back and playing them for my friends, yeah.

Well th I mean that's really interesting as a formative experience in itself, isn't it? I mean it kind of that's the roots of your own very, very diverse musical, the eclectic taste that you have. Absolutely. I remember walking into It's not even there anymore but there was Kensington Market where they sold bootleg T shirts and things and I remember seeing that cover of Fool's Gold, the painting of the dolphin and just being like, What is that? And going over and picking up that record.

The stone roses. That was significant for you that that record was Ed. Yes, because I think I mean jumping much later to version and that idea of this great funky break beat underneath these very psychedelic vocals and guitars, it was it's almost something I've been chasing in some way ever since. Your next creative inspiration Mark Ronson real cultural turning point was hearing a hip-hop record in 1992. It's They Reminisce Over You by Pete Rock and C.L. Smith. What impact did it have?

I mean, it was just such a line in the sand, like it just sort of changed everything. Up to that point, I knew hip hop as a casual fan, I knew the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy and things like that. But at that point I'd been playing guitar in a band and our band was doing quite well. For a bunch of high school kids we were playing at C B G Bs and playing some decent shows but

I was technically everybody around me was so much more proficient. They would shred us on the guitar and I was kind of like a a B plus. and then my best friend at the time who I'd played a lot of music with was Sean Lennon and he came back from a summer And he was suddenly playing like Antonio Carlos Jobim. Like I was like, Whoa, if this is what it is to be a guitar player, I might n need to find another angle or a lane if I wanna be in music.

And it just happened to dovetail with the moment of hearing this song they reminisce over you. And what was so different about it from the other hip hop that I've been into is it had this melancholy mournfulness that just got under my skin. And at that moment I was like, I only wanna be around music that sounds like this and I wasn't a rapper.

I didn't know anything about producing hip-hop, but I was like DJing and Turntables, that is maybe my way into this genre of music that I love. So that song kind of changed everything for me. Boy. You say the melancholy, so the tone was really important as well. It wasn't as abrasive, it didn't have that swagger that so many of the hip hop records up to that point possibly had. I think I want to

Right. I think a lot of the stuff of the production of Public Enemy and those things at the time were fueled by these like James Brown very aggressive break beats. And this was a sample from this jazz musician named Tom Scott, who was covering a song by the Jefferson Airplane, this very hippie-ish, sort of sweet, elegiac

So it was this weird mix of soul and hippie and jazz and the song they reminisce over you is actually it's a song dedicated to a d a friend of the groups who had died, so everything about it is about mourning the loss of the absence of innocence and f and having a father in your life and these kind of things. So I loved it, you know, that way when you hear a song that making you sad but you cannot stop listening to it because you're chasing the egg. You'll

breaking the song down there and describing it do you think you were doing that at the time and thinking, Where's that sample from? Why is that beat working in that way? Did you have that sort of analytical musical mind even at that point? I I think the first time I heard it I was just having a purely emotional, overwhelmed reaction to it and then

after that. Of course now you can shazam a song, you can go on whosample dot com, find out the thing. Like at that point it probably took weeks for me to even find out what the sample was and then I when I went to university a few months later there was one guy in my school who was like the oracle, this older kid of all the old sample records and had them because That Tom Scott record at the time was a hundred dollar record. So nob nobody had it, so 'cause

go to his room like every day after class and sometimes I'd just be waiting outside his room for him to come back and he'd be like, Oh my god, this kid again you know, he's like four years older than me and then I would see me and like, Can we listen to the Tom Scott song? you know, like that's it was so Sweet and and sort of archaic, but like if there was a song that you liked, you had to befriend somebody who had it, earn their trust, and then you could hear that song.

How important was that particular track in leading you to becoming a DJ in the first place of thinking I w I want to do this sort of thing myself? It was incredibly important I think because it was the kind of music that it was slightly more underground, so it was the kind of music you had to find a specialty record store and go and get that. And then that sort of

happened at the same time I went to this big rave one night. There was this all ages rave in this club downtown and I saw the DJ in the back room play hip hop and this kid couldn't have been a year or two older than me and to see someone my age and another white kid probably Tearing up this hip hop set and everybody going crazy made me think like, Oh maybe I could do this.

Your book charts your rise to becoming a a superstar DJ for very rich and famous people over a few short years, but starting out in tiny little back rooms and warehouses and starting with your first turntables. What are the key factors do you think that you had that made you such a successful DJ in the nineties? I think I mean I had ambition, drive and passion, but it took me a while for the actual technical t talents to catch up. I you know, I blagged my way into a few kind of

big early gigs but maybe I wasn't ready for it. But I think over the course of that time

I feel like I had the hustle. I was always running around with my demo in my back pocket, giving it to any promoters getting a job, but what My love of all this old funk and soul music Um, and whenever there was like a big song out by a Buster Rhymes, you know, I had to go find what the original sample was and then go track that record down and play it in the club and people's minds would be blown, they'd be like, Whoa, that's where that came from, like

So I think it was my passion for a lot of different kinds of music and finding a way to put them together. And then I had this almost compulsive thing to like just wanna Turned the crowd into a fever pitch. Almost to a You know, when I first started writing this book, I was talking to my therapist uh and he s I said, I I'm writing this book about DJing and, you know, connection and he was kinda like raised an eyebrow. Really? Connection? I think with you maybe a little more compulsion. Um uh

But I understand what he meant. I I loved and I think I needed the validation and the ego. I didn't want people to just come and dance, have a good time. Like I wanted to like bring them up into a bowl of like atomic energy until they were like sweaty and like there was no chance of anyone leaving the floor.

So I had this dogged determination to do that. And then in the late nineties, as the scene changed, which is suddenly becoming dominated by hip hop and the sound and I was the guy at the time who was the best DJ around. It's got Nate Dogg on it, ooh wee, got my man Mark Wanson in the place. What's going on Mark? What's up man, how you doing?

The most established hip hop DJs in New York in like such a short space of time, man. It's like I know you for doing all of the upmarket parties and everything. Yeah, you know, I've been doing my thing in the New York clubs for like ten years and like five years ago I guess I was doing it and puffy and like

Jay and Big those guys started coming down to my stuff. It was just cool. Like I always liked doing the underground stuff, and then Puff was like, Yeah, I like your style, so I wasn't gonna be No no no man, I'm I like to play M O P. Talking of course about Puff Daddy, Sean Coombs, who more recently has been convicted of prostitution related charges. But at the time he was such a massive figure in New York, wasn't he?

Yeah, well he was you know, with his bad boy records having Biggie and Faith Evans and he was putting out half of the records that all us DJs were playing, so when he came down to the clubs, I mean, of course it was such a big deal. You know, all the allegations came out about Puffy and all the dark horrible things that we learnt. Um, but to leave him out of talking about New York in the nineties and and why the fabric of the scene was like that without

discussing him would be disingenuous to discuss my rise without saying that he was a part of it. But I'm sure it also didn't hurt that while he was on this rampage to take over all of New York society to have, you know, a white kid from a nice family uptown d certainly wasn't maybe a coincidence. But I think I was the I mean, listen, Jay Z and

Q Tip and Buster Rines and all these people that were hiring me to DJ, like they weren't hiring me, they didn't care who my parents were. But by that point I just understood this scene and I think that I think it was the way that I also brought together A C D C and Rufus and Shaka Khan and Biggie and EPMD and the white stripes and mixing all these things together that was not really happening at the time that really made my name.

And in that moment you are controlling, in effect, the way that people are reacting physically and emotionally whilst hidden away in a in a tiny booth in the corner of the room. Just h on a good night, how did that feel? On a good night at D.

It's the best feeling in the world. It's why I still do it. It's why like, you know, I'm fifty years old. I shouldn't probably be trekking out to clubs and being until four in the morning and the damage on my ear and my back from carrying these records around but There's nothing that beats it. I because I think, you know, I'm as much a fan of music as I am somebody who makes it.

Maybe this might be a really hackneyed analogy, but like what it is for an actor to do a play versus a film. You know, the the the stage you're getting the immediate reaction and the rush and the energy from the crowd and then when I'm in the studio making a piece of music I'm I'm making something that I hope might be around after I'm gone. So they're just two different things.

Has technology computerized mixing, the AI generated playlist, has that killed the art of DJ? The art of DJing will always be around e and there are so many brilliant DJs now, even with digital devices and things like that. I just miss it for me. Like I remember that feeling of, you know, now you can go up to the club with two USB sticks with tens of thousands of songs on them. Um and then I find myself drowning in this sea of indecision, you know? But Too much choice.

Too much choice and it shows you all the tracks by BPM so you're like okay where do I go next? It's just too much. And back in those days I used to sit on the floor of my apartment in the entryway going through which records I was gonna play that night and imagining a dance floor already. There was so much intention. So by the time I got to the club I had such a great idea and rhythm of what I wanted to do. Yeah.

Three hundred records on a night in a couple of crates up and down staircases. What a I mean, physically that's an incredibly demanding job. He yeah, I lived at this one really steep five floor walk up down on Franklin Street in New York City and like on the nights I would usually try and bribe my friends to come back to help me with like drink tickets or something, but you know, the nights I was just by myself it was it was crazy. And I and a by my mid twenties I would just be waking up

the next morning and s like my neck couldn't move to the left. Like there were so many emergency trips to the chiropractor. Is it like a repetitive strain injury or is it just the way that your your neck is always locked to one side because you've got the headphones? It's a neck locked one side mixed with the lower back. I already have scoliosis carrying those crates up and down the stairs. I have this early onset arthritis in my foot and you know, I just I went.

Yeah, I went to the doctor and he was like, Oh, I watched some videos of you uh uh on the stage before you got here. You tap your foot like that while you're playing, you've been doing that for twenty five years. So yes, you have Cynovitus in your right foot. Ca he calls it Cynovitis. I liked I called it DJ foot. I've coined it. But it's something that yeah, it's the tinnitus, it's all these

War wounds. It's not quite the level of being like a chef, but there's all all my most of my DJ friends have got something wrong with them. All over those years that when you were developing your craft as a DJ, w did you have your eye on record production eventually? Yeah.

Absolutely. I always wanted to be making music and I would meet a singer or a rapper in the club and say, Come to my house tomorrow you know, I had a little eight track recorder and a drum machiner to make music but when you're up till four or five in the morning blasting your ears with the sound of all these other producers and things, it's very hard to find your own voice.

But one night I was DJing in the club and this guy came up to me, Dominic Trinier. He was he's no longer here but he was this amazing. And our guy and he had this crazy voice like he'd been gargling razor blades since the eighties and he said, Yo, I I got this white chick signed to my label and I don't know what the album's supposed to sound like, but I want it to sound like how you DJ.

Was Nika Costa, and that was the first production gig that I had, and we made an album for Virgin Records. It wasn't a huge success, but It kind of made enough noise to get me my first record deal. So Djang was this detour and then somehow brought me back to production.

Life mark. Yeah. Nobody knows my name. When did you first meet him?

I met her in the spring of two thousand six on the stoop of my recording studio in New York on Mercer Street. She was walking up one way and I walked up and of course I recognized her'cause she she already had the hair and she was had her kind of like fifties look already, the ballet slippers and She said, I I'm going to meet Mark Bronson and I said, Oh yeah, I'm Mark She just kinda gave me a blank look and was like, No, no, I'm Mark Bronson And she was like

Oh, I thought you were like a old guy with the beard. And I just liked her so much right away and we sat down and I said, What do you want your record to sound like? And she said, Well they play this record down at my local, The Good Mixer and she played me some music by the Shangulars.

In that era you would usually have some tracks uh re ready to play a singer. But I was like, Well I've never done anything like that but if you wanna go back to the hotel, come back tomorrow, I'll try some ideas tonight.

So I came up with the piano that became back to black and a little bit of the percussion track and she heard it the next day and she loved it and she said she wrote the lyrics maybe in I don't know, an hour she Yeah, I b I burned the instrumental that I had onto a C D. gave her a disc man and she went in the back room of my studio with headphones and just came back out like an hour like alright, got it. The lyrics. Lyrics and the melody, yeah.

And life is like a pipe and all ที่นี่ ที่นี่ ที่นี่ ที่นี่ ที่นี่ ที่นี่ Bye. Mark you know he was exc as excited about doing things and his enthusiastic We got on really well, personally as well. And I'll be like brother and sister.

The record eventually had that R and B retro sixties, the Ronetz and Ronnie Specter Yeah. Kind of echoes to it. But you hadn't made any of those kind of records. So how do you go about creating something? Was it just about it being live and analogue and authentic? I you know, when it started I was just so excited by her and I think really honestly inspired by like, Okay, this girl's so cool. I wanna make something that

impresses her or at least keeps her in New York for three more days'cause she was flying back the next day. So I don't know, it's just one of those you know, the moments of really d good inspiration. I came up with the piano and I started to use I didn't know how to make that analogue sound at the time.

So I was using sort of computer plugins and artificial effects to make it sound a bit old. But it I was working with the horn section from the band The Dat Kings because I had started to also make some demos for what would become my version album. So I said to Amy, I said, We're trying to make all these things sound old and vintage and we love this vintage music, but I know these guys actually out in Brooklyn who this is what they do their sound. Yeah. And I played her Sharon Jones record.

Oh yeah, she said it's the nuts. If she liked something, she said it's the nuts. And so I took it to those guys. And you know what's what I love so much about the Dabkins is they don't give a crap about anything in the outside world or being commercial. They just care about their little scenes. So like I came to them with this

thing and here's this artist Amy signed to this major label. They're like, Well, I don't know if I can find someone to watch my dog that day, you know. They were just like n they didn't care but I think they d dug a little bit of the demos and that's how we got that. Yeah, it was amazing. Um you know, she had quite a few of those songs written already, Wake Up Alone and Love is a Losing Game.

She wrote Rehab while we were together in New York and it was an amazing time. It was such a short time. It's like a it now it's a bit of a blur. And the lyrics that you say she had a lot of them already written, and the melodies, I mean how did it come together in the studio? Was it a very quick, organic process?

Yeah, it it was she had She had those songs written, the lyrics and the melodies, and what she would do was she would show me them.

on her guitar, she had a nylon string guitar and she was a good guitar player. She could play jazz chords and she would show them and sometimes she'd have to write the chord diagrams for me'cause they were really complicated and she would leave overnight and then I would play some instruments, a song like Wake Up Alone, I was just like, okay, this would work good with a like a six, eight, ding d.

And I would play them to the best of my ability. And then those are the demos we took to the Dap Kings with rehab. You know, it started with her as a bit of a slow twelve bar blues. She was like they tried to make me go to the hell. Well I'll come back And I remember because I'm a DJ trying to think about how anything can be made danceable. And I was like, well why don't we do it like the kind of

'Cause you like that music and that's what's in the DNA of all the music you're playing. I mean she'd be like, Yeah, sh try it. But it was very quick. I think we demoed all those five or six songs in five days and then she went back to England and I recorded the rhythm. She's like any great jazz musician, she's never delivering the same line in the same way twice. Never.

So in the studio, was that frustrating? I mean knowing which take'cause I presume so many of them were great, which one was the right one? Sh yes. She only needed to do four and each of them had these real moments of brilliance that it was like I mean of course I didn't know that we'd still be here talking about the album twenty years later, but there was still this sense of like

But that one's so good. But if I pick this one I'm changing naturally the the course of what this song is. Like this th so yeah, it was a little bit of that uh I mean obviously those are great problems to have. Like these are also good, which one do I pick?

And were you recording live performances? Because I mean I'm sure you do it very often with vocalists, you're comping the vocals, which it means you're taking several takes and then taking the best phrase and cutting them all together throughout the whole song. And sometimes a singer g is just singing each verse twelve times, then the chorus, then the next verse twelve times. I much prefer a a singer who sings the entire song and And that's what Amy would do.

And that's what Amy would do. And that's what a lot of great singers do, but it's it's funny how how and it might be unusual for people listening to hear this, but like How little that happens, you know. Because that's really how as a listener you feel the whole arc of the song because the singer's feeling it as they're singing it. So yeah, she would sing it maybe four times and then I would just pick my favorite bits, you know.

It is such a classic album back to black. It's great song after great song and the sound and I remember her saying when it came out, I remember her saying the thing that she felt most proud of. She goes, I got ten bullets in this one. Like ten bullets in the chamber. Were you aware of that at the time as you were recording it?

you know, I had never made really a hit record before and it f there was didn't sound like anything else that was on the radio that was popular so No, there was no reason for us to be like, Oh wow, we're gonna make this I just remember it being so exciting to the two of us and being like I could feel people getting excited but It certainly didn't seem like something that was like this is gonna be a huge commercial success, it just felt raw and honest.

As a producer, what did you learn from her, do you think? I mean I learnt so many things from her really and things I still carry with me but she was just so unfiltered with her criticism and like if she didn't like something in the studio I played her this one track and it was What if I add the oh maybe it's this you know and she goes, No, no, no, why are you trying to fix it? She goes, It's a piece of sh and I was like, Oh yeah, there is this thing in the studio we spend so much time trying to

tiptoe around and say, Oh, can we make it better? It's like, if it's not happening, just get rid of it. So I mean, I wish I had her brazen, blatant honesty too, like her quote unquote frankness. Now we're proud to present the Grammy for record of the year. Give me Winehouse.

The Actor Black made your reputation as a producer and of course in the years since you've worked with so many great artists, had so many huge hit records. How much of your experience as a DJ has fed into that success that you've had as a record producer? I think with the dance records, all of it.

not only obviously night in, night out, seeing what makes people move, but studying and digging for all these old records and these old sixties and soul seventies soul records almost becomes like the way you study arrangements. Great arrangers like Quincy Jones or Charles Stepney who did all the Rotary Connection and early Earth, Wind and Fire music. That's your school in a way, your education. So the DJing thing it's really influenced it's like

Yeah down to like we'll be working on a song and be like what kind of reverse hi hat do I want sound do I want to do that like like an uptown funk, you know, there's that sounds. You just have this encyclopedia.

Cyclopedia of sounds which is helpful. the the encyclopedic knowledge, the diversity of styles. And I guess that's reflected in the sort of people that you're working with, making, you know, huge hip hop records, funk records with Bruno Mars or whether it's Miley Cyrus.

Or Dua Lipa, but of course you've also worked with the Queens of the Stone Age, Paul McCartney, Tame in Parlour on the rock side of things. When people come to you, d do you think they're expecting a Mark Ronson production? Is there such a a thing? Is there what is the DNA of the sound? I don't think so any certainly not maybe anymore. Maybe after Back to Black there was a period where people wanted that sound, but now I think because it's sort of like

from back to black to like you said, Queens of the Stone Age to maybe things from the Barbie soundtrack. Like I'm never gonna not have signature elements like the drums always have to sound amazing. They don't have to be funky. They just have to sound

You know, with Queens of the Stone Age it was so unusual. I mean, I d uh such a diehard fan of that band since I was like in my early twenties and While I was working on a Lady Gaga album I emailed Josh Hami and just said, This mo I don't know if this is your cup of tea at all, but there's this song and your guitar playing would be so perfect on it and you know, to my huge surprise and delight he wrote me back and he said

You know, I my kids, for better or for worse, will not let me stop listening to Uptown Funk and I've really learned to appreciate a lot of the things in that song and started to we began a friendship and then I ended up working on that record. I think people hear something that you like and they want to work with you but I it wouldn't have a sound.

You said that you weren't sure during the process of making back to black how it would be received. You must have known when you were writing and recording Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars that that was an absolute surefire hit.

Maybe towards the very end and only at the very end when we had been working on the song for seven months But even at that point I remember the record company saying like I don't know if you wanna put funk in the title of a song, it's kinda cheesy or it's like it's four it's over four minutes, we should really get it down to three fifteen or radio won't play it.

And it also didn't sound like anything else. You know, we had the excitement when we created it, certainly that first day when the cares stand up and you're just you've we had this one minute demo and I remember just listening to it twenty times in a row on the drive home coming from Bruno's studio. There was something that made us keep going back in the studio over seven months as hard as it was and we were throwing out there were probably sixty-seven versions of that song.

To make us believe it was worth finishing. But you never know if something's gonna be a hit. I guess you just know how confident you feel to play it in a

As a pop producer, is it getting increasingly hard to make something totally original these days? To come up with something Sonically new because the commercial expectations of the market are so high. Pop music is just changing so fast. It's dizzying. Like when I think of Putting out a record and that Stress of

while I'm making music on like, will anybody care? Does anybody like this? I th part of the reason why I loving scoring and writing music for films is because it's something where I'm writing from a point of pure emotion and maybe not thinking about so many of those outside. Considerations. And then the other thing that's crazy is that I remembered being in the studio with Duran Duran when I produced a record for them and from being a huge Duran Duran fan from the age of six.

Going like, You guys should do something like kinda like real and girls on film, you know?

the Kaiser Chiefs from Franz Ferdinand and the killers are all doing bringing back your sound. You guys started it, you should do it. And I remember them being at first kind of not that receptive and being like, But we did that, you know, it's like I remember being like, It doesn't matter, it was so long ago and everybody wants you to do that again And now I'm that guy in the studio, you know, I like I'm in the studio with with Ray or somebody who's so young and

I start to go into like a drum sound or a progression or a sonic that's something from a record that I did twenty five years ago and I go, Well, my first instinct is why I c I can't do that. You were aware of that though, because on when that Ray record Suzanne came out, the first thing a lot of people said is it sounds a lot like Amy.

Right. Um well I think you know Ray for some reasons that are fair, some that are not, has had a lot of comparisons to Amy and she is the first UK artist to come out in such a long time, a soul artist to make such a death. Ray and I share just like Amy and I share a You know loves for the same sounds and classic music and Motown and things like that.

Where next for you musicly then? Which direction are you heading in? I mean you mentioned the film soundtracks. You did Barbie of course. I think you're also now scoring another Greta Gerwig film version of Narnia. I'm unfortunately not allowed to talk about that. Sorry, I'm not being coy, I just got a slap on the wrist. Generally, what drives you on creatively?

It's still the idea of Sampling a drum kit and chopping up and finding the sound of a snare drum that's so excited that you can't wait to put the rest of the puzzle together or sitting down at the piano and playing a chord that's just beautiful and you can't wait to find the next one. It's just it's just the creativity itself, I think. Mart Ronson, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural. Thank you so much.