How Mark Ronson Escaped His Funk…

… And wrote an album that wears his heart on it’s sleeve.

- Kate Mossman

MARK RONSON IS FEELING OLD. ‘I’m 44,’ he says, watching our team set up the photo shoot, ‘and I’m thinking, “Isn’t there a younger music-related person they could cover? Like Stormzy?”’

Ronson lives in LA now, ‘because it’s the epicentre of pop music,’ but insists that his lifestyle is anything but rock and roll. ‘I get out of the studio at midnight, and kind of go straight home.’

That is as may be, but Ronson is once again one of the most sought-after producers on the planet. In the past eight months alone he has picked up a Grammy for his song “Electricity” with Silk City, Dua Lipa and Diplo. He has won another Grammy, plus a Golden Globe and an Oscar, for “Shallow” from the film A Star Is Born. And he is responsible for the jacked-up, “Jolene”-style country-pop anthem “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart”, the hit Miley Cyrus tune that everyone’s allowed to like.

These recent triumphs, however, were not a given – rather they are proof of music’s capriciousness and the endless possibility for rebirth.

With Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson created a sound so popular that everyone copied it – which meant that everyone got sick of it, too. For a while, as the industry cashed in on the soul revival he’d ushered in, the phone didn’t ring: his producer friends, he says, got the calls for Adele instead. He was “fired” by The Gossip; he wrote a doomed anthem for Coca-Cola (“God bless Katy B”). There was too much clubbing – and that peroxide hair. As the noughties faded into history, he says, he was thinking, “What am I doing and how am I going to get back to being relevant and anyone giving a shit?”