Mark RonsonHe's “in bed” 'cause “it's quite early” and we wanna know if Mark Ronson, DJ/producer/style icon, is wearing silk pyjamas. “Ah, if you wanna write that you can, sure,” he deadpans, giving us nothin'.
Ronson has continued to rack up the production credits since the release of his last studio album, Record Collection, and this year worked with Rufus Wainwright on his latest offering, Out Of The Game. When Wainwright performed at Hamer Hall a couple of months back, he described Ronson as a “dreamboat”, lamenting he's, “So goddamn hot and so goddamn straight”. “Oh right, yeah,” Ronson responds when this information is relayed. Sounds like the pair formed a mutual admiration society. “Yeah, definitely,” he allows. “I mean, you only get to work with people so often that have the voice and the songs and the whole package and, as a producer, to get to work on really non-traditional, complex, awesome, challenging songs as well, you know? So it was difficult, but it was something I'm grateful I got to work on.”
Our very own Daniel Merriweather's stunning debut album Love & War was also produced by Ronson, who took an active interest in the soul singer from the get-go. “I just heard his demo, like, ten years ago and I'd never been to Australia, I didn't know anyone who lived in Australia,” he tells of how the pair came to work together. “I was working with Nikka Costa at the time and her husband Justin Stanley, who was in Noiseworks and The Electric Hippies, he just played the demo of this Australian kid and I was like, 'Fuck! This 17-year-old kid sounds like Stevie Wonder,' who's one of my favourite singers. And I called him up kind of outta nowhere, and I think that he was about to sign a record deal the next day for something he'd been working up to his whole life and [he'd been] negotiating this particular deal for three years or something crazy like that. And I was like, 'You don't know me from a hole in the wall,' but was just like, 'Don't sign to England and America, do the rest of the world,' and he kinda trusted me and we started working back and forward. I'm sure there came a time when he was like, 'Why the fuck do I trust this guy?' 'cause we were working for three or four years before we were able to get him a deal over here 'cause, you know, we thought my first album Here Comes The Fuzz would blow up and that would lead to him getting a deal. And my album didn't blow up at all, it imploded, and then it took a good three or four years of just, like, Dan coming back once or twice a year and hustling and going around to a lot of record companies and peddling his demo and the whole thing.”
After some discussion about Merriweather's career trajectory, Ronson proffers, “I'm sure it'll happen for him”. “[For] some people it's not supposed to happen all at the same time. I think everyone has their own arc. It took me 'til I was 31, 32 to have my first success as a producer and I've been making records probably since I was 16. I mean, I kinda resigned myself, at 30, to thinking it was never gonna happen, 'cause I came up around these guys, like, I watched Kanye, I even watched Chad [Hugo] and Pharrell [Williams] from The Neptunes. Dangermouse was kind of like the last straw, 'cause he was one I met when he kinda wasn't big and then [he] just blew up and I remember thinking to myself, 'Maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this?' In a very realistic way, like, 'How long are you gonna fucking keep going to these labels?' And I had beat tapes to try and get on all these projects, and this thing and that thing, and I was thinking to myself, 'I should maybe think about another career option,' and then I think within a year I was lucky enough to meet Lily [Allen], and I was working on Version and Zane Lowe and Gilles Peterson started to play some of the stuff off of that on the radio – it was like a bootleg cover of Radiohead Just that I made so, yeah! It just happens when it happens.”
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On trusting your time will come when you're adequately prepared to deal with the attention success can bring, Ronson considers, “Yeah, I'm probably lucky that it didn't happen when I was 21 or whatever. I think Adele seems pretty mature, but I was a fucking idiot at 21. I wouldn't say that I was an idiot,” he backpeddles, “You know, my mother she raised us fairly well and she was strict and stuff but, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have been probably that great at handling some of the other shit going on in the world and whatever else.” Sudden, cacophonous sounds interrupt our chat. “Sorry, I'm just feeding my dog.”
Once Maude, Ronson's “border collie, black lab mix”, which he adopted from an animal shelter when he lived in New York, is sorted, it's time to discuss his upcoming DJ sets. Ronson promises to bring along a guest who featured on his latest Record Collection set (“If I have any money left after I build my giant spaceship that shoots lasers on the stage”). “The thing is that everybody wants to come to Australia,” he shares, “'cause it's a great time, it's summer, the crowds are so good – so it's almost like a holiday where you spend an hour and a half playing your music onstage, um, which definitely doesn't feel like work, so it won't be hard to get somebody to come along.” (It's since been established Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt, who sings Somebody To Love Me alongside Boy George, will board the flight with Ronson.)
But Ronson's “giant spaceship” is unlikely to materialise. “I think that it's gotten so out of hand and super-tech that it's almost like an arms race between DJs and how to put on these awe-inspiring light shows and all these kinds of things that go on,” he opines. “It's basically like Independence Day, like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie – it just becomes a mass of explosions and kind of like induced emotions, where I'd rather sit it out.
“Daft Punk raised the game, obviously, and people like The Chemical Brothers have always had amazing light shows and things like that. That's just not the world that I really came from. I spent 12 years in New York. You just go up to a club – it could be a fucking hole in the wall or it could be some super-club – but you just go up onto your turntables and you play records. It's kinda still my favourite thing to do, but I understand why at a festival – and, you know, we'll have something fucking interesting, for sure, but I just have no desire to put a giant mouse on my head.”
Mark Ronson will be playing the following dates:
Tuesday 1 January - Field Day, The Domain, Sydney NSW
Sunday 6 January - Summadayze, Patersons Stadium, Subiaco WA
