Mark Ronson: ‘Every time you start a new record, you wonder whether anyone will care’

Looking back on the darkest days of the pandemic, creative types could probably divide themselves into two distinct camps: those who had their King Lear moment, using the terror and enforced solitude of the plague to create a work of genius; and those who achieved absolutely nothing of value aside from one ruined attempt at baking, because – without wishing to trigger flashbacks – you might recall that everything was bloody awful.

Mark Ronson, the superproducer behind much of this century’s greatest pop music, would probably place himself somewhere in the latter camp. Professionally, at least. Perched on a seat in his recording studio in SoHo, the other end of Manhattan from his Upper West Side apartment, Ronson now looks back on the past two years with a vague sense of healthy remove.

“In the beginning, there was almost a high and a euphoria at not having to take a plane every other day, and to wake up in the same bed,” he says. Ronson was in New York for most of it, having sold his home in Los Angeles, and thought that he might learn computer programs he’d always put off mastering, or else get some chores done.

“Then slowly, after a few months of making beats on my laptop and trying out new things, I suddenly realised that without instruments and having people in the room, my art isn’t very good,” he says, dolefully. “So my music just started to get... not very good. My confidence took a bit of a battering. I was like, ‘Am I even going to make music any more when we come out of this?’”

Mercifully, the answer is yes. On the walls outside Ronson’s studio are framed discs showing some of the artists to whose music he has added his Midas touch over 25 years behind the mixing desk: Amy Winehouse, Adele, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Duran Duran, Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera, Lily Allen, Queens of the Stone Age, Rufus Wainwright, Robbie Williams, Dua Lipa...

If they were all to gather for a reunion, you’d need an aircraft hangar in which to fit the egos, but Ronson, with his low-key energy and introspective drawl, brought the best out of them. Apart from Robbie, come to think of it. That album wasn’t great. Ronson prefers using vintage recording equipment and samples, plus analogue instruments, to create a sound that’s often funky, sometimes stripped-back, and has been defined by Ronson as either “quote-unquote fun groove, good-time party music” or “sad bangers”.

In a long-sleeved navy sweater, chinos and socks (it's snowing outside, so the place is shoes-off-by-the-door-please for the moment), Ronson, 46, is strumming a guitar when I walk in, and absently plonks his hands on an electric piano keyboard as he talks. Last spring, when lockdown lifted slightly and he was able to start face-to-face recording sessions again, it was his latest collaborator, the flute-playing American singer and rapper Lizzo, who helped lift the fug.

“I remember almost not going, out of anxiety. Like, what if I’ve forgotten how to do this? And have no good ideas? It’ll be so embarrassing. And after maybe one day of clearing the rust, it was wonderful. Now, I feel like we’re just getting back to normal.” We’ll hear the results of those sessions when Lizzo’s imminent fourth album is released.

But that was the professional side. His personal life, on the other hand, was extraordinarily productive. Not only did he meet the actor Grace Gummer in lockdown – specifically October 2020 – but he married her 10 months later, in a scaled-back ceremony in New York.

“We’d met before, actually, and I’d sort of had a crush [on her]. I’d always be like, ‘Why can’t I meet someone like that?’ I’d walk away from any interaction with her on a little bit of a buzz. But she was with somebody, I was with somebody [presumably his ex-wife, French actor and model Joséphine de La Baume, whom he divorced in 2018], or whatever.”

They were set up by the singer Lykke Li, a friend in common, who was Ronson’s “main sparring partner” on his last record, Late Night Feelings, which was “all about divorce and heartbreak, then she gave me this giant assist, like she’s some kind of fairy godmother or spirit guide or something.”

Gummer, who has starred in the television dramas The Newsroom and American Horror Story, was unlikely to feel star-struck at the company Ronson keeps. Her mother is Meryl Streep, her father the sculptor Don Gummer, and her three siblings are in acting, music or fashion. If her mother is the Queen of Hollywood, that makes her at least the Princess Royal. The Anne of Tinseltown. “It’s funny, nobody ever asks about that,” Ronson says, entirely deadpan, when I mention his mother-in-law. “No, they do. But they’re very private, and I respect that.”

Ronson is himself cut from impressive – possibly velvet, probably vintage, definitely not cheap – cloth. A scion of the property-developing Ronsons who founded Heron International, once the UK’s second largest private company, he was born in west London, to Laurence Ronson, a producer-turned-developer, and the jewellery designer and socialite Ann Dexter. She later became Dexter-Jones, when she married Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones (it is said the seminal Magic FM track I Want To Know What Love Is was written about her). Ronson has two younger sisters and two half-siblings, one of whom is the Succession star Annabelle Dexter-Jones.

The Ronsons moved to New York when Mark was eight (his accent still occasionally drifts across the Atlantic, then back again by the end of the sentence). There, as a lanky teenage nobody with precocious musical tastes, he started DJing at the city’s legendary 1990s hip-hop parties, making his name playing in clubs for the Notorious BIG, Jay-Z, Fat Joe, Big Pun and just about everybody thriving on the scene at the time.

“At one of them, I’d play in the VIP room, and the DJ booth was next to the entry stairs. So I’d be playing and Mariah Carey or Stevie Wonder, somebody crazy, would come in. It was an amazing time. And I obviously didn’t think, ‘Wow, we’re in the ‘90s,’ but now, I get a kick out of it when I meet some teen who’s like, ‘Wow, you were in New York in the ‘90s?’ Because for them...”

Yes, for them, it is where they want to be – looking at Gen Z fashion, anyway. Bucket hats, baggy stone-washed jeans, skate shoes and all the brands associated with that decade, not to mention the music, is what’s cool now. “Yeah, it blows their minds.”

It must also make him feel old. It feels absurd to say it about a man who could pass for 28, but Ronson celebrates his 30th anniversary in the music industry this year, if you include those DJing days. “I think if I wasn’t able to work on things that make me feel excited, or pushing things forward creatively – like if I was just sitting in a rocking chair thinking about the old days, maybe. But it’s amazing actually, I don’t spend a lot of time looking back, but that was kind of a special time. I was lucky to be around.”

In the years that followed, Ronson was desperate to work directly with artists to help shape their sound, from the concept to the recording, even songwriting in some cases, so he focused on producing instead of playing other people’s work. As a consequence, he cites as his hero and mentor the producer Quincy Jones, rather than any DJs. Ronson filled his black book with musicians he’d met, begging them to make demos with him, and eventually releasing his debut album, a collection of collaborations called Here Comes the Fuzz, in 2003.

He then moved back to London for most of his 30s, released a second album, Version, and began working with Amy Winehouse on Back to Black, which would win five Grammy Awards. Those two records made him the most famous producer in the world. Not that he looks back.

“I could sit here and go, ‘Yeah, when we did Back to Black...’ but that just makes me think of David Brent or something. It’s this blowhard-type character,” he says. “Some of those things that could be perceived as modesty come from anxiety and insecurity, but every time I start a new record I’m like, ‘Oh God, is this the one where I have no new ideas?’ I’m sure there’s a healthy balance to that, but I don’t like to rest on any past stuff.”

For someone with seven Grammys, an Oscar (for co-writing Lady Gaga’s Shallow from A Star Is Born), a Golden Globe, two Brits, an MTV Award, a GQ Most Stylish Man of the Year Award, and a Guinness World Record for most weeks at No 1 in US digital song sales (Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars), Ronson can occasionally make being Mark Ronson seem effortful. But that may be why he’s still at it, and at the top of his game, three decades into his career.

“Every time you start a new record, you’re like, ‘OK, will anyone care?’ All these thoughts go on, but it’s almost like with meditation – you clear the clutter and try to access the part of your brain where you’re not thinking about those things. Because a lot of my biggest success, with things like Back to Black, or Uptown Funk, came from not thinking about any of that stuff. When Amy came in, I wasn’t even successful. She had one record. So people just left us alone.”

As it is, he now gets to pick and choose who he wants to work with. That includes corporate partnerships, the latest of which involves working as brand ambassador with luxury Swiss watch company Audemars Piguet. I’ve met enough celebrities who’ve soliloquised – with moving commitment – about why they felt a certain yogurt brand spoke to their principles and to who they are as a human, to know when affection is genuine, and Ronson’s love for Audemars Piguet is clear. He practically goes doe-eyed gazing at the beautiful 1982 gold Royal Oak Quartz timepiece on his wrist. “The level they’re at, they don’t really have to go looking for people. They have this mystique around them, so it was too good to be true. You do get some of these requests and you think, ‘Can I really... with a straight face?’”

During lockdown, he met the company's French CEO, François-Henry Bennahmias, “sitting 12ft apart” in Ronson’s New York home, and explained how he first came across the watches at the Montreux Jazz Festival, then saw one while hanging out with Daft Punk in Paris, how he couldn’t quite pronounce it right (today he sticks with ‘AP’), then bought one from a dealer... It sounds as though he was pitching to them, not the other way around.

Helpfully, Audemars Piguet has a rich history with music, from partnering with the Montreux festival to collaborating with legends such as Ronson’s old muckers Quincy Jones and Jay-Z. The latter, in fact, references the name in half a dozen songs. A personal favourite: “I’m so tomorrow the Audemars says yesterday.”

Ronson will now use his ambassadorship to not only endorse the brand’s music programme, “but actually make some music for them”. And he assures us that “just because it’s for AP doesn’t mean it’s sub-par or it wouldn’t go on my own record.” Ronson being Ronson, a man who tends to stand to one side of the limelight in a perfect suit, nodding sagely to a beat, means that it is a Russian doll of collaboration: Audemars Piguet with him, him with singers and musicians, and so on from there. The first track, made with the R&B artist Lucky Daye, is called Too Much.

After the inertia of lockdown, Ronson is now back working as hard as before. Last summer, Gucci – of course – convinced him to play his first set in two years at a celebrity-infested party in East Hampton. But that’s socialising, if anything, whereas his windowless studio is where he geeks out. Lizzo was here again the other day, then the Canadian singer-songwriter Daniel Caesar yesterday, and next... Well, it could be anybody. And they’ll probably walk out with a hit.

He watched Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary, Get Back, recently. He adored the depiction of the laborious, often boring and frustrating process behind what we think of as instinctive musical genius. It struck a familiar note. Paul McCartney, of course, is soon to turn 80, but still gigs, records and writes children’s books as hard as ever. So I ask Ronson to imagine another three decades from now. Kids? Still in New York? “I hope so,” he says, but hesitates to put any concrete ambitions out there. One hand grips his watch for a moment, then reaches for the safety of the switched-off keyboard, which he depresses to play a single silent chord.

He doesn’t focus beyond the next thing, so the question stumps him. “I could picture myself there, but 30 years seems like a long way away. I can see about three to five years ahead,” he says, slowly. “Though even that's a bit of a struggle...”

Fingers crossed for no more lockdowns, then.