Some people get measured dollops of luck while others receive it by the bucketload. Mark Ronson discovered the singer Lily Allen, made the troubled diva Amy Winehouse a star and was paid a reported £40,000 to DJ at Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes. To top it all, he has been nominated for three Brit awards.
The 32-year-old Anglo-American producer has been compared to Phil (“wall of sound”) Spector in terms of his distinctive 1960s sound, although not for Spector’s gun-toting notoriety. Ronson was merely accused of having an affair with Winehouse during her husband’s imprisonment, which he denied.
His Brit-nominated album Version became the dance soundtrack of 2007, thanks to guest vocals by his mates Allen, Winehouse, Robbie Williams and Paul Smith of Maximo Park.
It seems the gods marked out Robson for good fortune from the outset, placing him in a family tree with branches stretching from pop’s aristocracy to the big beasts of British politics and business.
His father, the band manager Laurence Ronson, discovered Bucks Fizz, the antiseptic group that won the 1981 Eurovision song contest; his stepfather was Mick Jones, the front man of the rock band Foreigner, and his relatives include two Tory politicians, Lord Brittan, the former home secretary, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary. His uncle is Gerald Ronson, the property tycoon involved in the Guinness fraud scandal in the 1990s.
Rifkind, a second cousin of Ronson’s mother, said last week he was happy to have a pop star in the family, not least because “I do not have a musical bone in my body and if I try to sing my children tell me to stop”.
Growing up among rock stars in Manhattan gave Ronson the opportunity to become the DJ of choice for P Diddy and Prince, as well as the confidence to forge his own brand of horn-infused soul. When Ronson reworked Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way last year he became the only person to have won Bob Dylan’s permission to remix one of his tracks.
Any mention of Ronson’s privileged background is received with world-weary disclaimers by the tall, handsome producer, whose mid-Atlantic drawl reflects a childhood split between London and New York. Some interviewers detect a “zen-like calm” that mirrors Ronson’s need for control in the studio. Others think his disdain of celebrity smacks of hypocrisy.
“It’s hard for me to let go,” he said last year. “I have this guilt thing, or I feel that I have to set an example.” Though he was not averse to a bit of name-dropping: “I do have the odd night where Amy will have to pick me up off somebody’s couch and go, ‘Mark, we’re leaving now’, but it doesn’t happen often.”
Huge sales of Version, bolstered by the phenomenal success of the single Valerie, a cover of the Zutons song featuring Winehouse, signify neither quality nor originality, some critics claim. “It’s supermarket soul – dull and detached,” said one. “It’s got a beat but not a pulse. It’s an expert pastiche but that’s all.”
Ronson’s collaboration with Allen owed nothing to his gilded background. To check out the London scene in 2006 he left Manhattan, where he lives with his long-term girlfriend Cosi Theodoli-Braschi, an artist, and met Allen at the Notting Hill Arts Club in west London. At the time he was broke, he claimed.
The singer, daughter of the actor Keith Allen, impressed him by sticking a pin badge through his newly acquired leather jacket. “It was the most I had ever spent on a piece of clothing,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘What did you just do?’, and she just shrugged and said, ‘It’s cool’.”
Allen, who had not yet secured a record contract, gave a demo of her work to Ronson, which he played a few months later in New York. Impressed, he cashed in some Air Miles so she could join him and work in a studio. While he wrote the piano and guitar backing to Littlest Things, she scribbled the lyrics. “I asked her to sing it all and she just made up the whole melody on the spot, and sang this amazing solo.” Her demo, the single Smile, became the hit of that summer.
Later Ronson met Winehouse and pounced on her anecdote about her manager’s attempts to persuade her to join an alcohol recovery programme. “She began humming a [line], ‘They tried to make me go into rehab.’ I said, ‘That could be a funny hook for a song’.” Rehab became Winehouse’s biggest hit, and the album he helped to produce, Back to Black, has won her numerous awards.
The explanation given for Ronson’s well-chronicled closeness to the singer while her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, is on remand, accused of assault and perverting the course of justice, was that the couple were working on new material. Last week Winehouse was admitted to rehab after photos of her allegedly taking crack cocaine were printed in The Sun.
Ronson said recently of his friend: “She’s not in a good place right now.”
He was born in north London on September 4, 1975, into a family of Ashkenazi Jewish descent – Russian-Lithuanian on his father’s side and Austrian on his mother’s. He grew up in a house down the street from Paul McCartney, where Keith Moon of the Who was a regular visitor. According to Ronson’s mother, Ann, Moon was “mesmerised” by the infant’s skill at beating out a tune whenever he heard music. “[Moon] asked me to promise to buy Mark a drum kit for his next birthday, or he would buy it.”
During a talent contest at his nursery school, Ronson eschewed the nursery rhymes chosen by his peers and launched into Ian Dury’s Sex and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll. After his parents split up when he was six, he accompanied his mother and sisters Samantha and Charlotte to New York, where he acquired a stepfather and a new rock family.
At 12, he and his pal Sean Lennon had a sleepover with Michael Jackson. Now he jokes: “I haven’t seen him since; he doesn’t call, he doesn’t write.” Liv Tyler, the actress and daughter of the rock star Steve Tyler, was another schoolfriend.
Musically “bookish”, Ronson rebelled by throwing himself into the hip-hop scene, where he earned his spurs as a DJ. He honed his skills in the student bar of Vassar College in upstate New York, where he was studying sociology, before transferring to New York University to study music theory. It was a wild scene.
“That was the real thing,” he claimed. “Not rich white kids throwing parties with a hip-hop DJ, but places where rappers and drug dealers went.”
He realised he was making a stir when P Diddy wrote his phone number on a $100 bill to induce Ronson to spin the discs at his next party. His reputation for getting people on the dancefloor took him to Paris, to London and all over America.
In 2001 he co-produced an album by the American singer Nikka Costa. Everyone said it would be a smash, but it bombed. Ditto his own debut album, Here Comes the Fuzz, in 2003, featuring “every rapper and his mother”.
Meanwhile, his fame as a DJ was growing. “The term ‘celebrity DJ’ was almost invented for me,” he recalled. “It was annoying and it wouldn’t wash off. I realised I would have to stop if I wanted to be taken seriously for my music. I’d get calls saying, ‘Will you DJ the Martha Stewart Christmas party?’ ” In November 2006, though, he could not bring himself to turn down the invitation to DJ at Tom Cruise’s wedding bash, which he described as rather mellow: “When I got to the castle, they were dancing like crazy. Then it got to the point where the grown-ups got tired of dancing and just the kids carried on. It had a good vibe, a sweet, love, wedding vibe to it.”
The criteria for being a good record producer include completing a project on time and within budget, being everybody’s friend and coaxing the finest performances out of singers. Ronson maintains that trust is essential. “I played Amy Winehouse one track which straight away she said she didn’t like,” he recalled. “ ‘Why waste five minutes selling it to me?’ was her response. You need that sort of bluntness.”
Some say the secret of Ronson’s recording success is the distinctive sound of the Dap-Kings, a largely unacclaimed Brooklyn outfit. Their old-style soul and funk features on six tracks of Back to Black, provides much of the backing on Version and virtually replaces the instrumentation on the Dylan remix.
Perhaps conscious that his successful formula is ephemeral, Ronson is reported to be taking singing lessons. But will such an exacting individual trust himself as his own producer?
