Mark Ronson

0:07Welcome 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 1990s. He moved into music production and in 2006 co-wrote and co-produced the Amy Winehouse album Back to Black. The record won five Grammys and Mark Rumson himself scooped the Producer of the Year Award.

0:46Since then, he's released five solo albums and has worked with some of the most successful names in pop to create massive hits.

1:19The winner of ten 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.

1:51Mark Ronson, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you so much. It's very nice to see you again. Great to be here. DJ, record producer, songwriter, musician, in that order? DJ, well, they all blur together for me because my passion, I mean, growing up, I played in bands 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 now my ears are battered in my back and it's so bad I'm 50 years old. But I would just say all of those things. All of those things. Yeah. So if you met somebody on a plane, they say, what do you do?

2:30I usually say I make music. 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 70s London. They were a cool young couple. 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, 50 people partying.

3:07I mean, I don't remember seeing specifically Keith Moon and Christopher Reeve and these people, but I know that they were there. Really? That was there. My dad worked in music, and so that was his circle. Your dad was a music publisher? He was a music publisher, yeah. Who was he working with? 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 Up. Which one, Eurovision? Which one, Eurovision.

3:36That was like his big hit. He later went on to manage Andrew Roachford. He discovered Roachford. So 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. They were probably a bit wasted. Like, come on, Robin. you got to come into my son's room and it's strange that you know of course to wake up be like why is the guy from television in front of me but and you were a fan of morgan minnow i was such a fan 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 around he went nanu nanu he just gave me the finger gesture thing i think with the finger gesture thing.

4:27And 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. Oh, so your parents were on a come down a lot of the time? Yeah. I don't want to disparage them. They talked about it, but, yeah, 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 parties 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 What sort of music would you have been hearing at home or in your dad's car?

5:27My dad had amazing still does, he has incredible taste, he loved Sly and 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 listen to hot chocolate But I just love that my dad's whole takeaway from the whole thing about the book was, and that's no, just a hot chocolate. I actually really liked him and I DJed their music. But yes, he loved great music. He was, you know, in that first wave of British adolescents who listened to Radio Caroline and Pirate Radio and would race to the record shop.

6:10There was a record shop on South Moulton Street where he'd pick up Little Stevie Wonder. Just the caricature of the English soul fanatic in the early 60s. 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 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 not a happy place to be.

6:49When my parents split, things got very different. My mom, a few years later married, met my stepdad, who was a very talented musician from the band Foreigner. And they also liked to party and they had that thing, but it was more jolly, I guess what it was. It was a little less dark. So you moved to New York City when you were probably seven or eight years old. Seven, yeah. From St. John's Wood. I mean, was there an element of sort of culture shock? I mean, did you feel, how were you greeted by the other kids? Yeah. Oh, no, it was crazy because in 1983 in New York, I mean, in America in general, there was the Red Scare, the Cold War.

7:26And so you're like, how does that apply to someone from St. John's Wood? But the people called me commie because I had a funny accent, even though I was from... Because you're European. Not Estonia, yeah. Yeah. So I remember all the kids teasing me for having this English accent. So I obviously ditched it as quick as I could, came back to England. So 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 did make good friends quickly in New York. But I was I definitely stuck out like a sore thumb when I got there.

8:03And so there's a new family unit formed in New York because your mum remarried to Mick Jones, who was the guitarist and the founder and chief songwriter and producer, actually, co-producer of the band Foreigner, who were massive in the 80s. Yeah.

8:23He had a Hope Studio as well where you were. Yeah. 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 so generous at showing me his equipment, and some of the equipment was insane, like the Sinc Clavier, which was this 1980s programmer sampler that Trevor Horn used to make Frankie Goes to Hollywood relax. This was the top-of-the-land 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.

9:04So I was like, oh, so I wonder if I could remake the entire song. So I slowly reprogram the drum beat. And, you know, it was so exciting to me. And I remember my parents were probably having some crazy party and bringing one of my stepdad's musician friends in the studio. I'd be like, look what I did. And then the person just being friendly, like, yeah, it's Wishing Well, kid. Like, what do you want me to say? But 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 Terence Trent Darby or EMF or Bross or the Wonder Stuff or Stone Roses, these great things that were happening and very exciting in England.

9:49Which you wouldn't have heard in New York. Wouldn't have heard in New York, and taking them back and playing them for my friends, yeah. 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.

10:21The Stone Roses. Yeah.

10:29That was significant for you, that record, was it? Yes, because I think, I mean, jumping much later to Version and that idea of this great funky breakbeat underneath these very psychedelic vocals and guitars, it's almost something I've been chasing in some way ever since.

10:54your next creative inspiration Mark Ronston a real cultural turning point was hearing a hip hop record in 1992 it's They Reminisce Over You by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth

11:10what impact did it have first hearing this record I mean it was just such a line in the sand and 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 CBGBs and playing some decent shows, but technically everybody around me was so much more proficient. They were shredders on the guitar, and I was kind of like a B+. and then my best friend at the time who I played a lot of music with 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 need to find another angle or a lane if I want to 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 was it had this melancholy, mournfulness that just got under my skin.

12:16And at that moment I was like, I only want to 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 in turntables, that is maybe my way into this genre of music that I love. So that song kind of changed everything for me.

12:47You 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. More reflective, right? Right, I think a lot of the stuff of the production of Public Enemy and those things at the time were fuelled by these James Brown very aggressive breakbeats. 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 folk song.

13:28So 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 friend of the group's who had died, So everything about it is about mourning the loss of the absence of innocence 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's making you sad, but you cannot stop listening to it because you're chasing the ache. You're 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?

14:02Did you have that sort of analytical musical mind even at that point? 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 whosampled.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 nobody had it so because it was so rare it was so rare so I would 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.

14:51You 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 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 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.

15:25And 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 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.

16:04What are the key factors, do you think, that you had that made you such a successful DJ in the 90s? I think, I mean, I had ambition, drive and passion, but it took me a while for the actual technical talents to catch up. 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 my love of all this old funk and soul music, and whenever there was a big song out by Busta Rhymes, I had to go find what the original sample was and then go track that record down and play it in the club.

16:48And people's minds would be blown. They'd be like, whoa, that's where that came from. 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 just want to turn the crowd into a fever pitch. When I first started writing this book, I was talking to my therapist. and I said, I'm writing this book about DJing and, you know, connection. And he was kind of like raised an eyebrow. Really? Connection? I think with you, maybe a little more compulsion. But I understand what he meant. I loved and I think I needed the validation and the ego.

17:28I didn't want people to just come and dance, have a good time. I wanted to bring them up into a bowl of atomic energy until they were sweaty and there was no chance of anyone leaving the floor. so I had this dogged determination to do that and then in the late 90s as the scene changed just suddenly becoming dominated by hip-hop and this sound and I was the guy at the time who was the best DJ around

17:59Hey yo, that joint right there it's by Mark Wonson Ghostface Killer it's got Nate Dogg on it got my man Mark Wonson in the place what's going on Mark? What's up man, how you doing? You're like one of the most established hip-hop DJs in New York in 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 10 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, hey, I like your style.

18:33So I wasn't going to be like, no, no, man. I like to play MOP and Ghostface. 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 Big E 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 all the dark, horrible things that we learned. But to leave him out of talking about New York in the 90s 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.

19:22But 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 a white kid from a nice family uptown certainly wasn't maybe a coincidence. But I think I was the... I mean, listen, Jay-Z and Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes 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 ACDC and Rufus and Chaka 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.

20:06And in that moment, you are controlling, in effect, the way that people are reacting physically and emotionally whilst hidden away in a tiny booth in the corner of the room. Just on a good night, how did that feel? On a good night, it's the best feeling in the world. It's why I still do it. It's why, like, you know, I'm 50 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. Because I think, you know, I'm as much a fan of music as I am somebody who makes it.

20:43Maybe 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 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 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 DJing? The art of DJing will always be around, and there are so many brilliant DJs now, even with digital devices and things like that. I just miss it for me.

21:26I remember that feeling of now you can go up to the club with two USB sticks with tens of thousands of songs on them. And then I find myself drowning in this sea of indecision. Too much choice. Too much choice. And it shows you all the tracks by BPM. So you're like, OK, 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, the entryway, going through which records I was going to 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.

22:06But if you're hauling, I don't know, 100 records, 300 records in a couple of crates up and down staircases, I mean, physically, that's an incredibly demanding job, isn't it? 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 crazy. And by my mid-twenties, I would just be waking up the next morning and, like, my neck couldn't move to the left. Like, there were so many emergency trips to the chiropractor.

22:42Is it like a repetitive strain injury? Is it just the way that your neck is always locked to one side because you've got the headphone? I think it's the neck locked to 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. In your foot? Yeah, I went to the doctor and he was like, oh, I watched some videos of you on stage before you got here. You tap your foot like that while you're playing. You've been doing that for 25 years. So, yes, you have synovitis in your right foot. He calls it synovitis. I called it DJ foot.

23:17I'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 most of my DJ friends have got something wrong with them. All over those years when you were developing your craft as a DJ, 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 machine 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.

23:58But one night I was DJing in the club and this guy came up to me, Dominic Trenier. He was, he's no longer here, but he was this amazing A &R guy. and he had this crazy voice like he'd been gargling razor blade since the 80s. He said, yo, I got this white chick signed to my label and I don't know what an album's supposed to sound like, but I want it to sound like how you DJ.

24:23Her name 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 DJing was his detour and then somehow brought me back to production.