Amy was one of the first I’d play a new record to

Producer Mark Ronson’s Midas touch extends to his own album

DJ, MUSICIAN, writer producer, facilitator. Mark Ronson is all of these and if he needed to draw up a CV, it would break through the floor such are the names it would drop. Adele, Estelle, Macy Gray and Lana Del Ray trip off the tongue in a pleasant rhyming way. Veterans as diverse as Foreigner and Paul McCartney have also called seeking a career reboot. If Ronson had only ever produced

Back To Black for Amy Winehouse he could sit comfortably in the producer’s pantheon. He dedicated Uptown

Special, his fourth album release as an artist, to the late singer.

Its lead single, Uptown Funk, with vocals by Bruno Mars, was a No. 1 and has featured in charts worldwide since November. It has helped him take the top spot for one of his own albums for the first time. ‘That’s not the kind of thing that was meant to happen to me. That’s the kind of thing that happens to Miley Cyrus,’ he says.

‘You set goals for yourself but that’s one of those things that seemed so remote. In this era of the internet and blogs, people’s tastes change so much and I thought, who is going to be checking out a Mark Ronson record in 2015?’

Evidently many have sought out the album and its mix of old-fashioned soul, funk and psychedelic pop.

Although the success of the single comes as little surprise, the parent album is a far darker, more textured affair than

Uptown Funk suggests. Ronson enlisted the help of Pulitzer Prize winning US novelist Michael Chabon to write much of the lyrics – as you do.

Well, it beats asking Ryan Tedder or Gary Barlow.

‘I was a little bit spoilt before because on the second album,

Version, the songs were covers, so my lyrics came courtesy of Paul Weller and Radiohead and people like that,’ says Ronson.

‘I felt the music for this album was developing in a dark, mood- ier way and the lyrics had to match that. I met Michael once at a book launch. We talked about music and one night I had an idea to write him a long email because I felt I had an “in” with him, to see if he would be interested in working on some songs, and that’s how it started. ‘One song in particular,

Summer Breaking, encapsulates what the writer of The Wonder

Boys brought to the table. It opens as sparsely as any of the short stories that made his name, “Driving through ghost town metal, horses a thousand feet high, orange sky.”

‘I did hope that working with Michael would bring a depth to the lyrics,’ he says.

He thinks that good lyrics shouldn’t be the preserve of indie bands or the latest tortured soul with an acoustic guitar. ‘Dance tracks seem to concentrate on having a killer rhythm track but the lyrics seem to be about being on the dancefloor, getting your heart broken,’ he says.

‘There are songs I’ve been listening to for 20 years and I still don’t know what they’re about but I keep coming back.’

As well as Chabon, Bruno Mars, and gifted singer Keyone Starr, Ronson called on Stevie Wonder to add harmonica to a couple of tracks. He says it was something of a relief that, due to touring commitments, there was no opportunity to meet Stevie.

‘That is the nature of working these days. You send audio files over and back via the internet and it gets done. Gnarls Barkley made an entire album like that,’ Ronson says. ‘Maybe, deep down I felt being in the same room as golden: Mark Ronson, above, worked with Amy Winehouse, Stevie Wonder and Bruno Mars him would have been overwhelming. His music has meant so much to me that I probably would have become too emotional.’

There is more than a hint of emotion when I ask him about Amy Winehouse.

‘I recorded with Amy before we made Back To

Black as well – when she wasn’t the megastar she became,’ he says.

‘You often get these amazing vocal performances before artists become a bit jaded with all that’s going on around them. ‘We made one album,

Back To Black and that resonated with so many people. It’s hard to look back to see if we would still be working with each other. She was just… always among the first people I’d play a new record for.’

Enlisted a Pulitzer Prize winner to write the lyrics