The man with the Midas touch, Mark Ronson’s career has seen him metamorphose from New York hip-hop DJ to super-producer, working with everyone from Ghostface Killah to Amy Winehouse, throwing out leftfi eld curveballs like his ‘Version’ transformation of The Smiths into not-so- Northern soul, and teaming up with Gucci to launch his own range of footwear. With a new album ‘Record Collection’, released under the name Mark Ronson & The Business on the way, he helped kick off the Ibiza season with a headlining performance at the Ibiza Music Summit, which you can read about on page 58.
Was it a surprise to be asked to be key-note speaker at the IMS in Ibiza, the home of dance music? “It’s a really big deal and I realise that I’m not creating or DJing dance music but I think it just shows how much the playing fi eld has been levelled. Last night we went to see David Guetta and Calvin Harris, who’s a singer, but also a DJ and a producer, was playing fi rst. Cassius were there, and Skream, Toddla T and Annie Mac. Tonight you have Buraka Som Sistema. I’ve been playing their stuff for ages on my radio show and they’ve just done a cover of one of my favourite ’80s songs, ‘Buffalo Stance’. There aren’t that many boundaries any more. My favourite club in London is Yo Yo where they’ll play La Roux, then Shy FX, then David Rodigan. England’s good for that. It’s a shame you don’t have more of it in America.”
The big story at the moment is still the cross-over between hip-hop and house. Are there any plans for you as a producer to do anything along those lines?
“Hip-hop is, in essence, a different form of dance music. There was a point when Public Enemy came along and it became, what they called, the black CNN. But hip-hop started as dance music, you think about Arthur Baker doing Planet Rock out of Kraftwerk, and that’s always existed. Hip-hop went through a grimy period when it got tougher and the tempo went down but I think
will.i.am and those guys just want to make people dance and 120 beats per minute is the proven fucking thing that does that. I’ve heard some of Puffy’s new electronic record, ‘Last Train To Paris’, and it’s got some really clever dance productions on, it’s more progressive than the mainstream American stuff.”
You’re a huge name now but you still keep DJing on East Village radio. “I’ve been doing it for six, seven years before having any of the artist success of the last fi ve years. It’s basically a shop front with turntables in the window in East Village and I play demos. We played Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ a year before it came out, and I’ve had everyone from Adele to Ian McCulloch to Q-Tip come in and do it. It’s so low rent and low budget but I think that’s the charm. “I had a show on Kiss for a little while, but for me that was too much pressure, Saturday night, a couple of hundred thousand people listening. I needed to have something low impact and less pressure. The dance stuff I play is the good, slick shit everyone likes. I like Stuart Price, I like Holy Ghost, all the DFA shit, and dubstep, Rusko and everything I’ve heard from Skream and Magnetic Man is brilliant.”
So does your own new material refl ect that? “My new album is called ‘Record Collection’ and it’s a different sound for me as well. Working with Duran Duran, the sound of the synths is something I really fell in love with but it’s not like we’re jumping on an ’80s synth band bandwagon. It’s us applying it in our own way. Some of it sounds like if a band from 1972 got a Daft Punk CD in the mail from the future and tried to work out how to play it. You combine a kind of Fela Kuti drumbeat with some ’80s synths. Then you get a great melody over it and Boy George is singing and all of a sudden you hope you have something unfamiliar.”
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60 seconds with... MARK RONSON
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