them connect and having a good time.
Tell us more about the club scene at that time, how did you become the most in demand guy? DJs even back when I was doing it in the 90s weren’t like Calvin Harris and David Guetta, on these big stages. You were respected because you made people have a good time but you might be shoved in a corner somewhere with the turntables facing the wall and you’d have to like crane around to see if people were dancing. But I loved it because I didn’t want to be the star of the show. I just wanted to play music that I loved. And it was also an interesting time because Jay Z and Puff Daddy, were starting to come out in New York and discovering this downtown scene. So I essentially had literally a front row seat for my thing in the DJ booth and it was really fun to watch New York just change in front of my eyes a little bit.
You really went with this perfoming as a DJ at Puff Daddy’s legendary 29th Birthday Party, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes wedding, Paul McCartneys wedding, that was after you had got into producing, was that the beginning of the end of DJing? I never wanted to be a DJ as a career. It was something I loved doing, but it always felt like a little bit of a sidetrack from making music, which is the thing that I probably loved the most. But the DJ-ing became successful and then all these other producers that had one time been my peers, maybe at the same level, people like Chad and Pharrell from The Neptunes or Danger Mouse or Kanye, were suddenly like superstars. So I just thought, ‘Maybe I’m not that good at this. ’ I didn’t give up the reigns, but I thought to myself, ‘This might not ever happen.’ And there’s something in the power of surrender. I met Amy Winehouse at this moment that I was just like, ‘ I might never ever make any music that’s commercially successful. So I’m just going to make the stuff I really love.’ And that seems like a very obvious thing to say that everybody should know. And then because I met Amy at this time, where I was just like, ‘I don’t care if anyone else likes this, And that’s ironically, where I had my first success.
Back to Black is now one of the most influential albums of the century, did it feel like you were making something special, Amy had a reputation of being difficult, was that your experience? No, it wasn’t. When I met Amy I know she had been working on what was supposed to be her second album, the follow up to ‘Frank’ for a few years. And I know she had gone through periods struggling with stuff. At that time that we met at my studio in New York, the connection was immediate, like even just as a personality, she was so
funny. I just asked her what she wanted her album to sound like. ‘I want it to sound like this thing they play down at my local.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she played me the Shangri-Las. And I was like, ‘This is cool’, I was so inspired by her and she was only going to be in New York for one day so I said, ‘Well, I don’t have anything to play you here’ but if you go home and come back tomorrow, I’ll try and come up with something.’ So Istayed up all night because I was just buzzing from the energy of her and I wanted to come up with something that was going to impress her enough to stay in New York. I had the idea for the piano chords from ‘Back to Black’ and I just put a little [drum noise]. I was like, ‘That sounds like the stuff she’s playing me right?’ - like a spooky tambourine. She came back the next day and I remember being so nervous in case she didn’t like it. I’m playing this track and I look back and she’s goes, ‘I love it. That’s what I want my whole album to sound like.’ And I was like, ‘Cool’. And she went in the other room and changed her flight. And then we stayed in for a week.
Amazing in itself, but didn’t you put together the whole album in less than a week? She had a lot of songs ready to go already. She had them on her little nylon string guitar. She had ‘Wake Up Alone’ and ‘Love is a Losing Game’. And then we wrote ‘Back to Black’, she wrote ‘Rehab’ while we were there. So the six songs that I did on that, it was probably a week. And then she went to Miami to do the rest with Salaam, And then we went to Brooklyn and I recorded the tracks with The DapKings.
Who she had never met until you did ‘Valerie’ right? I said, ‘There’s this great band.’ I’d never worked with them before but I was a big fan of the Sharon Jones records. I remember calling her in the middle of the night because I was so excited when the band was recording, I said, ‘Listen to this!’ and held the phone to the speaker then I pulled it back and she’d hung up! [laughs] But yeah, it was really exciting because when she got the CD for her album when it finally came in before it came out, I remember her calling me up and being like, ‘You mean to tell me there’s some bloke named Binky Griptite that played on my album?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, he played guitar, he’s amazing.’
What does ‘Back to Black’ actually mean? ‘You go back to her and I go back to black’ – just back to infinite sadness. I think it was just like the most dramatic thing that she could say. I think it’s just like nothing and just sadness.
You win three Grammy’s with ‘Back to Black’ then ‘Valerie’ comes out, did you have a mission to take sort of older music together and make it even cooler for the present day?
LIVE24-SEVEN.COM
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INTERVI EW MARK RONSON
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