Mark Ronson: This charming man

Mark Ronson, the best-connected man in pop, tells Elizabeth Day about working with his heroes and his dislike of "super-dumbed-down" music
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mark ronson in brooklyn
Mark Ronson, photographed for the Observer in Brooklyn, on 18 May 2010. Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer

The top button on Mark Ronson's shirt has fallen off. "Oh no," he says, when the thread unravels in his hand, his mouth crinkling at the corners. He slips the button carefully into his trouser pocket, before carrying on with whatever it was he was saying, but it has clearly unsettled him. "I can't have my photo taken without it," he says sheepishly a few moments later. "It will look all wrong."

He is right. The shirt is emblazoned with an intricate art nouveau pattern of William Morris-style flowers and leaves. With the top button done up, and worn beneath Ronson's double-breasted Prada suit, the shirt looks smart and slightly ironic. Without it, the collar gapes open and he resembles a dodgy secondhand car salesman on a timeshare holiday in Tenerife.

At first, Ronson tries using Sellotape to stick the fabric together but then it turns out that the photographer has a travel sewing kit in his bag for just such emergencies. Ronson is effusive in his thanks. "Now," he says with a lupine smile. "Can anyone sew?" The photographer obliges. The shirt is quickly fixed.

Ronson is mortified at the prospect of looking like a diva or a man whose concerns tip rather more towards style than substance. But the button tells you a couple of important things about him. One: he is a perfectionist. Two: he can persuade you to do almost anything.

It is these two qualities that have propelled the 34-year-old to the top of his game. As a music producer, he has teased the best out of artists including Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Daniel Merriweather. Winehouse's breakthrough album Back to Black combined her smoky vocals with his retro-soul sound to such devastating effect that it won five Grammys. It was Ronson who first suggested Lily Allen should play up her London accent on the triple-platinum album Alright, Still. And when, three years ago, he released Version, an album of covers performed by artists including Robbie Williams and Kasabian, Ronson scooped a Brit for best male solo artist.

Now on the verge of releasing his third studio album, Record Collection (which includes collaborations with everyone from Boy George to Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan), it is clear that Ronson is a man who knows exactly what he wants and who is also blessed with the abundant charm he needs to get it. He is routinely called "the best connected man in music" because of his coterie of glamorous friends and also because his sister, DJ Samantha Ronson, once dated paparazzi favourite Lindsay Lohan. John Lennon's son Sean is one of his best friends. His stepfather, Mick Jones, was a founding member of rock band Foreigner. And his mother, Ann Dexter-Jones, used to throw star-studded parties in the family home in New York, where guests included Mick Jagger and David Bowie. Ronson remembers being tucked into bed by actor Robin Williams and having a sleepover with Michael Jackson. "Nothing weird happened," he says, with the weariness of one who has been asked the same question a thousand times before.

But Ronson does not particularly like to be tarred with the socialite brush. "It's bullshit," he says, sitting in his small Brooklyn studio and contemplatively eating a banana. "It's not like I'm amassing some golden Rolodex to see who can have the most famous friends. It's slightly obnoxious because it implies there are all these celebrities just patting each other on the back. I think I'm really just probably pretty easy to get on with."

We are sitting in a poky room to one side of the main recording studio, the walls hung with red velvet drapes and the floor covered in an assortment of woven rugs. If anything, Ronson's brand of creative collaboration recalls the absinthe-soaked salons of 1920s Paris – a cultural meeting point where artists can come and share ideas, "but," says Ronson in his dry mid-Atlantic drawl, "with less alcoholism".

Record Collection, to be released later this year, sprang from "four or five months of jamming with my favourite musicians in the world… It became like a really fun summer camp." The album gave him the opportunity to work with musicians he has long admired, such as Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes and Rose Dougall, the former singer of the Pipettes. Does he have any heroes left to meet? "I still haven't worked with Mr T," he says with a slow-breaking smile. "Batman was unavailable."

The result of this musical mish-mash is an extraordinary fusion of genres that really shouldn't work and yet somehow does. Ronson manages to meld together a dizzying array of electronic synthesisers, hip-hop beats and Caribbean steel drums with a deft commercial touch. During the making of the album, he got peculiarly obsessed with synthesisers, and on the first day of writing, there were eight piled up high in the studio. "It's almost as if a really talented band from 1972 had got a Daft Punk CD in the mail and had to work out how to play it," he explains helpfully.

I hear the album at a playback several weeks before our interview in a private members' club in central London. Ronson, dripping casual charisma and wearing a luminescently white suit like the man from Del Monte, introduces each track to the roomful of journalists with a succession of self-deprecating jokes. "I feel like I'm giving a Powerpoint presentation," he says at one point, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet (which are smartly clad in a pair of limited-edition, Ronson-designed Gucci deck shoes).

The fourth track on the album, "Somebody to Love Me", is sung by Boy George and is a particular high point – George's voice has got deeper, throatier and more affecting with age. "It's like when you hear Edith Piaf singing 'Je Ne Regrette Rien'," agrees Ronson. "It's knowing someone's story as an outsider, knowing what they've been through and seeing that they've come out on top. All the weight, gravel and grit in the voice makes it so much more compelling."

Ronson himself sings the title track – the first time he has done so. "It's weird listening to my own voice because with the headphones on, it sounds really awful – nasal and grating." Still, he has been taking singing lessons and he acknowledges that the end result "doesn't sound bad".

In fact, he likes his music to retain a sense of quirkiness and decries the current trend for bland pop songs, churned out on computers. "There are bands that only use computer programs and make brilliant shit, but… that democratisation of music can also make people really lazy," he tells me later in Brooklyn. "So much of it is super-dumbed-down. It doesn't sound like anyone cares, it doesn't sound like that was written because somebody had to get something off their chest. It's all about a party at a rich guy's house… It makes me sad because it's very calculated. I can't imagine people will be listening to it in 20 years' time."

He thinks the act of making music has become markedly less tangible, with a dwindling emphasis on the ability to play an instrument. "There's no sense of musicianship. There are brilliant bands from the punk era that couldn't play that well but there was a grit to it. Computers, they remove any sort of human feeling out of stuff… Everything now is just completely sterile. Vocals even more so, because with Autotune, anybody can sing because you can just fix it."

His iPhone vibrates and he apologises for taking the call. There is a brief conversation about deadline dates with the voice at the other end of the line. "I thought Jay might like to come and listen to the album," Ronson says casually. And, yes, that is Jay-Z.

But the interesting thing about Ronson is that for all his celebrity friends, his manners are consistently impeccable, whomever he happens to be speaking to. He answers my questions in the same way that he talks to the photographer's assistant. He does not try to charm and this, in its own way, ends up being curiously charming.

He says he still gets nervous when he meets his heroes. When he started working with Ghostface Killah, the pair recorded three songs before Ronson plucked up the courage to speak to him on the phone. "I was nervous that he might think I'm slightly dorky," he explains. "I thought, 'It's just better that he doesn't know me and we have this working relationship.'" They did talk in the end. Now, Ronson is a close enough friend to call him Ghost.

He remains a curious combination of geekiness and social ease. One minute, he appears completely unfazed and relaxed to the point of somnolence. The next, his mercurial attention will have shifted and he will be frantically bashing out piano chords while simultaneously answering several texts. He works hard, jetting around the world to wherever the next job takes him.

He splits the rest of his time between London, where he was born, and New York, where he has an apartment, a rescue dog called Maude and a girlfriend (French actress Josephine de la Baume). Shortly after this interview, he is due to fly to Munich and he seems to exist in a semi-permanent state of transit – his words slur together and even his purple-lined navy socks are from British Airways. "I think I have an inherent modest level of stress, but I'm only super-aware of it when it goes away, when I'm on holiday and I think, 'Oh this feels pretty good'," he says, chewing on Nicorette gum – he's trying to give up smoking and finding it a challenge. "But I don't feel neurotic."

Yet there would be plenty of reason for a healthy dollop of neurosis. Ronson's father, Laurence, was a band manager who turned his back on the family business (multimillion service station and property company Heron) to look after Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz and 1980s soul singer Roachford. Ronson was born in St John's Wood in London but his parents divorced when he was five and he subsequently moved with his mother and younger twin sisters, Samantha and Charlotte, to New York. There was an acrimonious custody battle and Ronson had to testify in court. "I remember Dad picking us up at weekends and it was awkward." On several occasions, he says his father's family, determined to stop Ann taking the children to America, "cut off the electricity in my mother's house, kind of to show her who she was messing with. They really didn't want her to bring us to New York."

That must have been horrible, I say. His eyes gaze at me from beneath half-drooping eyelids. "It's hard to say it was horrible now because I'm so close to my dad and the best part of it was that he remarried and had three children who I love." His mother and Mick Jones also went on to have two children of their own and Jones brought with him two children from a former relationship, so all in all, Ronson has a grand total of nine siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings. "To me, it never seemed anything other than natural to be so close."

In America, Ronson found that his classmates' parents were delighted by his English manners. "I'd be saying please and thank you and eating with a knife and fork while they'd be screaming, 'Mum, fucking turn the TV on!' My mother was pretty strict. I hated it but maybe it made me a bit more sensible."

Perhaps the experience of dislocation, of moving to a strange country and having to make a whole new circle of friends, also left Ronson with a particular aptitude for getting on with people. He describes record producing as a cross between "diplomacy and being a bit of a shrink, working out how to get the best out of people".

He remembers being obsessed with music from an early age, poring over copies of Smash Hits. Ronson ended up dropping out of New York University in the mid-90s to make his name as a DJ at downtown hip-hop clubs, charging $50 per job. His family were baffled, but Ronson rapidly acquired a reputation for his diverse sets and was soon being hired for celebrity parties. In 2006, he was the DJ at Tom Cruise's wedding to Katie Holmes. He was so nervous, he drank too much, played "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and then promptly threw up as soon as he got off stage.

Ronson admits it rankles when people assume he got his breaks because of his privileged background or that he is little more than a millionaire dilettante, playing with his electronic synths and Gucci-designed shoes whenever the fancy takes him. "I think it's an easy potshot to take if you're a critic, but the places I first made my name were these hole-in-the-wall hip-hop clubs on the Lower East Side and they couldn't have cared less who my family was, let alone have any idea who they were."

When Version came out, featuring covers sung by Winehouse, Allen et al, it was again assumed by some that Ronson had simply flicked through his diamanté-encrusted contacts book and got his friends to rehash a few old songs written by other people. Portishead's Geoff Barrow called it "shit funky supermarket muzak" and Ronson received death threats on MySpace from teenage Morrissey fans who were outraged at his cover of the Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before". "I'm proud of Version, I think it was cool," Ronson says, pointing out that neither Winehouse nor Allen had had their big breakthrough when the album was being recorded. He has since made a "hardcore" pact with himself to have "no horns or covers" on the new album.

He tells me he is proud of Record Collection but I suspect he is anxious, too, about how it will be received. Ronson admits that sometimes, when he is on an aeroplane flying to yet another far-flung destination, he finds himself thinking about death. "I just imagine, if I die, OK, what will it say in the paper? I just wonder: what would my friends think?"

He pauses, his brow momentarily wrinkled, but then the troublesome thought clears as quickly as it appeared. His phone vibrates again and immediately you can see Ronson's mind shift gear as he concentrates on what he has to do next: the appointments he has to arrange, the pieces of music he wants to make, the flights he needs to board. He pops another square of Nicorette gum out of the packet and starts chewing furiously.

"Bang Bang Bang", the first single from Mark Ronson's upcoming album Record Collection, is out on Columbia on 11 July

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