It feels slightly odd to be meeting Mark Ronson on a rainy industrial estate near Caledonian Road, north London. A certain glitziness attached itself to his name even before he was famous – his mother is a New York socialite, his father a music business grandee, his stepfather a rock star – and glitziness is a commodity in fairly short supply in this particular area of King’s Cross. Now resident in London – handy for Paris, where his wife, model and actor Joséphine de La Baume, has most of her work – the industrial estate is where Ronson keeps his recording studio. Inside, it is substantially more alluring than its exterior suggests: gold discs and Grammy awards, framed vintage gig posters and flickering scented candles.  A courier arrives with a gift and a card from his record company, celebrating the arrival at No 1 in the charts of Uptown Funk, a collaboration with singer Bruno Mars that Ronson laboured over for six agonising months. He claims that he worked so hard on it that his hair started to fall out; at one point, the stress of trying to come up with a suitable guitar part caused him to vomit and faint.  “We did 45 takes of it and I just couldn’t get it, it sounded like horrible bullshit, so we went to lunch, walked down to a restaurant. Everyone was saying: ‘Dude, what’s wrong with you? You’ve gone totally white.’ Because I was going on pretending everything was just fine; you don’t want to admit that you’re just not there, you’re not where you want to be. And I went to the toilet and just … fainted. I threw up, and fainted. They had to come and carry me out of the toilet.”  Still, it all worked out OK in the end. En route to No 1, Uptown Funk managed to break a British record for being streamed the most times in a week: 2.3m times, evidence of how thoroughly the track dominated the Christmas party season. Anticipation for his forthcoming album, Uptown Special – co-produced by Jeff Bhasker, who has previously worked with everyone from Beyoncé to Ed Sheeran to Lana Del Rey to Kanye West – is extremely high. No wonder your record company has sent you champagne, I say. “The ‘record company’,” says Ronson, mordantly. “I arranged to have that delivered myself to make me look good in front of a journalist.”  He made a similar joke last time I met him, in Manhattan, seven years ago. A fan came up in a restaurant, mid-interview, and started gushing about his second album, Version. “Thanks for making me look good in the Guardian,” Ronson called to her as she left.  In fact, Ronson spent a suprising proportion of our time together dolefully insisting he didn’t lead a glamorous, charmed life while giving every impression of leading a glamorous, charmed life. The previous year, he had co-produced Lily Allen’s debut album, Alright, Still, and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. The former went on to sell 3m copies, the latter 20m. Version had become almost as ubiquitous: you couldn’t turn the television on without hearing Ronson’s cover versions of Coldplay’s God Put a Smile on Your Face and The Zutons’ Valerie, also sung by Winehouse.  The tabloid press seemed almost as fascinated by him as they were by her and they wouldn’t leave her alone for five minutes, this being the start of Winehouse’s horrible descent. Record producers tend to be shadowy, backroom figures, but Ronson was almost needlessly handsome, dated supermodels and came from a family so famous in New York society that Tatler magazine had claimed, perhaps a little hysterically, that anyone who didn’t know them should leave Manhattan. He had recently played Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes.  Over the course of the few days we spent together, Ronson was mobbed by female fans and hounded by tabloid reporters, one of whom thrust a recording device under his nose and demanded to know if he had “a message for Amy”. “If I did,” he frowned, “I’d probably ring her, not say it into your tiny Dictaphone and have her read it in the papers.” As if to underline his status as the hottest producer around, a young British singer and her manager turned up at the studio where Ronson was recording his radio show. The singer was looking to work with him on her debut album and offered to make herself useful by popping out to buy everyone beers. It was Adele.  In the middle of all this, Ronson affected a kind of bemused detachment, patiently explaining that his background hadn’t much helped his career (“Ghostface Killah isn’t going to work with me because my mum’s in Tatler and my stepdad was in Foreigner”), declining to say much about Winehouse and her troubles, and claiming he found all the attention “fucking weird”. Today, too, he seems in a noticeably more downbeat mood than you might expect someone in recent receipt of a No 1 single to be. At least part of that might be down to jetlag: he flew from the US to Paris yesterday, saw his wife briefly, tried to sleep, woke up at 2am this morning and arrived in London a couple of hours ago.  It renders his already languid transatlantic drawl more languid and drawly than ever, causing a few of his answers to tail off (“Sometimes I keep talking like I’m trying to get to a point,” he frowns, “and then I realise there isn’t actually a point to what I’m saying and I’m making it even worse by keeping going”). Occasionally, it appears to restructure his vocabulary in some intriguing ways: I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean to say that Allen and Winehouse were two of the leading figures in British psychology, but listening back to the recording, that’s definitely what came out of his mouth.  But you also get the feeling that Ronson may just tend to a slightly lugubrious view of life. He is drily witty about the state of his career, which he claims had “definitely gone cold” prior to Uptown Funk. It’s perhaps worth noting that Ronson’s notion of a fallow period in his career involved working with Paul McCartney and co-producing Bruno Mars’s Unorthodox Jukebox, the fourth biggest-selling album in the world last year. “You know you’re cold, industry-wise, because you see all the gigs going to your friends. OK, I understand, so they think that I’m just the guy that did Back to Black six years ago, and that’s pretty much all. I don’t know, it’s probably all my weird hangups and neuroses, a lot of it.”  Neurotic or not, there may be a grain of truth to what he says. The sound he minted on Back to Black and Version proved to be one of the most pervasive in modern pop – nearly a decade on, people are still making records indebted to it, not least Sam Smith and John Newman – but Ronson’s 2010 album Record Collection, a bold attempt to break free of his trademark retro-soul formula, “sold way less than Version”. His position as the celebrities’ wedding DJ of choice has apparently slipped, a state of affairs he doesn’t seem terribly bothered about.  “Put it this way, there was some massive wedding in the south of France earlier this year and they had Elton John performing the first night, Mariah Carey and Calvin Harris on the big night and I think I was, like, DJing in the lobby while the guests were checking out,” he laughs. “If you’re at the level where you can get Mariah and Calvin to headline, I’m like the Sunday afternoon chillout set DJ, which I have absolutely no problem with.”  And the tabloids stopped following him around, a state of affairs he seems less bothered about still. “I was linked with these two really captivating, charismatic people, Lily and Amy, and it was just a byproduct of that. They so captured the public’s attention and I guess I just got my lucky break because of that, or my unlucky break, depending on your view of being in the tabloids.  “And I guess I was probably going out a little too much in 2007 and 2008. I kind of wish I’d been drinking and partying a bit less, because when I look back on it, it’s all a bit of a blur. I wish I could remember a bit more about things like winning the Grammys and shit, because stuff like that’s kind of special. Maybe because it wasn’t as much fun as it had been, maybe just because I’m a little older or married, I don’t do that any more. But they really stop chasing you around because you’re not having hit records and your name isn’t going to sell papers, so they go and follow Harry Styles or Professor Green instead.”  “You purposely kept out of the press,” offers his publicist.  “I was desperate to get into the fucking press,” says Ronson, deadpan. “I was literally hanging around outside Bungalow 8, going: ‘Where’s the photographer from Metro?’”  He doesn’t think his decision to calm his lifestyle down had anything to do with Winehouse’s death from alcohol poisoning in 2011, although it’s pretty clear it had a huge impact on him. On the wall of Ronson’s studio, there is a frame featuring a bass drum skin with a heart and “Amy” painted on it in the style of a tattoo, a gift from Bruno Mars, who performed a tribute to the singer at that year’s MTV awards. “I was asked to perform at that event, but I just wasn’t ready at that point to, like, go and perform with anybody, around that … whole thing.”  Last time I met Ronson, he joked that one of his main roles as her producer was to stop the singer sloping off to a bar near the studio midway through recording sessions. Today, he talks about their working relationship in wistful, vaguely mystical terms; something magical happened between them that he hasn’t recaptured with anyone else.  “No one’s ever going to compare to Amy because of the talent she had and the unique bond we had, that rapport, that energy in the studio. For all the stuff that I did on Back to Black, I think we only ever spent five or six days together in the studio. Maybe 10. Valerie was done in two hours. Her thing was so effortless in a way, because … well, because she would just … it was just what came out – that’s it. ‘That’s it, I’m not changing anything, that’s what came out of me and it’s good enough.’ And every time it was obviously good enough, and special. It was just … a thing.”  If Ronson genuinely thinks his career was in the doldrums, then Uptown Special certainly seems the album to pull him out. Mars heads up a remarkably starry cast of collaborators that includes Stevie Wonder. There is also a singer called Keyone Starr, who Ronson found in Jackson, Mississippi, after touring churches in the deep south of America in search of “a young singer who has that feel of a late 70s Chaka Khan record”.  “It was kind of amazing. You’d meet these people that could outsing anyone in the top 10, but they’d explain that they didn’t really enjoy singing secular music or Beyoncé or whatever, because unless they’re really singing for God, they just don’t feel it. In the era of music reality shows, where people basically start singing in order to become famous, it’s so anti that, it’s incredible. You’d start talking to them, like: ‘We’re making this record, would you be interested in coming up to LA to record a song?’ and they’re like: ‘Well, I can never miss my choir rehearsal on Wednesdays and Thursdays,’ which is really touching.”  More bizarrely, the lyrics were written by Michael Chabon, the author of Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Ronson apparently approached him after turning up at a book signing in New York. “I wrote him a letter and he was just kind of instantly into it,” he says. The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist proved surprisingly amenable to being told that the characters he came up with for one song were “too sordid and unlikable to inhabit the same world as this music I’ve written”, and that his words weren’t right because they didn’t fit the correct pop formula. “He came down to the studio and it was like a Jeff Bhasker songwriting boot camp. You know, Jeff has all these amazing stringent policies on songs and what words sing good, and what you can’t sing, how everything must adhere to the note, the chorus must start this interval higher than the verse, all these things. And Michael, obviously he has no problem in the words department, but he just seemed to love taking in all these songwriting boot camp ideas. He was incredibly patient.”  The end result is hugely impressive: Uptown Special sounds like a hit. Moreover, it might well become a hit in America, a country where, as Ronson puts it, “my records to date haven’t done shit”, but where Uptown Funk unexpectedly made the top five. He played some of it at a DJ gig the other night, he says, and “2,500 kids were totally going for it, which I thought was kind of amazing. It’s so different to what everyone’s ears are attuned to right now, but it completely works. That just kind of makes me psyched for music. You know, ‘Oh, it’s not just that I like it because I’m an old man,’ or whatever.”  Indeed, talking about the album, Ronson becomes about as animated as his voice and the jetlag will allow. If it was someone else’s album and he heard it, he says, he’d be jealous. As I’m leaving, he starts talking again about the guitar part on Uptown Funk that made him faint. He played it to his stepfather, Mick Jones, of AOR titans Foreigner. “And he said: ‘Oh, that’s good, is that Nile Rogers?’  “That’s what I’ve done,” he says, a little heavily. “I’ve made something so good that people don’t actually think it’s me.”
The producer and DJ helped launch the singer to superstardom with his retro-soul sound. Now, after period of self-doubt that led him to collapse, he is back with new album Uptown Special, featuring Stevie Wonder and Bruno Mars and a No 1 single. Alexis Petridis meets him