Mark Ronson on Amy Winehouse: “She came back out the back room in 30 minutes and she’d written the whole of Back To Black”

Mark Ronson was on Matt Wilkinson’s show today on Apple Music 1 for the return of 5 Best Songs – the feature interview where an artist selects their all-time favourite songs.

Mark’s 5 Best Songs:
Pete Rock & CL Smooth – They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y)
Tyler the Creator – Big Poe
Roots Manuva – Witness
Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood (Ed Case Refix)
Amy Winehouse – In My Bed

Mark on Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s – They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y)
That time, when I first heard it in 1992, I was a fan. I would say maybe a casual fan of hip hop. I knew Public Enemy and LL Cool J and the things that were on the MTV and then the drummer in my band, I played in a band at the time, was drawn to this because the drums were so cool. He played it for me and because the song has this wave just getting under your skin because it’s this very melancholy type sample that’s in there, I had never heard anything like it. And it was that kind of thing. It was just that line in the sand that once you hear it you’re like, well, I only want to listen to this kind of music from now on. And it really kind of spurred me on the path to be a DJ.

Mark on Tyler The Creator’s Big Poe
Tyler’s amazing and this new album, it’s just exciting to me. It has so many references to the nineties, but it doesn’t feel, it’s not steeped in nostalgia. There’s a bunch of new shit that I really need to play when I’m DJing, and this has been one of them and obviously for obvious reasons. It has a Neptunes feeling to it. This whole record is great.

Mark on Roots Manuva’s Witness
I don’t think it was a coincidence that that song happened to do well in the UK. So I’d come here and I would start to do DJ gigs here and play fun festivals with UK DJs or even with Jazzy Jeff and I started to hear this one song all the time, and then when this song got played, people would lose their fucking minds and I was just like, this song’s insane. And then obviously started taking it back and playing it in New York in my sets too. And there’s some incredible viral TikTok I just saw recently of this French dance crew going crazy to the song. It’s like, I think this beat will just forever be infectious.

Mark on Gorillaz’ – Clint Eastwood (Ed Case Refix)
That was something I probably first heard in a club in London – at the club night called Rotation. It was a kind of seminal hip hop garage, whatever kind of night. Now this tempo of Two Step or Garage or whatever you want to call it is now a global pop sound, but it was at that time there was like Americans that had never heard anything like it, so it was so much fun to play this record.

Mark on Amy Winehouse’s In My Bed
I think that was about the same time Frank came out. So I was here to play Carnival, driving around London and she was on the cover of Timeout magazine. So back in the day there were billboards and flyer posters everywhere of this girl Amy Winehouse. And I just remember being like, who is this girl? Because obviously as a Jew as well, I was like, this is a Jewish name. I was like, and this soul singer, she’s cute. I just remember thinking it was really interesting and then I checked out that song in my bed and because it’s the producer, SLA Remy who sort of redid the beat that he did for NAS’s song Made You Look, which was already one of my favourite instrumentals of all time. So I was like, oh my god, she’s singing over Made You Look – incredible! Even though nobody knew that In My Bed Song, it was just so much fun to play it.

Mark on working with Amy Winehouse
She came to my studio the first day and I just said, well, what kind of record do you want to make? I would say, not that I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was just like I didn’t have a sound. I met her and I thought she was so charming and she had this kind of amazing energy. She said, well yeah, I want to make something that sounds like the music they play down at my local. I was like, well, I don’t have anything like that, but if you want to come back tomorrow I’d love to work on something. So she left and I came up being super inspired by just meeting her. I came up with bits for Back to Black and little drumbeat and played it for her the next day and she was just like, it was funny. It was so hard to read her. She was so stone-faced and she was like, yeah, that’s what I want my whole album to sound like. Just so sudden – and I remember she went in the other room and called her a&r and was like, I want to stay in New York another week to work on some more stuff with Mark. And that was it. She went to the back room. This was so old school, I burned the instrumental on a CD and gave her a disc-man and some headphones, so she could write to the track and she came back out the back room in 30 minutes and she’d written the whole of Back To Black.