When Mark Ronson first started to be noted as someone other than a guy who DJed at gold plated parties, he initially tried to make it as a sort of Timbaland esque hip hop guru. When this didn’t work, he put his headphones back on and helped produce some incredibly successful albums, including Amy Winehouse’s “Back To Black” and Lily Allen’s “Alright, Still.” Credited with bringing something remarkable from both those artists, he stepped out in the spotlight again with “Version” his covers album which basically took 12 songs that were perfectly fine as they were and added some brass to them. Luke warmly received, but with some famous names appearing as guest vocalists, it sold quite well and quickly became coffee table fodder. He went away again after that and produced Adele, Estelle and Christina Aguilera, clearly becoming the go to guy if you want to sound like you’ve listened to a lot of motown records but have roughly 20 times the budget of the Supremes. Now he’s back with a new album “Record Collection” with, get this, all original material and another slew of guest vocalists, including former Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall, Boy George, once golden soul man D’Angelo and the View’s Kyle Falconer, who guests on new single “The Bike Song.”
What Ronson wants, what he desperately craves, is to be a tastemaker, a link for the public at large into the artists he loves. He tried it with Daniel Merriweather and one reasonable ballad aside, that didn’t work. Now he’s trying something slightly different, to take artists on the outskirts of the mainstream and bring them to wider attention and to take a few faded icons and restore them to glory. So why he’s chosen Falconer as the man to help him to do this is bizarre. The View were never any good, never. They had a couple of minor hits, but their second album (Yes, that’s right, they’ve released two albums) “Which Bitch” bombed so spectacularly they were lucky not to be dropped and Falconer’s drunken mess of a voice, which had charmed some people for precisely ten minutes, was reduced to a muddy wheeze. Even on “The Bike Song” in which he is charged with the simple task of saying “Gonna ride my bike until I get home” and with Ronson’s admittedly impressive way of cleaning up his voice, it’s still borderline inaudible. The rest of it is passable, in a sort of expensive advertising campaign way, sounding jaunty without ever making you think at all. Even when kooky rapper Spank Rock turns up things don’t really motor. It hums along, efficiently, but predictably. Meshing together the hip hop beats of Ronson’s early days with the layered cushioning of his later work, it’s got elements of Primal Scream, Beastie Boys and Groove Armada thrown in, without any of the spark and danger of those acts. On this and the early clips from the record, it just feels like Ronson is trying so desperately hard all the time. Trying to be cool, trying to be the kind of musician that critics talk about on late night review shows while still being played in supermarket check outs. It’s not working at the moment.
Sporting his new bleached haircut, Ronson actually now has much in common with another man with scarily blonde hair, Mr Hudson. He’s mates with the right people, he’s got half decent taste in music and ultimately, his future is behind the controls, not in front of the mic. Whether it’s enough for either of them to be just a producer is doubtful, but it’s where they’re both better off. There’s no shame in making other people sound good, it’s a skill few people possess, both men should be proud of it and strive to keep bringing the best out of the artists they work with.
Ronson‘s latest, along with the whole of his last record, is expensive lift music. He’s better off producing, helping to craft the rough cuts of bolshy boys and girls into shape. He should worry less about being famous and remember that people are still writing and talking about Phil Spector, Dr. Dre and Tony Visconti, and, if Ronson produces a few more records as good as “Back To Black” they’ll write about him too. If that comes off, this will at best be a footnote.
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