Mark Ronson Talks His Life in Parties, Working With Amy Winehouse, and Oscar Win
The famed DJ, musician, and producer has seen his fair share of epic nights out. His new memoir Night People chronicles them all.
Like many teenagers in 1990s Manhattan, Mark Ronson started DJ’ing. Unlike most of them, he was talented. The musician, who grew up in London and New York, took it up during his college years at New York University. His mainstream breakout came early—when he was 26—after he produced Nikka Costa’s hit 2001 song, “Everybody Got Their Something.” Since then, he’s collaborated with the biggest names in music, from Amy Winehouse and Duran Duran to Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus. Now, the 50-year-old is chronicling the beginning of his career in a memoir, Night People, out on September 16. “I interviewed over 150 people for the book, including my mom and dad,” says Ronson. The title comes from his “fascination with night, nighttime, and partying, which runs through my family.”
Ronson has nine siblings, including his twin sisters, Charlotte and Samantha, with whom he’s pictured at left. His parents—Laurence Ronson, a music manager turned real estate developer, and Ann Dexter, a jewelry designer and socialite—divorced when he was young. In 1985, Laurence married Michele First (left). Ronson’s stepmom “took us on the first week of their honeymoon—I’m not sure how psyched my dad was about that.” After his mother married Mick Jones, the Foreigner front man, Ronson got two stepsiblings and two half-siblings, including the actor Annabelle Dexter-Jones. “It’s hectic and wonderful. Someone’s always at war, but it always gets worked out.”
“This is me in my parents’ first apartment, on George Street in London, with no choice but to be a DJ for the rest of my life,” jokes Ronson. Both of his parents were into music, but his dad was “fanatical. Especially anything soul, or funkier, or with a groove, he was obsessed with: Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone. He listened to Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s ‘New York New York.’ My sisters and I would jump on the bed. We knew all the words.”
Ronson is pictured DJ’ing at a party for the premiere of David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive. By that point, rap music had pervaded the mainstream, especially with the commercial success of Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls. Ronson helped introduce their music to new crowds by playing their songs at uptown events like the Met Gala. “Society people certainly weren’t going to the Tunnel to hear Funkmaster Flex, or even downtown to hear DJs like Stretch Armstrong,” says Ronson.
Ronson, then a student at NYU, is pictured in the studio with Michael Fredo, the nephew of designer Tommy Hilfiger, working on one of his first music gigs: scoring Tommy Hilfiger commercials. (Ronson also starred in the brand’s early-’90s campaigns.) “We worked with QD3, Quincy Jones’s son—this was a full-on nepo baby dream team.”
The Hilfiger job led Ronson to a campaign tour for the brand, for which he, Simon Rex, and Rashida and Kidada Jones traveled around the United States in a bus, going to malls and throwing parties. On that trip, he met Aaliyah (above), who was the face of Tommy Hilfiger in the ’90s. “I was pretty starstruck, because ‘One in a Million’ was one of my favorite songs,” says Ronson. “She came out during a lunch break and put on a record. I was like, ‘If you introduce me to Missy Elliott and Timbaland, I’ll give you DJ lessons for the rest of your life.’ She laughed, and then she did, actually.”
In 1993, during Ronson’s first summer DJ’ing, he’d often be found on the decks at the Limelight. “I was dyeing my hair red with a bottle of Manic Panic. Looking back at it now, I’m like, Fuck, that was the coolest I’ve ever looked.” A few years later, then mayor Rudy Giuliani cracked down on the nightlife scene, using an antiquated cabaret law that prohibited dancing in all New York City venues without a license. His “dance police” would “storm the club,” explains Ronson. “If people were dancing, the cops would come and literally put a padlock on the door. If we got wind that the cops were coming, I would throw on the theme from Cheers, and everybody would suddenly stop dancing.”
Ronson is pictured in 2003 with his younger sister Charlotte and his stepfather, Mick Jones, who “pretty much raised me.” Ronson was DJ’ing at an event for Charlotte’s clothing line, C. Ronson, at Bloomingdale’s. “She had a line of supercool tank tops.”
Ronson is pictured with Jimmy Fallon (far left) in 2002, backstage at Roseland Ballroom, where he and the comedian were about to open for the Strokes. “Jimmy wanted to make a comedy album,” explains Ronson. After its release, the Strokes invited Fallon on tour. “I said, ‘Cool, I’ll get you a band of the best musicians of that type.’ And Jimmy was like, ‘No, no, no. I can’t have a great band. I have to have a shitty band.’ I was like, ‘Okay, then I’ll come with you.’ ”
In 2003, Ronson attended the MTV Video Music Awards in a decidedly casual look. These days, he prefers relaxed suiting. “Back then, I didn’t know anything about fashion. I dressed the same every single day,” he recalls. “The only difference was whatever T-shirt I was wearing—that’s how you really broadcasted what your loves were. I would go to [the boutique] Union and buy shirts with Stevie Wonder on them.”
In 2010, Ronson debuted his new band, the Business Intl., and their first album, Record Collection, with a show at London’s 100 Club. Amy Winehouse made a surprise appearance. “At the last minute, Amy was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll get up onstage,’ ” recalls Ronson. “Even though ‘Valerie’ had come out, she didn’t want to sing it onstage. She hated to do something the way it was on the record. We had a bass player named Stuart Zender, and she just kept singing, ‘Why don’t you come on over, Stuey Z?’ The rest of the show was kind of a disaster because we didn’t know how to play all of our new stuff, but at least we got to do that with Amy.”
“Pharrell and his former partner Chad Hugo’s music basically defined the New York club experience in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” says Ronson, pictured here with Pharrell Williams at New York Fashion Week in 2004. “In fact, part of what held me back as a producer was listening to tracks by the Neptunes, DJ Premier, and Timbaland all the time, four nights a week, while I was DJ’ing. It made it difficult to find my own sound. I had to stop DJ’ing so much to lock into my own thing.”
Because Samantha is a DJ too, Ronson often, and inadvertently, shares records with her. “Over the past 20 years I’ve been playing, stuff has disappeared,” he says. “Now that I’ve been DJ’ing vinyl again, I’ve just raided Samantha’s collection.”
Ronson is pictured with Rashida Jones (left), whom he dated in the early 2000s, and his sister Samantha, who is also a DJ. “I admired my sister’s more badass approach to music,” says Ronson. “She was much more confrontational and cared a lot less what people thought. She was brave in a way that I wasn’t always.”
One of Ronson’s “best friends forever” is Sean Ono Lennon, the son of John Lennon. Ronson is pictured with Lennon and Lennon’s mother, Yoko Ono, backstage at a 2010 concert they performed in. “She could be kind of tough. Sean would be rehearsing for five days straight with a hundred different guest artists, and I remember one time his mom came in for one of those rehearsals, and she took him aside. She said, ‘Sean, if you play like this on the night of the performance, I’m not coming,’ ” recalls Ronson. “He’s the greatest son of all time. I’m a pretty good son, but I think he beats me.”
In 2019, “I did a series called Club Heartbreak, which were these fun parties where me and my friends DJ’ed our favorite ‘sad bangers’—dance floor heartbreak songs,” says Ronson. The club nights were held all over the world, from Paris and London to Los Angeles and Brooklyn (above).
Perhaps the most important party of Ronson’s life was his wedding to Grace Gummer. “We got married in the middle of Covid. It was before the vaccine, so we had a really lovely, intimate wedding,” says Ronson. “After DJ’ing for 25 years, I didn’t even want to think about the DJ. I had my friends from the Roots play beautiful jazz standards while we were walking down the aisle, and that was it.”
At the 2019 Academy Awards, “Shallow”—the song Ronson cocreated with Lady Gaga for A Star Is Born—won an Oscar for Best Original Song. “That whole day, me, Andrew, and Anthony—my two friends and cowriters—were thinking, If we win, what should we say?” Ronson recalls. “At the end of the day, we’re like, ‘No, let’s just let Gaga speak.’ And then we’re onstage, and Gaga says something that’s so beautiful. Then she just looks at me and goes, ‘Mark?’ I just felt like such an asshole to my friends because I was like, ‘Nobody’s speaking, just Gaga! Unless, of course, I say something at the last minute.’ ”
In 2024, Ronson returned to the Academy Awards for Ryan Gosling’s performance of “I’m Just Ken,” a song Ronson cowrote for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. (He scored the rest of the soundtrack too.) Onstage (right), Ronson was joined by a huge group of dancing “Kens” while Gosling sang. At the end of the song, Guns N’ Roses’ Slash played the guitar. “I remember coming back to my seat and asking Grace, my wife, ‘Did that go okay?’ And she was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ I wasn’t fishing for praise, either. It was a really ballsy, ambitious production.”
In 2016, Ronson performed at the Super Bowl with Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. “It was just bananas,” he says. Of Mars, he adds, “I’ve never worked with another artist who knows how to take a song that’s already fucking exciting enough on the record and just bring it up exponentially.”
Ronson was invited to interview the musician Wyclef Jean at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival. Ronson brought the elder of his two daughters along “because she’s just obsessed with music. I got her an old ’80s Fisher-Price record player with Big Bird,” he says. “She just sits there and listens. Her favorite songs are ‘Scenario,’ by A Tribe Called Quest; ‘Hey Jude’; ‘Pink Pony Club’; and Kacey Musgraves’s ‘Slow Burn.’ ”
“I stalked Miley for five years after I saw her singing ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,’ by Paul Simon, on SNL’s 40th anniversary show,” says Ronson. In 2018, they collaborated for the first time on the song “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart.” “The day we made it, she came in and talked for three hours about her life. Then she was like, ‘All right, should we write the song?’ ” At Glastonbury (above, in 2019), Ronson joined Cyrus for her headlining show to perform it.
