Is Mark Ronson a pioneering DJ/Producer or a guy with a great phonebook? It was a tough one to call before last night’s Academy gig and…it’s still hard to say after.
It was a Mark Ronson and the Business Intl affair last night so the producer was surrounded by a collection of musicans on stage, the keyboardist/vocalist Rose Elinor Dougall, of The Pipettes, being the most memorable (“She’s the hottest girl in the world”, shouts my friend Mags. “Make sure you put that in the review”.)
One of the first tunes out of the gate is his brassy Radiohead cover ‘Just’, with the blonde quiffed Ronson almost hidden, happy to let his band get on with it. It’s a strong start and continues in this vein at first. Izzy Kizzy comes on to perform all rapping/MC duties and one of Ronson’s best productions, ‘Ooh Wee’, kicks things into a new gear.
Mark welcomes the crowd and goes back to drumming away frantically on impossibly cool looking red er..drummy things. Dougall leaves her keyboard to fill in for Lily Allen on ‘Oh My God’ and things are going great.
‘California’, or ‘The song from the OC’ as it’s usually called, is thrown into the mix. I’m definitely the happiest person in the audience for this one. Myself and my housemate David are currently re-watching series one and it turns out that on second viewing (Ok, third viewing) Luke is actually a beaut and Ryan is a bit of an asshole.
Anyway, while I muse on the politics of high school life in Orange County Mark Ronson has decided to scrap all this band nonsense and be a DJ again. It’s just him on some decks (and incongruously as always, a laptop).
This is how Ronson got to be where he is now, playing DJ sets to all the right people (the right people, urrggh) in New York and maybe this is his way of staying true to his roots or something but… no, it just doesn’t work.
Perhaps a packed Tripod would respond well to a Mark Ronson DJ set but here it just jars. It doesn’t sit comfortably with the opening section of the show – like eating hot dogs on toast (something I shamefully did when I got home last night).
There’s a lot of furious moving around the decks and the laptop, but up there on stage in clear view it all looks a bit…well silly. Maybe if he was shrouded in shadow and smoke, high above a heaving club crowd it’d work, but here? Shoehorned into a great band show? No, no, no.
Izzy Kizy comes back, to fill Missy Elliott’s shoes this time, and that’s the highlight of a thankfully short DJ set.
The band come back on but somethings been lost with the break. There’s no sense of momentum to turn this into a great night.
‘Bang Bang Bang’ threatens to get things going again, but MNDR, so cool in the ‘Bang ..’ video, doesn’t bring much to her other album tracks. Mark comes out in front to show his guitar skills for a Coldplay instrumental (a lot better than it sounds) and another ok-ish album tracks follow. And then it’s time for the obligatory ‘we’re finished, oh wait we’re back’ bit.
The encore is brief but possibly the highlight of the show. Just two songs; ‘The Bike Song’ and ‘Valerie’ but the appearance of The View’s Kyle Falconer on vocals is a proper glad-I-got-to-see-that-moment.
And that was it, two parts of a good show with a average DJ set sitting uneasily in the middle. So who is Mark Ronson? A great producer? A canny networker? A celebrity DJ? Still not sure, but there was enough going on last night to still be interested in the question.