‘You don’t have to stare at me,” advises super-producer Mark Ronson from behind a DJ setup resting on a heart-shaped disco ball cracked perfectly down the middle. “You can turn around and dance,” he adds before dropping Kanye West’s Paranoid. He’s acknowledging a slightly awkward atmosphere that initially permeates London’s sweaty Scala, tonight decorated to look like a sad-sack student union club-night in line with Ronson’s new album of “sad bangers”, Late Night Feelings. This is a DJ set with guest appearances, not a gig, but one that features a recent Oscar-winner (for his work on Lady Gaga’s Shallow) with a near-immaculate CV stuffed with modern pop’s biggest practitioners. While he eschews the attention-grabbing antics of fellow producer/DJ Diplo, who he recently collaborated with as Silk City, people are here to see him no matter how sheepish he looks.
He relaxes into it quickly, however, opening with Ann Peebles’ I Can’t Stand the Rain, which, rather than speeding up into Missy Elliott’s The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly), a 1997 hit that utilised the original’s drip-drop beat, morphs into his emo collaboration with Camila Cabello, Find U Again. In fact, the set works best when Ronson chucks in surprises: when the sad disco of the new album’s Lykke Li-assisted title track transforms into the euphoric Magician remix of Li’s I Follow Rivers, or when the set slows and Ronson celebrates his most fertile creative relationship by playing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.
That song is preceded by one of the two guests, with powerhouse new vocalist Yebba bringing some much needed IRL heartache to the excellent Don’t Leave Me Lonely. King Princess, meanwhile, is introduced to the stage for the album’s Pieces of Us only to ignore the singing bit to slurp from an energy drink, vape furiously and ask the crowd: “Are there any gays here?” It’s not the night’s only odd moment, either, thanks to an awful chopped and screwed remix of Shallow that feels endless. Ronson’s on much safer ground mixing Dolly Parton’s Jolene into the Miley Cyrus collaboration Nothing Breaks Like a Heart, ending proceedings with a very on-trend country hoedown – bleeding into Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road because, well, 2019.
As an escapist hour celebrating and revelling in loss it’s a success, but you can’t shake the feeling there’s an absence at the heart of it all. Though perhaps, given the mood of the album, that was the point.
