Rod Stewart has always had a chequered history in the world of rock and roll. Although he may be responsible for making some of the most celebrated blues rock ever made with The Jeff Beck Group, he’s also the same man who tried his hand at disco with ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ and made a corny pastiche of the genre. Regardless of his past, Stewart has never considered himself a music snob, and one of his favourite songs of all time first graced his eardrums when he heard ‘Uptown Funk’ for the first time.
When talking about the poles of music history, though, Stewart and the Mark Ronson smash feel like they should be on separate sides of reality. Compared to the slick sounds of funk that Bruno Mars sang so effortlessly, Stewart had been known primarily for making art that was closer to blues and folk for the first half of his career.
While anyone was bound to get some credibility working next to Jeff Beck, Stewart had started to find his voice first working with The Faces. After ditching his old band for a solo career, Stewart settled into his groove as a hitmaker completely by accident, creating the song ‘Maggie May’ while having absolutely no melody to work off of.
Even though Stewart would eventually make a mint off of his trademark rasp, Ronson was coming from another retro style of music. Having worked alongside Amy Winehouse when creating her masterpiece, Back to Black, Ronson was content to fade into the background of each of his mixes and build songs from the ground up.
Despite not being the central focus of most of his hits, Ronson practically “plays” the band whenever he goes into the studio, usually working with whatever group he has with him to put his own unique stamp on their sound. Since Bruno Mars was already gravitating towards retro music on tracks like ‘Treasure’ and ‘Locked Out of Heaven’, it was a no-brainer to get both of them in a room together to make a song.
For as much as it has been played in wedding receptions, corporate functions, and kids’ birthday parties the world over, ‘Uptown Funk’ got there for a damn good reason, making the most out of only two chords and becoming the epitome of cool when it was released in 2014. Although Stewart hadn’t seen the top of the charts with any of his singles in years, he could admit that ‘Uptown Funk’ was far beyond anything else he had ever heard.
When singling out his favourite tracks for BBC Radio 2, Stewart considered the school a high point for popular music, saying, “This song, I believe, is one of the best records ever made into our world. I love it so much. The production, Mark Ronson, it just goes without saying, it’s just different class.”
Even though Ronson was still known as the face of the new school, he would also turn in time working with several of Stewart’s peers, working on music for various Paul McCartney projects, as well as fine-tuning pieces for Queens of the Stone Age. While Stewart’s track record for dance songs implies that he should be kept far, far away from any kind of Ronson production, he at least knows what dance perfection sounds like when he hears it out in the wild.