It might have reminded you of a million and one other songs, but when Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ delivered Uptown Funk, on 10 November 2014, it still sounded like a breath of fresh air.
Dripping in sass and revealing a trunkful of late ‘70s and early ‘80s influences, the song arrived with a swagger and has never really left. In fact, for a time, it felt inescapable.
With Uptown Funk now celebrating its 10-year anniversary, Mark Ronson has been reflecting on its success and cultural impact.
“Uptown Funk remains one of the most meaningful musical experiences of my life,” he says. “Creating it in a jam with Bruno [Mars], Jeff [Bhasker], and Phil [Lawrence] and then spending seven months refining every detail was a true labour of love.
“Performing it live on SNL is a memory I’ll always cherish. Now, watching how the song has taken on a life of its own - from clubs to weddings to graduations - I’m genuinely moved by the joy it seems to bring to people. I’m endlessly grateful to Trinidad James for sparking that initial inspiration and to my brothers Bruno, Jeff, and Phil for pouring their heart and brilliance into it.”
Speaking to Music Week in 2019, Ronson revealed that Uptown Funk began life as a jam in Bruno Mars’ LA studio. “[Bruno] was on drums; he said he’d been doing this James Brown/Trinidad James thing that could be fun. Jeff Bhasker was on keys, I was on bass and Philip Lawrence had the mic.”
It turned out to be a productive evening: “On the first night we wrote the verse, ‘This hit, that ice cold…’ We were trading lines. Jeff had the ‘Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold’, we were like, ‘Wow, that’s cold, that’s like a Kanye West line!’”
A great start, then, so why did the song end up taking seven months to finish? “We left so excited that night, and every time we’d go back in we’d chip away a little, but we never got the whole song to feel as exciting as the first verse did,” admits Ronson. “We were like, ‘Fuck, it’s not done.’ We tried different things, choruses, arrangements... But it all felt corny.”
The breakthrough, it transpires, came courtesy of Phil Lawrence: “We were in Memphis working on the song. Then Phil came up with the ‘do doo do’ bass part and that seemed to cement everything,” recalls Ronson. “It was like, ‘OK, we can have these rap verses and not really a real hook because we’ve got this cool bassline and that’s the cement.’”
There were still bumps in the road to come, though - not least Ronson’s initial reticence when he heard the version that Mars had gone away and worked on.
“To be honest, when Bruno first sent me the demo I thought it was kind of cheesy,” he says. “It had this dinky little clap on it and we’d been doing this heavy funk thing. But he just knew, and he said - in the nicest possible way - ‘It’s this way or the highway’, and he was completely right.”
In fact, although Mars only gets a ‘featuring’ credit on Uptown Funk, with Ronson being listed as the main artist, Ronson is happy to give Mars the lion’s share of the credit. “75% of the song is [down to] him; he’s the fucking hook master,” he says.
Such was its ubiquity, Uptown Funk could easily have ended up being something of a millstone for Ronson and Mars, but both have enjoyed further success - Mars with with his 24K Magic album and Silk Sonic project with Anderson .Paak; Ronson via more solo material and production work for Lady Gaga and on the Barbie soundtrack - and it seems that they look back on the project with fondness.
“We don’t talk about the song much anymore,” said Ronson in 2019. “We’re all so grateful for it. We’d send jokey texts like, ‘Man we did it, we’re the new Macarena’, just funny texts. Everybody is so grateful and aware that it was this wild, lightning in a bottle thing.”
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