Out of my depth with Mark Ronson

i fell down a youtube rabbit hole earlier and ended up on a video of Mark Ronson at Glastonbury in 2008.

here is the random story of when I performed in Marks band for 1 glorious and super weird week

I moved to London in 2008 after i signed a publishing deal. I didn’t really play shows because i had a lot of anxiety that was stopping me, i was just writing songs and learning still, i played the odd show and it rarely went very well. After a stressful couple of months trying to make stuff happen that just wasn’t coming together, we decided to take a trip to Eastbourne on the train. The day got off to a bad start. You know in those ticket machines in London where it spits out your ticket but also 2 receipts? well we were late for the train and it spat out the first thing, which i assumed was the ticket, and then i ran. But it wasn’t, it was the receipt. So i got on the train and then couldn’t convince the conductor that having the receipt proved i had actually bought a ticket. Apparently Irish charm is lost on some people. I was so poor that paying that 20 or so quid for another ticket was absolute carnage.

I was sitting stewing on the train when i got a text message from my a&r at Sony atv

“mark Ronson is gonna call you”

i figured it was a joke. at the time Mark was everywhere, i was obssessed with his Version album. What was he ringing me for? apparently he needed a singer for his tour, the person who was singing the radiohead song Just had dropped out unexpectedly. That person was an artist called Kenna who i was also obsessed with

anyways, my a&r had played Mark some of my demos a few weeks previous and he’d liked them, when Kenna dropped off the tour, Mark thought of the demos and asked Felix (a&r) if i’d be down to fill in for a couple shows in Ireland. I think he thought i was living in Dublin, which is why he’d asked.

I got a text “hey this is Mark, can i give you a call?”

i absolutely panicked, my anxiety kicked in full throttle. Absolutely no you could not call me because i wouldn’t be able to form coherent words. But obviously i wanted to do the shows. So i texted him back

“I’m on an Irish number and i don’t have credit so i can’t take calls”. Absolute bollox, absolute lie. But it worked. He texted “do you want to come to Belfast and sing a song?”. of course i did. He said he’d pass my details on to his tour manager and they’d sort out getting me there. i had no clue what a tour manager was, but i pretended i did. Even though i was in London, Mark still wanted me to do it, He’s an incredibly nice person.

I figured i was just going for 1 night, so i packed the tiniest bag in the history of time. I mean it was ludicrous how small it was, a brown leather satchel like i was an orphan from a Dickens novel. I was also at that pretentious stage where i was travelling everywhere with a copy of On The Road and a couple of other books so everyone knew i was an artist. So barely any room for a change of clothes. and also i wasn’t the most sartorially aware human at the time, i definitely didn’t have clothes to match the occasion of singing with Mark. I think back now and cringe, i’m glad there are no photos of it.

I got to the venue in Belfast and Mark could not have been nicer, he was so encouraging and helpful. and i definitely sucked in soundcheck, really nervous, tripping over myself. He was so kind to me and didn’t make me feel bad. he was travelling with a huge touring party, a massive band, and tons of feature singers and rappers. It was really overwhelming. i performed the song that night, and i think i did fine, not great, but fine. But i think Mark liked me, so he asked if i wanted to travel with them to Dublin to perform at the show the following night.

this was a handy offer, because honestly i was fairly drunk and had no actual clue what hotel i was staying in or how i was going to get back to London. Very professional

I had never been on a tour bus before. i was very excited. But i’m also a nervous peer… peeer… how do i spell peer!?? as in someone who thinks they need to pee when they get nervous?? ha, anyways.

i’d drunk quite a lot of beer, and i was super paranoid about being half way to Dublin on a bus with a bunch of seasoned industry heads and me asking to pull over so i could take a piss. So i kept running back to the dressing room before we pulled out to take precautionary pees, i mean really forcing it out.

On the 4th trip, the tour manager stopped me and said “what the fuck are you doing why do you keep getting off the bus?? we’re leaving in a minute”. i explained to him my situation and he opened a door on the bus to reveal a fully functioning toilet. I think he muttered the word idiot under his breath. Turned out that he was a bit of an arsehole.

half way to Dublin he found me on the bus and asked me if i had family in Dublin? i said yeah my parents lived out of town. I thought he was being nice. 10 minutes later he came back to say he’d cancelled my room in the hotel in the city because he figured i could just stay with my folks. Like i said, proper arsehole.

So i got off the bus on O Connell street at about 3 in the morning and jumped in a taxi to Malahide where my parent lived. i had no money, so this was an unexpected expense. v stressful.

I should also point out that I was so polite that i didn’t want to ask about getting paid for the shows. Mark had said in the first texts that i’d get paid obviously, but the tour manager never mentioned it and i had no clue who to ask or what to ask for. So i never asked for anything. Hilarious when i think back on it now.

my parent’s were REAL surprised to see me sitting in the kitchen of their house the following day. I headed back into town and met the tour bus at the hotel on O’Connell street that i didn’t have a room in, and we headed across to the venue. i loved this particular venue, it was called Tripod. It’s a pret a manger and some office space now. true story, fucking Dublin and these useless governments that have stripped the life out of it and replaced it with short term let apartments and vacant office space. beyond depressing.

It was a fun night though, i was hype because it made me feel like a real musician to be in my home town doing something like this, my friends came, it made it look like i knew what i was doing. After the show the musicians all went back to the hotel and then for food at a diner spot called Eddie Rockets. About 8 people ordered food, then most of them bounced to go to an after party at a bar nearby. as they were getting up to leave, someone asked if anyone had any euros? without paying much attention i idly said “yeah i do”. “Oh cool, none of us have euros, if you pay for the food we can get you back later in Sterling”. i didn’t want to be rude, so i said fine.

i was basically bankrupt at this point

Mark threw a really fun party back at the hotel. At one point he put on Shook Ones pt 2 by Mobb Deep and i remember rapping the entire thing to myself thinking no one was looking at me. but Mark noticed, and i think maybe it intrigued him a bit because up to this point i was basically this uber shy random Irish guy he knew nothing about. He asked if i wanted to come back to the UK and do a festival with them in a couple of days time. This was incredibly lovely and super handy because a) i was really loving being around this group of people, and b) i had no clue how i was going to get back to London otherwise.

we headed back over on the ferry the next morning, i had no hotel room still so the incredibly sweet and lovely bass player Stuart Zender let me stay on the couch of his suite for a few hours before we headed to the ferry terminal. What a nice human too

I can’t remember what the festival was called, it was definitely my first festival experience, Mark was performing on the main stage and i just remember the rush i felt running out onto that huge stage and it all feeling a bit more comfortable and like it all made a little more sense to be out there. Amazing how 3 shows can shift your perspective like that.

I desperately hoped their would be more shows to do, but they were heading to the US afterwards and my time was definitely up. As much as i loved it, it was obvious that there were people who could do a better job than me at the time. We headed back to London, i jumped off the bus and went back to the house i was living in and just dined out on that feeling for the next few months. And i needed it, because it was just endless doors being shut in my face over there at the time, a couple of months after that i packed all my stuff and moved back to Dublin.

But the feeling of those shows, seeing musicians like that, at the top of their game, knowing that i could get on a stage and hold my own, honestly without it i’m not sure i would have made the album at all, i needed the belief that came from it to help drag me through and keep my eyes on what was possible. It seems like a lifetime ago now, it’s weird thinking about it, so much has changed. But i love that memory and right now with this new album about to come out, and me feeling like a version of myself that is very close to how i felt in the beginning, it makes sense the universe would send it back my way tonight. Love