This week in New York, Mark Ronson celebrated his 50th birthday — and the launch of his book, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City — and all of the right “night people” were there.
Ronson’s literary agent David Kuhn hosted the star-packed party at Manhattan hot spot Chez Nous, the restaurant he and his partners Sean MacPherson, Ira Drukier, Richard Born and Kevin Thompson opened this summer inside the historic Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village. In his toast, Kuhn recalled meeting in the ’80s, when “Mark was a teenager who was starting to DJ at clubs that were way cooler than I was.”
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“I first met Mark at one of his miraculous mother Ann’s legendary Sunday brunches in the 1980s, always a mix of uptown and downtown, the famous and sometime infamous, and always multi-generational,” Kuhn recalled in his speech, describing the gatherings thrown by Ronson’s mother, Ann Dexter-Jones, who married Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones after divorcing his father.
“Most of you know this was the social and cultural swirl that Mark grew up in, one that might have caused another kid in his shoes to become jaded, or entitled, or lazy, or unfocused. And the amazing thing about Mark is that he is not only none of those things but actually the opposite of all of them: he grew up to be curious, grateful, incredibly hard working, determined, and most of all humble, this despite his incredible talent and success.”
While music stars often enlist ghostwriters to help pen their memoirs, Kuhn said that “it was quickly apparent that not only could Mark write the book himself, but that he was a natural and gifted writer. Because he innately possessed the core strengths of a literary memoirist: hard won self-knowledge; a gift for storytelling; excellent recall; an ear for dialogue, a point of view, and a big, generous heart.”
Rosnon initially wondered if he needed to work with a co-writer, but he and Kuhn decided instead that “he would just start putting stories down on the page and see where that led.”
“Mark said that he wanted to tell the story in this book to capture the milieu of the ’90s that he grew up in, especially for younger folks who weren’t there, and also to honor those who he credited with his musical education, especially those no longer around,” Kuhn said.
“As Mark writes in the book, and is now speaking about in interviews, one of the addictive pleasures of being a DJ has always been to use his musical tastes and instincts to light up a dance floor and give a room full of strangers unmitigated pleasure. Now he will do that as a book author, speaking one-to-one to each of his readers.”
The playlist for the party featured every song mentioned in Ronson’s book, sequenced in the exact order they appear on the page. Guests sipped “Mark-aritas” in the restaurant’s cozy banquettes and included Elle Fanning, Derek Blasberg, Cey Adams, Guy Oseary, Carmen D’Alessio, Premier, DJ Stretch Armstrong, Lysa Cooper, Steve Lewis, Belinda Becker, Andrew Jarecki, Jen Gatien, Amy Sedaris, Naomi Fry, Jenny Dembrow, Isabella Massenet, Nicky Campbell, Pamela Hanson, and more. See the photos below.
