Mark Ronson 2026 BRIT Awards

While everyone was busy mostly gushing over ROSALÍA and Björk’s epic performance of “Berghain”—and it was undeniably epic—or marveling over Harry Styles’ white boy dance moves/jazz hands during “Aperture,” one of the performers that kind of got lost in the shuffle at this year’s BRIT Awards was Mark Ronson (though maybe not as lost in it as, say, Wolf Alice). This was perhaps because he doesn’t have much in the way of new music to promote at the moment (save for the “Valerie”-chasing “Suzanne” with RAYE, who was too busy performing her newer singles, “Where Is My Husband” and “Nightingale Lane,” to opt in to a performance with the perennial DJ). In fact, because it was a kind of “lifetime achievement”-centered performance, it was potentially easy to ignore what amounted to a “greatest hits” rehashing. Except that it was much more than that.

Indeed, at its core, what Ronson was offering turned into something of an unofficial Amy Winehouse tribute. One that aligns with the fact that it’s coming up on the twenty-year anniversary of Back to Black, the album that truly launched both Winehouse and Ronson into the stratosphere of being “music industry titans.” And it’s something that Ronson acknowledged about Winehouse at the BRITs while accepting the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award. For he basically kicked off his speech with the statement, “I realized on the way here that Thursday, March 6th [which is actually a Friday], it’ll be twenty years to the day that Amy Winehouse came up to my studio in New York City. And she came up to the steps and she said, ‘I’m here to meet Mark Ronson,’ and I said, ‘That’s me’ and she goes, “I thought you were an old guy with a beard.’ Anyway, we went ups—now I’m an old guy—we went upstairs and we talked for four hours and that night we wrote ‘Back to Black’ and that day changed my life forever. I can’t believe the list of artists that I got to go on to work with… I know the music I made with Amy is the reason that any of them know who I am anyway so, that’s why I always treasure her voice, her talent, our bond, all of it.”

His recognition of Winehouse was also apparent in the performance he gave that same night, opening it with Ghostface Killah, who famously contributed a feature to “You Know I’m No Good.” But three years before that, he would appear on Ronson’s debut, Here Comes the Fuzz, via the lead single, “Ooh Wee,” which he rapped for under two minutes until letting Ronson take over at the piano to play “Back to Black”—after an audio clip of Winehouse saying, “Mark Ronson, he comes from…hip-hop like me, and that’s what we know and we can set that aside and be like, ‘Cool, we’ve got that under the thumb.’ And when I played all that stuff, he was just like, ‘Cool.’” The presence of a small TV set placed atop the piano then shows Winehouse singing the words into a microphone in black and white (but it’s not footage from the actual black-and-white music video).

The Winehouse love-in continued with a musical segue into “Valerie” (the cover that Winehouse made more famous than the original by The Zutons), with Ronson further announcing, “To celebrate Amy tonight, we have the legendary band who brought her songs to life, the Dap-Kings.” Another shot of the small TV set showing Amy singing along to “Valerie” makes the allowance for her voice to complement the live music before a full-tilt instrumental of “You Know I’m No Good” ensues. Unfortunately, all of that well-intentionedness toward honoring Winehouse’s musical legacy is rather sullied by then transitioning into the date rape anthem that is “Uptown Funk.”

Then, after almost four minutes and twenty seconds of waiting on top of a giant disco ball that descends from the ceiling, Dua Lipa is permitted to make her live and in person appearance for the tribute, starting with “Dance the Night” from Barbie the Album (which Ronson executive produced). She then goes into an earlier hit she had with Ronson, 2018’s “Electricity.” Eventually joining Ronson by the piano, Lipa sips a martini at the end of her song, with the performance then devolving into an instrumental outro (which, yes, kind of sounds like “SNL music” at times) that finds Lipa declaring, “Make some noise for the one and only Mr. Mark Ronson.” It smacks of the sort of thing that would have been said about Amy on Frank’s “Outro.” So maybe Ronson learned far more than he himself realized from Winehouse. Including his style of non-DJ-related showmanship.

So yes, beyond just the timing of Back to Black’s twentieth anniversary, Ronson was right to pay such heavy tribute to Winehouse. Particularly since she’s so absent from his recent autobiography, Night People. Already realizing the “outrage” that might arise from not mentioning her at all in the book, Ronson references in the Acknowledgements section that he’s aware there are a great number of readers who would likely be disappointed by absolutely zero details about working with Winehouse (and besides, he chooses the stopping point for his life narrative to be the end of the 90s, concluding with the first taste of music-producing success he got with Nikka Costa’s 2001 single, “Like a Feather”).

So it is that, in thanking his editor, Ronson alludes to Amy’s absence with, “[Colin Dickerman’s] wry wit, intelligence and willingness to take a chance on the Mark Ronson book nobody asked for (what, no Amy?!) told me I wanted to work with him.” Just as, perhaps, Ronson’s wry wit, musical intelligence and willingness to take a chance on Amy told her she wanted to work with him. Then again, there was that brief Twitter flare-up the year before she died that berated Ronson for taking too much credit for the album. A comment she took back soon after, but still… One can’t help but think that Winehouse might have a scathing comment about Ronson at the BRITs now. For she wasn’t the type to suffer anything too mushy about her, least of all a tribute.