Mark Ronson: Amy Winehouse was a 'genius'

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Mark Ronson says his late pal Amy Winehouse was a "genius".

The 43-year-old DJ has opened up about being in the studio with the late singer - who tragically passed away aged 27 in 2011 - and revealed that her 2006 Grammy-award winning album 'Back To Black', which was produced by Ronson, was the most "important" project he has ever worked on because it was a "masterpiece".

He said: "Nothing will ever be as important or as loved as 'Back To Black'. Amy was the first ­person I ever worked with, the most honest and most talented. She wrote the song 'Back To Black' in ten minutes. I just had to come up with good arrangements to help her and enjoyed its success without having to go through the same pain as Amy. I was closed off emotionally back then and it's taken me this long to go through my own pain and write a record about it. Now I realise just how incredible she was. It was a masterpiece. If anyone deserves to be called a genius, it's Amy."

Ronson - who split from ex-wife Joséphine de La Baume in 2017 - went on to admit that his much-anticipated fifth studio album 'Late Night Feelings' is his "proudest work to date" because he channelled his own heartbreak into the record.

He continued: "It's my proudest work and my most honest. I was pretty devastated and confused in the wake of my separation. I was avoiding dealing with feelings and didn't want to deal with reality and what was going on in my life. I had lost my self-esteem. I wasn't even in my body - I was somewhere floating, looking at what was going on in my life."

The 'Nothing Breaks Like A Heart' hitmaker went on to admit they he stayed in the studio for a "month" to deal with his heartbreak, which is when "the music came".

He told The Sun newspaper: "I was drinking too much, going out a lot and putting off addressing everything. Then in January 2018, I told my engineer to take a month off work from my studio in LA and I just stayed there. I knew I needed to deal with all this s**t. If you have all that emotion and you try to shove it down, it's going to f***ing erupt. And that's when this music came."