Easily the coolest cat in the recent history of popular music, Mr Mark Ronson does not strike you as the kind of person who would suffer from stage fright. But the world-renowned DJ, producer and songwriter was certainly not a natural when it came to owning some of the world’s biggest stages.

“At the beginning of the Version tour in 2007, I was so nervous you had to push me onto the stage,” Ronson laughs down the line from London, just one of the many cities in the world, including New York and Paris, which he calls home. “But then you get the nerves worn down, start drinking lots of Jack Daniels and before you know it, you’re slashing solos, running up and down stage rails.”

Ronson may be referencing the last time he touched down in Australia for the Global Gathering festival, in a raucous set which saw him leaping off amps and over-performing at almost every opportunity. It’s a stage persona that Ronson remembers fondly, but doesn’t necessarily hope to repeat this time around.

“I watch some of the old footage of us performing on the Version tour and it’s like, ‘Who the fuck does that guy think he is?’ It’s a bit over the top,” he says.

As much as he is the king of cool, Ronson is also the master of reinvention. His latest album, Record Collection, marked the third transformation of the man responsible for sending Amy Winehouse, Adele and our own Daniel Merriweather hurtling up the charts.

While Here Comes The Fuzz embraced Ronson’s roots as a hip-hop DJ du jour and Version highlighted the retro-soul revival, Record Collection – with its icy synths, stuttering drum machines and guest spots from Boy George and Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon – is all about the glorious ‘80s. It’s also about Ronson having a crack at singing, something that he conveniently shied away from on his previous outings.

“The two songs I sing on the record I do live. Lose It In The End, you know, I do that every night. To start with I was ropey as hell and you can do your warm-ups for half an hour but it won’t make a difference. Eventually I learned how to project my voice live and sing and it kind of sounds halfway decent.”

The Record Collection touring band is also substantially different from its predecessor, if only because it’s more consistent. Ronson is happy to admit that he prefers it this way, even though the guests he managed to snare during the Version days (Wale, Merriweather et al) were all kinds of awesome.

“The thing about that tour [Version] is that it was really more of a revue,” he explains. “You know, big band with percussion and horns and guests leaping on and off stage. The difference with this project is that the main vocalists on the album are Alex Greenwald, MNDR and a few others but they’re also playing instruments the whole time. It really is more of a band situation…that to me is really exciting, rather than a backing band a bunch of cool singers running about.”

Ronson, in addition to singing, also undergoes a bit of a transformation, trading in his signature guitar for his first love, the keyboard. “This record I spend a lot of time between two synths,” he says, “and obviously having spent most of my life behind two turntables, that’s a position I feel very comfortable with.”

It’s this same approach that he uses to map out the current set-list, slotting the new jams in amongst the old hits that his audience know and love.

“Coming from background as a DJ, you’re just there to make a whole load of people have a really good time,” he says. “I never really got into it so I could say, ‘Alright, now I’m going to subject people to an hour and a half of my experimental noise set’. So I [try to] bring that sensibility to the show, but I don’t want to be a jukebox either.

“It’s sort of knowing how to read the crowd. I know that when I was DJing, if I had a fat new Gangstarr track that nobody had heard yet, I’d sandwich it between a Biggie record and a Tribe [Called Quest] record. If you give people what they do know, you have their trust and take them on a journey.”