Bruno Mars: A 24 Karat Superstar

How the hell will Bruno Mars go about following up the Mark Ronson-led monster of ‘Uptown Funk’? By going back to the music of his childhood, he tells Hamish MacBain.

- Hamish MacBain

“So...?!” I haven’t even sat down and Bruno Mars, quiff now replaced by curls under a baseball cap, is already quizzing me about what I think of his third album. He wants to know where I listened to it, what kind of sound system it was played through, which songs I liked best, if the mixes were sounding good and so on.

This is partly because, at this point, very few people have heard ‘24K Magic’. There’s one copy in the world, on an iPod touch that was whisked straight back to a safe in the head of his record company’s office as soon as I’d finished with it. But it’s mainly because Mars is a both a perfectionist and a consummate people pleaser. He’s excited that the album is finally out there in the world and really wants people to love it, having spent weeks obsessing over every last detail on it.

“It’s stupid things I obsess over, like, ‘Are people going to get off the dancefloor because I said something stupid about a dragon?’” he says.

“For me, this album, I can’t do better. Right now, sitting here talking in 2016, I can’t do better. Do I hope that we’re sitting here in a year and saying that my next album is the best ever? Yeah! But for now, this is it – this is the best I got.”