IS SIXTIES soul - of the Motown and Stax variety - really all that hip and exciting again? Well, going by the hits of Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse, it seems to be.

There is one producer linked to both singers - Mark Ronson. He scored a recent smash of his own with Stop Me.

The song - a nifty and affecting remake of The Smiths' Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before - flaunts an obvious affinity towards Motown pop, especially with its "sneaky" tag-on of The Supremes' You Keep Me Hangin' On in its chorus.

How did those two songs end up together?

"Daniel (Merriweather, the Australian singer of Stop Me) was in the vocal booth singing the (Smiths) song and I just kept hearing The Supremes over and over in my head," says the 31-year-old London-born, New York-raised producer and recording artiste on the phone from London.

"Maybe it's the similar chords. My mind just works that way. I hear one thing and I'm onto the next already."

In any case, Morrissey (of The Smiths) is thrilled about the remake. Ronson has also got the support of Kaiser Chiefs to remake Oh My God (with Allen on vocals), Charlatans' The Only One I Know (vocals by Robbie Williams) and Kasabian to "revisit" L.S.F., Mark Ronson-style.

They are part of a new 14-track album of mostly covers titled Version which also includes retro-funky covers of the Jam's Pretty Green, Ryan Adams' Amy, Britney Spears' Toxic and Coldplay's God Put A Smile On My Face.

Hip-hop is as much in Ronson's blood as Brit-pop. Back in 1993, before the "bling-bling" explosion, he was deejaying in clubs in downtown New York for US$5.

He recorded an album, Here Comes The Fuzz, in 2003 for the now-defunct Elektra label. The single Ooh Wee featured the rap of Ghostface Killah & Nate Dogg.

After the album, he got a bit bored with making music, until the new album happened.

"I didn't have any grand plan in the beginning. Someone had asked me to do a cover for a Radiohead compilation. When I got to stripping (the song) down bare to just chords and melody-structure and building it back up with horns and beats, I just enjoyed music again for the first time.

"It was almost a project that came out of procrastination because whenever I was making a beat or hip-hop rhythm, I just got bored and put a Smiths chord over it and it'd be - oh cool, maybe this sounds better. That's how the album came about," Ronson recalls.

The result does remind one of David Holmes' revisionist idea of the retro-funky soul-lounge hybrid. (Holmes is also composer of film scores for Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, etc.)

What does he think of the comparison?

"I'd rather be known for carrying on the lineage of Quincy Jones and NelsonRiddle," Ronson replies.

Through working on the Winehouse album Back To Black, he recalls adopting the "old-school" approach to arranging and producing a la Jones and Henry Mancini, and that got him excited about his role in the studio again.

So is today's music as good as what came before?

"I think all the best music - be it pop, rock or R&B - was made from 1964 to 1975. It's no insult to artistes who came after that but you just had that period where all the classics were made - whether it's Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Marvin Gaye or the Rolling Stones," he says.

"As for Led Zeppelin, I think John Bonham's drumming is almost like the basis for hip-hop though obviously, hip-hop came from funk. The way he played shows that rock could have the biggest, fattest groove too. To me, that was just amazing."