The spin doctor: the man Adele and Florence turn to when they want a hit

In a Malibu garden on a hillside overlooking the Pacific, Adele is remembering the first time she worked with producer Paul Epworth. ‘He made me sound like a monkey when he got me to sing on Jack’s Everything is New record!’ ‘Jack’ is the singer Jack Peñate. Epworth, meanwhile, is the studio whizz responsible for Florence + the Machine’s debut album Lungs and its follow-up Ceremonials.

In fact, right now, the 38-year-old from Bishop’s Stortford is probably the most successful producer/writer in the world, a trusted collaborator with a staggering array of international talent, from Adele to Azealia Banks to Sam Mendes to Quentin Tarantino to Cee Lo Green to Paul McCartney.

When we meet in his Queen’s Park studio, near to the house he shares in Brondesbury Park with his wife Danielle, a make-up artist, and 18-month-old daughter Vivienne, Epworth is still glowing from his and Adele’s victory at last month’s Golden Globes, where they won the Best Original Song award for ‘Skyfall’. ‘Jennifer Lopez read my name out!’ he says. ‘I’m just gonna sit with that image for a moment. My wife’s had to watch me rewinding the video a few times…’ And awards season is not over yet: on the horizon is this month’s Oscars, for which the 007 theme tune is also nominated and at which Adele will be performing.

But right now, I am dragging Epworth back to March 2010, and recounting my meeting in an American recording studio with Adele as she worked on the album that would become the world-beating 21. She was smoking and cursing the 80-degree Californian sunshine. ‘I can’t do the beach,’ she wailed, gesturing down the idyllic shore, ‘I’m so pale, I’ll just melt.’

In London, she and Epworth had already co-written five tracks. ‘He helped me finish the songs that were meant to be great but I couldn’t make great on my own.’ One, ‘He Won’t Go’, was ‘the first ballad Paul’s ever done. It’s about undying love.’ It concerns a couple, friends of hers, one of whom was a heroin addict. ‘When he was in rehab I was with her the whole time. So I wrote him a song about it… And he’s fine, he’s been clean for five months.’ Epworth was the only man Adele trusted to nail this emotive subject. Another song, possibly ‘Rolling in the Deep’ (Adele didn’t clarify), was even more difficult to complete. She tried to finish the riff ‘with four other writers, and they all turned it into something completely wrong. Then Paul just knocked out a track in five seconds.’

‘Wow!’ whispers Epworth. ‘I never knew she actually tried to make that song with other writers.’ ‘Rolling in the Deep’ went on to sell 10.3 million copies and was number one for seven weeks in the US. The album won two Grammys, kick-starting its huge success worldwide — 25 million sales (and still counting). That alone will have made Epworth a multimillionaire (he earns money via ‘points’ on every copy bought of records he has produced, as well as song co-writing credits). ‘I’ve tried to turn some of the benefits of the success of that record into equipment I can use to make better music,’ he says, explaining that he’s in the process of moving to a bigger studio. But shiny Audi A5 and slick look notwithstanding, he insists that he is ‘not really flash’. ‘I’m very private and don’t generally socialise with other people in the industry. It makes it too easy to lose your grip on reality.’

Paul Epworth is a music obsessive who always knew he wanted to work with songs. He grew up in small-town Hertfordshire. His father, an electronics engineer, ‘was a bit of an audiophile with a good collection of records — old Dylan, early Yes, and a lot of old synthesiser stuff’. His mother, a nurse, ‘was into more African stuff, like Black Mambazo, and a lot of soul’. There were always lots of guitars and keyboards lying around (his younger sister Mary is also a musician; she released her debut, ‘psych-folk’ album last year) and Epworth started playing guitar in his teens. ‘I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t have a choice as I’d pretty much given up on education by the time I left school. I set about educating myself with any information I could get on music and recording.’

He performed in small-time indie groups: ‘I was in a band called Lomax. We were very, very loud.’ But he soon decided that production was more his passion than performing. Aged 18 he enrolled in ‘a little college course that showed you the basics of sound engineering’ at Islington Music Workshop, and in 1995 landed his first proper job, as a runner/teaboy at Beatles’ producer George Martin’s AIR Studios in Hampstead.

The mid-1990s were boom times for British music, the high watermark of Britpop. Or, as Epworth says with a grin, ‘the Kill Your Friends era’, referring to John Niven’s best-selling (and soon to be filmed) novel about the drug-crazed record industry. ‘Those were funny days,’ he acknowledges. Making albums when artists were high on cocaine was no way to secure high fidelity. ‘Yeah! Everything has way too much treble on it! I worked on an Oasis record, so I can vouch for that.’ That record was 1997’s Be Here Now, the follow-up to (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, an album that was infamously recorded in a blizzard of coke. ‘That was hilarious. It was a case of everything being as loud as everything else.’ He did re-mixes for Shaznay Lewis and The Futureheads and soon became the go-to producer for a clutch of sharp young British guitar groups, including Maxïmo Park, Bloc Party and The Rakes. His work with the last two bands snared Mercury Music Prize nominations. He earned his first writing credits on Kate Nash’s number one album Made of Bricks (for which he was nominated for an Ivor Novello award), worked with Plan B on both his albums, and, in 2009, earned two more Mercury nominations for Florence’s Lungs and Friendly Fires’ self-titled debut. Epworth had lift-off.

As a producer/writer he has no specific sound, method or genre — he’s as comfortable working with hip-hop and soul artists (he and John Legend recently wrote a song for the Django Unchained soundtrack; his presentation disc marking 750,000 sales of Cee Lo Green’s last album is propped on the floor) as he is guitar outfits (he’s currently working on the debut album by the Fleetwood Mac-esque, hotly tipped Californian sister trio Haim).