Oh, you’re interviewing Danger Mouse?” echoes the hotel barman, moments after asking what had brought me to Hollywood. “He’s the black guy with the big afro, right? What’s his name again?” Brian. “That’s him! He comes in here all the time. He’s really cool…”

For sure Danger Mouse is cool. That much, I already knew. He is one of the most prolific, and prodigiously talented, music producers in the world, a boundary-breaking studio wizard who has won five Grammys and gets compared to a modern-day Phil Spector, or Brian Eno. He operates across an impressively broad musical spectrum encompassing rock, hip-hop and pop-soul – and has worked his magic on artists such as Beck, the Black Keys, Gorillaz, A$AP Rocky, Norah Jones and CeeLo Green, with whom he formed the band Gnarls Barkley and co-wrote and produced their 2006 mega-hit “Crazy”.

Whether as a producer, songwriter or recording artist, Danger Mouse doesn’t have a signature sound so much as a signature feeling – intense, atmospheric, melancholy-laden. It is a mood he brought to bear on “River Lea”, the song he co-wrote and produced for Adele’s new album, 25. “He’s like a sponge; he soaks everything up all around him,” Adele has said of him. “I just love him.” (“It was so easy to sit around and talk that at times I forgot we were there to make a song,” he says of her.)

So, like millions of music fans worldwide, I know what Danger Mouse sounds like, but I don’t know much about the man behind the moniker: 38-year-old Brian Burton. I do know he pinched his stage name from the 1980s kids’ cartoon and used to dress up as the eponymous rodent onstage as a way of overcoming his shyness. I’ve harvested scraps of biographical information from the internet and learned that while he often talks in-depth about his craft, he says very little about himself.

He wasn’t one of the cool kids. He was Brian the business student, working at a DIY store, in a suit and tie

We meet at an Italian restaurant in his local neighbourhood in central Los Angeles. He arrives 20 minutes late, impeccably dishevelled in a military jacket, white T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, and orders a spicy-chicken-and-avocado pizza in a deep, gravelly voice. He has lived in LA for 12 years, though, he says, “I never thought I’d stay – I just needed somewhere sunny. But I’ve found life here to be a little easier. I tend to stick out wherever I am. I’m tall, I’m light-skinned, I’ve got a big afro. No matter what country I’m in, if I walk into a bar, people look at me. They just do. Whereas here, unless you’re really famous, people don’t give a shit.” Burton also has a place in New York, where, he says, “I feel even more comfortable, just being around a lot of people making music.”

Over the next two hours, his pizza turning cold, Burton will open up about his life. And it becomes clear that his struggle to fit into his surroundings has been a definitive one. He spent his childhood in Spring Valley, a small town in New York State, 22 miles north of Manhattan, “the only black family in a Jewish neighbourhood”. His dad was a former soldier turned school teacher, his mum a social worker; he has one older sister.

Being black “wasn’t really discussed” in a formal way by his family – “I was left to my own devices in the circle of what it meant.” Like the other local (white) kids, he tuned in to 1980s pop and “hair metal” on the radio, and became a skater, to fit in. Much later he learned that his dad had gone on civil rights protests in his youth, “but we never really talked about that – I don’t know why”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I always felt it was so silly – hip-hop kids in one corner, rock kids in the other’: with Gnarls Barkley, performing ‘Crazy’. Photograph: Chris Polk/FilmMagic

When he was 13, the family moved south to Georgia, to the city of Stone Mountain. His new school was predominantly black, which he found “totally confusing”. He showed up for his first day in a Metallica T-shirt and was soon having to “hide from people. It was a dangerous school, really messed up. People were scared for their lives a lot of times. There were weapons and guns; it could be really scary. And I felt it was something my parents wouldn’t understand, so I never brought it up.”

Unsurprisingly Burton quickly became a hip-hop kid in order to survive, and by the time he reached university in Athens, Georgia, hip-hop was all he knew. But he still wasn’t one of the cool kids. He was Brian the business student, with an internship at a home-improvement store where he spent holidays working “in a cubicle, wearing a suit and tie”. Then, in his second year of college, he had an epiphany after hearing Pink Floyd playing in a bar and falling in love with the beautiful, haunting sound. It hit him that the reason he had never heard Pink Floyd before was that, according to the unwritten rules of youth culture, young black kids weren’t supposed to like them. “And I started questioning everything. Why can’t I listen to music like this? Who am I? What am I doing with my life?” Admittedly he “had been drinking”, but when he sobered up, the questions remained.

By 2001 Burton had ditched the suit and tie, become a self-taught bedroom producer and had self-released a couple of trip-hop albums (“Not many people bought them,” he says). Because so much of the music he liked, from the Beatles to Massive Attack, was from the UK, he decided to move to London to further his career. But with only $500 when he arrived, he took the first job he was offered, in an “old-timers’ pub full of hardcore drinkers” near London Bridge.

Does he have any funny stories from the pub? “No,” he says. “It was depressing – a dark, lonely time. I didn’t know anybody. Plus I was broke, so I didn’t meet anybody.” He used to have “a heavy feeling of nostalgia, of not wanting to be where I was”, but adds that he “eventually came to realise that, as bad as everything can be, it’s the way it’s supposed to be – you have to try to just enjoy it.”

The one thing I could control was how hard I worked on the music, so that’s what I did every night

Even so, how on earth did he stick it? “The one thing I could control was how hard I worked on the music, so that’s what I did every night.” Which didn’t help his threadbare social life. Little wonder that after nearly two years, the gloom threatened to overwhelm him, so he moved to California.

On paper Burton comes across as more lugubrious than he does in person. He is easy company, a gentle giant – albeit sometimes a little detached, as if somehow removed from his own experience, on the outside looking in. He also has a vivid imagination – at one point he diverts the conversation on to the issue of teleportation and asks whether I would risk it if there was a chance of disappearing permanently. He never really answers when I ask him the same question but prefers to speculate about where those who disappear might end up.

He doesn’t do drugs, by the way, though he admits: “I’ve had my moments.” Given his love of psychedelic rock, has he ever had a psychedelic experience? “I’ve never done LSD or any of that stuff. Maybe it just sounds like I do!”

His big break, when it finally arrived in 2004, was famously almost his undoing. He self-released 3,000 copies of The Grey Album – an intrepid remix of the music from the Beatles’ The White Album overlaid with the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album. To Burton it was more than just musical genre-bending, it was a work of activism: a comment on the futility of self-imposed racial segregation. “I always felt it was so silly – hip-hop kids in one corner, rock kids in the other. I wanted people in both corners to see the other side.”

He was initially unconcerned about the threat of legal action from the Beatles’ record label, EMI, “because I didn’t have any money”, but then internet activists posted the music online and more than 100,000 people downloaded it. Burton maintains he had nothing to do with this, but he claims EMI gave him an ultimatum: testify in court against the activists or become a defendant, too. But he couldn’t bring himself to testify against his own fanbase. “I genuinely thought I was screwed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I have moments where I think: This is the record where I’ll be found out’: with Damon Albarn, who saved his career. Photograph: George Pimentel/WireImage

It was then, in one of life’s sliding-doors moments, that he received a call from Damon Albarn asking if he’d produce the next Gorillaz album. By miraculous good fortune, Gorillaz were signed to EMI, “so Damon fought it out with them. They said: ‘You can’t work with him,’ and he said: ‘You can fuck right off.’ And because it was Damon, they dropped the whole thing.” From that point onwards Burton never looked back, working so obsessively, and on so many projects simultaneously, that even his manager began to fear he would burn out. “He gave me a book called In Praise of Slowness – his way of saying that it’s OK to calm down…”

At what point did he stop feeling like an outsider? “As silly as it sounds, I still don’t feel like I’m a part of it all,” he reveals. “I have moments where I think: ‘This is the record where I’ll be found out,’ you know? I have no idea why some stuff works and some doesn’t – I just try to do the stuff I like.”

Our interview is slotted in between recording sessions for the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, and he is launching his own record label, 30th Century Records (backed by Columbia), to which he has signed a clutch of unknown psych-rock bands that sound as if they have one foot in the past and one in the future – much like Burton himself.

We abscond to his favourite dive bar, where he likes to hang out with friends. He won’t say who he socialises with (though he does let slip that he was out with a “female friend” the other night) and this makes his life appear more solitary than it probably is in reality. The bar proclaims itself to be a “rustic inn” – he comes here for the chicken wings.

Given his thing about time travel, would he rather live in the past or the future? “Now isn’t an option?” he asks. “I’d definitely choose now. This is the nicest people have been to each other on this planet for a long time. Yes, there are wars and terrorism, but relatively speaking people are more understanding about other people’s right to be who they are and to figure out what that is. Whether that will continue I really don’t know.”

I think he’s talking about himself here. Like he’s finally figured himself out. Another pint, Brian? “No thanks,” he says, pulling on his coat. “I’d better get going – I’ve got things I need to do.”

30th Century Records Compilation Volume 1 is out now