“I brought the synth into the studio with Harry, flicked through the presets and there’s one called Harpoon Dream. I took the delay off and we were like… ‘yeah!’: Kid Harpoon on the Moog One preset that made Harry Styles' As It Was

Kid Harpoon’s genre-hopping experimentation has risen to become the sound of modern pop. While an artist in his own right since 2009, it’s Harpoon's collaborative work, co-creating critically acclaimed hits for the likes of Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Jessie Ware, Florence + the Machine and Years And Years, that’s made his name.

Most famously co-writing and co-producing Harry Styles' Harry’s House – the Album of the Year at both the Grammy and BRIT Awards – and manning the boards for Cyrus' Grammy Record of the Year Flowers, Kid Harpoon – AKA Thomas Hull – has most recently produced the entirety of David Byrne’s 11th solo album Who Is The Sky?, released in September.

We caught up with Hull at home in LA, to talk Styles, Cyrus and studio secrets.

“Oh, I love Real World. Everyone loves it,” Hull gushes after learning that MusicRadar is based in Bath, near the renowned (and celebrity-frequented) Real World Studios. “Though I don't know why, the room actually sounds like shit because the ceilings are so high. The Big Room is too big!” he laughs. “But it's the vibe. I think there’s just something about it there. It just feels fun.”

And fun is a big thing for Hull. Studio head-height permitting, if you want to make hits with the added bonus of having a good time, today’s popstars know who to call. “I think my process is letting people explore,” Hull ponders.

“A lot of the time it's easy to go, ‘I want to sound like this and end up there’ and there's a lot of people that can help with that. But if you like David Bowie and Animal Collective and love Britney Spears and Pet Shop Boys? How does that all work together? That, to me, is way more interesting. Music is like a Rubik's cube to me. A big puzzle. I just find it so fascinating.”

And with Hull’s approach to making music finding favour with everyone from Shakira to Kings of Leon, his production and multi-instrumentalist skills have proved the perfect foil for those seeking a creative collaborator. However, after taking up piano lessons aged nine, Hull soon had a change of heart.

“I was like, ‘This isn't for me. Can you teach me guitar instead?” he admits. “I took him the Eric Clapton Unplugged tab book. But because I’d got a keyboard and started lessons, my dad refused to buy me a guitar! He was like, ‘I've already wasted 100 quid on a keyboard!’ But after a while my teacher was like, ‘Y’know what? He’s getting good…’”

So is it the guitar or keyboard that Hull reaches for today? “Neither. I love starting with drums and drum loops,” Hull says. “Because that sets a tempo. I find that with guitars and pianos, if you start there, it can lead you to a world that's been done 10 million times before.

“And it's really hard to get rid of a piano! If a song is written on piano, trying to take it out of ‘piano world’ is really hard. Like Adele had a moment with Someone Like You and no one was really doing that at the time. But since then… to me, all I hear is Adele. No one's really doing anything new. I don't think it gets better than Someone Like You.”

And after co-crafting Styles’ As It Was and Late Night Talking among a hundred others, surely Hull must perpetually be called upon to cook up something similar? “Nah, to me, that’s not interesting,” he insists. “When it gets overly referential. When you're just trying to do something that's already existed. When they keep coming back to, ‘the drums need to do what this is doing’, or ‘the melody needs to do this’... that just limits the whole thing.

“Instead, what’s interesting to me is if, say, you want to do something that sounds like ABBA. Well, I want to do something that sounds like it could be played at Berghain in Berlin. So why don't we do this hardcore techno jam? But have an ABBA melody on it and then see where we land? Then you're getting to somewhere that no one's heard before.”

W retreading past hits off the agenda, Hull can get totally in tune with what he does best. “It’s that classic thing. You have 10 or 15 years to make your first album and you’re constantly working on it, but once that’s out, you’ve got a year or two before the next one needs to be out.” he observes.

“So suddenly you've got to get inspired quick, and you've got to be creative at a moment's notice. And you've got to be not just creative, but you've got to be brilliant too. Because it's so competitive.”

So how does he lock minds with the artists that he’s helping to craft classics? “I'm a music guy. I'm fully music. And I'm expected to be music and they’re coming to me for my knowledge of music,” Hull surmises. “So the best thing for me is – taking Miley [Cyrus]’s brain as an example – she's got like 10 million fashion references. She'll bring up images from old fashion campaigns and be like, ‘See the way this looks? I think this is how this should sound’. And that to me is so exciting.

“It’s so important that I don’t cut that off because I have an ego and think that I know everything about music. She's got one of the most brilliant, creative minds ever. I should be tapping into that.”

And speaking of Cyrus, Hull had the honour of picking up a Record of The Year Grammy for his production work on Flowers, one of 2023’s biggest hits. What magic was afoot there? “One of my things is taking a slower song and figuring out how you make it uptempo,” Hull explains.

“Just because the artist said the song is slow, it doesn’t have to be. Dance music is full of songs that are slow but when you add a 130bpm beat you suddenly get that weird tension that a lot of people like. It’s that happy/sad thing. I feel like I'm always trying to get tempo in there somehow.

“Flowers started out as a piano song. I listened to it for a bit and then, and I could see it being played in Pulp Fiction. And Uma Thurman's singing it. You know? Like that scene where she's with John Travolta and they're all high?

“So then I was like, ‘let's jam it’ and she grabbed a mic and I grabbed a bass, and we jammed and she sang. Literally for like 30 minutes, and after she left I built the whole thing out, and then sent it to her. And she was like, ‘Damn, this is amazing’. That 20, 30 minute little sprint with her just got the vibe.

“I wanted it to be uptempo – more like an I Will Survive. It just felt uplifting to me, and Miley is all about positivity. She’s just not a ‘feeling sorry for herself’ kind of person. She's like: ‘life's awesome. Let's go get it’. That's her. So it worked out.”

And is it that same collaborative magic at play when Harpoon gets fired at the latest Harry Styles project? “With Harry it's a mutual thing of giving to each other and Harry's taught me so much. I definitely got to a place where I was churning things out, but Harry loves an album. He said ‘I want to listen to an album’. And if you want an album, you have to care about that all along the way. Because otherwise you're going to end up with three singles and seven failed singles.”

It’s this kind of cohesive thinking that’s made Style’s last two albums – particularly the Harpoon work on Fine Line and Harry’s House – so distinctive. “When you're not specifically writing ‘hits’ you might find something that instead inspires you to go forwards. You have to think about it as a whole. You're adding to the artist’s integrity. Yeah, there's singles, and the headlines are talking about that. But it’s deeper than that.

“It's important for artists to feel heard. Of course, A&Rs are gonna lose their job if they don't have a hit but if you can be that guy that goes, ‘This seven-minute song is really, really important and we're gonna take our time’… That's one thing I learned from Harry is his care about every little detail and it really changed my life in a big way. That’s one of his strengths – how much he brings out of the people around him.”

It’s not just his close partnership with Styles that has seen Hull breaking new ground. Take his input into David Byrne’s recently released Who Is The Sky?: “I learned a completely different lesson from David. I learned that his real collaborative skill was to sometimes just let people go. And if it's mental and you're not quite sure about it, it's fine!” he laughs.

“He really lets people do their thing because he’s really interested in how it turns out. Letting things go and then moving on to the next thing and being like, ‘Do you know what would be really fun? If we got a room full of cats and recorded them and then we wrote a song in that room. That'd be fun!’ And then you go, ‘okay, cool’… It’s a bit of an adventure.

By now Hull is no stranger to working with the big names, but even his career debut was touched by greatness. “I'd made a record when I was signed to Young Turks on XL and I was very punk DIY. Like, ‘I'm going to do it all myself’. And I had a friend that was an engineer, and we made a whole record. But basically we messed up and we recorded everything too quiet,” Hull recalls.

“You know in Pro Tools you can record really quiet and just boost it? 10dB? 20dB? You can’t do that on tape. You boost the levels and you just bring up the noise floor.”

But after his songs found favour with Trevor Horn, with the producer signing Hull to a publishing deal, Horn himself stepped in to help. “He needed it to work for him too but there was hiss everywhere. It just sounded bad. But I’d spent all my budget. So I asked for his advice and he said, ‘I’m gonna produce your record’. And I was like, ‘Okay…’ because Trevor’s aesthetic wasn't necessarily what I was doing.

“But it turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me,” Hull explains. “I got to watch Trevor work. I got to feel that energy and watch him make records. There were moments where he'd be like, ‘This is where the fireworks need to hit’ and he was really passionate about pushing the music to places and visualizing where it was going to end up. I think it just planted seeds in my brain and while I'd always thought about production and songwriting it was only then that I was like, ‘Oh, now I get it’”.

And – like Horn – that even includes owning his own gear-laden studio – a rented house in Laurel Canyon that he’s filled with his favourite tech and keeps permanently set up, ready to record. “The whole place is just studio,” he enthuses.

“There's a room that's just all drums. And there's a room that's all synths. And there's a DJ set up. I wanted to create a space where people come in and go, ‘Hell yeah, this is exciting! This is where this guy knows about stuff!’ I feel like that’s my job a bit, you know?

And through knowing his set-up inside and out Hull can work with a level of speed and care that strikes a positive chord with anyone who comes through the door. “I have everything, set up, dialled in and ready to go. That’s why I need a lot of equipment. I like to leave things dedicated.

“So I have two drum kits and they’re left locked and set up. I have my dry kit, and then I have my live kit, and then with the other gear I have two or three sounds I get out of them. I don’t use one bit of gear for everything. But then the flipside of that is that you need a million things!

So what’s the Kid Harpoon go-to for synth bass, we wonder? “I’ll go Moog Model D,” Hull nods. “I just got an old Model D. I had the reissue but I was at RAK Studios and they had a Model D there that blew me away. So I took a photo of the serial number and sent it to Rob Rosen in LA, who's like the synth guy. And he was like, ‘Oh that year, that era it was a blah, blah, blah. It just so happens we have one of that series’. And I was like, ‘Okay, I'll try it. And then when I got it, I was like, ‘Oh, damn!’ I tell you, these guys are like crack dealers,” he laughs.

“The new ones are great because they have MIDI, but the old ones… It's like the way old basses get demagnetized over time. They just round off a little bit and they have that mid-range.”

And Hull’s love of Moog doesn’t end there. “I bought a Moog One – the 16-voice one. It was expensive but I bought into all the videos and I was like, ‘This looks amazing’. It’s a great synth… But it’s so complex. There’s a reason that the [Roland] Juno 106 is still the greatest, because when I need to get something working, it’s there. Whereas the One is like, ‘I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna play with a synth today’…

“But that’s the synth on As It Was. Here’s something I probably shouldn’t admit to MusicRadar… You know what's crazy about that sound? I was trying to justify paying for this thing so I brought it into the studio with Harry and I was flicking through the presets and there’s one called Harpoon Dream. And I thought, ‘This is pretty cool’. And I took off the delay and we were like, ‘Yeah!’.

“It’s not even that deep in there. It’s like preset A4 or something. And it stayed on until the end. Because it had Harpoon in the title… But that paid for the Moog One!”

And what’s the latest bit of kit that got the Kid fired up? “A recent discovery for me is modular synths. I've become obsessed. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, it's just bleeps and bloops, you won't like it’ and so I avoided it. But I’ve found it really useful. There’s no one bit of gear that I couldn’t live without but the thing that makes me most excited to get into the studio is the modular synth.

“I find the sequences really interesting and all the things you can do with the sequences. And it's painstaking, and even annoying sometimes. But once you dial it in, it's so exciting. I've just always felt more comfortable out of the box. It just always feels more fun to me to be more tactile. It just doesn't feel as fun to me to type in what you want. And I think the electronics just sound better.”

In fact, it’s safe to say that if it’s cutting edge then the Harpoon tip isn’t too far behind. “It’s like Trevor and the Fairlight. Trevor was able to buy the Fairlight before anyone else could afford one. He pioneered that whole thing until sampling became cheaper.

“Technology and music have always worked side by side, moving together. We like the sound of tape because it reminds us of old records. But then digital was amazing too. AG Cook and SOPHIE and those modern electronic producers. They're so digital-sounding, but it's so exciting.

“Today’s equivalent of what Trevor did is probably someone doing something similar with AI, because that combination of whoever's using the technology and how they use it will never go away. That's always going to be the most exciting bit. Technology is all these different modes of inspiration to use on our musical journeys. I find it super exciting.”

But surely, with the international demands put upon his high-profile clientele, getting everyone to come and jam at Harpoon House must prove problematic? “Yeah, I'm trying to scale it back a little bit,” Hull admits.

“I've actually hit a point where I think it can be overwhelming for people. You know, we're deep music nerds. And music nerds come in and go, ‘Fuck yeah! Let’s go!’. But I think that if you're a songwriter, you just want clarity. You don't want someone jumping around. So I’ve been putting stuff into storage a little bit, I'm just clearing the space.

“Some of my favourite producers are in the box. And it's annoying working like this because every time you go to a new studio, you have to set up. Harry likes to travel around and do different studios and we like to set up studios in houses in different locations when we're in album mode. So it becomes a whole operation. It's mental. You know it's become a thing when you're constantly speaking to a shipping company. I'm really close with the guy that ships our equipment,” he laughs.

And Hull’s next travels will bring the producer back home to London as he becomes Abbey Road’s first ever Producer In Residence. Hull explained the project and just what he’s aiming to achieve there.

“Abbey Road has always been a classical studio and now it's known for movies and stuff, but obviously, because of the Beatles, it's got such an iconic status in music. But I think it's been tough for them because as the money's changed with streaming and stuff, people can't afford to go to Abbey Road.

“But Abbey Road have got such an amazing musical connection they’re trying to make it more accessible to musicians again. And I think people are wanting to go back into studios again. Now the rates are better and they're really working to understand what musicians are trying to do and how we can invest in our musical heritage and the music people around us. So it's not just people like me who can afford to work at Abbey Road. It's also for brand new producers and brand new artists.

“And so what I'm hoping to achieve is to be part of that journey and support it and hopefully mentor some young producers, because experience is really the most important thing.

“I learned from Trevor, and I've done a little bit with Greg Kurstin, and we're really close friends and I've learned so much from him passing me down little tidbits of experience. If I can do that for someone else, I would love to do that.

“And while I love living here, I do miss home. So to be able to come back and put back into my community and where I came from is great. I love the UK and I love British music. And I'm a massive Arsenal fan, so I want to be home watching the Arsenal!”

David Byrne’s Who Is The Moon? is out now. Find out more about Abbey Road’s Producer In Residence here.