Kid Harpoon – Once

Here follows a warning to aspiring singer-songwriters. If you want to hold on to any hard-fought credibility on your debut album, it’s probably not a good idea to allow Trevor Horn to produce it. Horn is major league, you see. He works with people like Paul McCartney, Tom Jones and Robbie Williams. He’ll invite you to his Los Angeles studio where he’ll supply session musicians with credits on Bob Dylan and Metallica albums. It will be hard to resist the proposition, but resist you must. Because if you don’t, you will sacrifice any semblance of individuality and emerge blinking into the Californian sunlight with a collection of songs so attention-sappingly bland that they could have been made by anyone. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Horn. Once still needed someone like Londoner Kid Harpoon to provide the hopelessly hackneyed songwriting. [Nick Mitchell]