Sarah Jones | Harry Styles' drummer

Fifteen consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden is a thing very few musicians have ever done. Sarah Jones has.

She is one of the busiest touring drummers in British music — a founding member of an indie band who became the drummer of choice for some of the most demanding pop and art-rock acts going.

She is also, quietly, playing one of the nicest-looking drum kits on any stage. Here is her story.

Who is Sarah Jones?

Sarah Jones was born on 31 August 1985 and is based in London.

She started on piano, and came to drums almost by accident — a family friend left a kit at the house, and a cousin showed her some basic beats. That is a more common origin story than the industry admits.

She was a founding member of New Young Pony Club, the London indie-dance band that came out of the mid-2000s nu-rave scene.

The touring career

From there she became a first-call session and touring drummer:

• Hot Chip — dance music played by a live band, which is a specific and difficult brief.
• Bat for Lashes — atmospheric, dynamic, textural.
• Kurt Vile — American guitar music, loose and warm.
• Harry Styles — the big one, including the Love On Tour residencies.

Drumeo’s voters gave her Pop Drummer Of The Year in 2022, citing the Madison Square Garden residency and a Grammy-nominated record.

What Sarah Jones actually does

She plays for the room she is in. Hot Chip needs machine-tight quantised feel. Bat for Lashes needs space and colour. Harry Styles needs enormous, simple, joyous pop drumming. She sounds correct in all three, which is not the same as sounding the same.

She is a hybrid player. Acoustic kit plus triggers, so the electronic elements of the arrangements come off her hands rather than off a track.

Her feel is warm. For a drummer who works so much with electronic material, she does not play like a machine. The Styles material in particular is loose in a way that lets a stadium sing along.

She plays simply at scale. Arena pop drumming is mostly about weight, consistency and not getting in the way of a vocal, and she is excellent at all three.

She has taste in sound. The vintage kit is not an aesthetic decision alone — old drums are warmer and drier, and that is the right choice for the music.

Sarah Jones’s drum kit

Her Harry Styles touring kit is a lovely thing.

• Drums — a vintage Slingerland kit in lavender satin flame. Slingerland is a long-defunct American brand — the same maker Bill Ward used on the early Black Sabbath records — and a satin flame finish from that era is a genuinely rare object to see on an arena stage.
• Cymbals — Meinl.
• Heads — Remo Coated Emperor on everything. Two-ply, warm, controlled.
• Electronics — a Roland BT-1 trigger pad integrated into the acoustic kit. A BT-1 is a thin bar trigger you can clamp anywhere on a rim, which is why it turns up on so many hybrid setups.

Every era, with buy links, is on Sarah Jones’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

This is one of the more copyable modern rigs, and one piece of it costs very little.

Add a bar trigger. A single BT-1-style trigger clamped to a rim, running into a module, lets one drummer cover the electronic parts of a modern pop arrangement. It is the cheapest possible entry into hybrid drumming — our electronic drum kit guide covers what you need alongside it.

Then put coated two-ply heads on everything. Warm, controlled, no ringing. Our drum head buying guide explains the trade-off against single-ply.

And buy old drums. Vintage shells are frequently cheaper than new mid-range kits and sound warmer. Our used gear guide covers doing that without getting stung, and the Gear Guru will price it up.

Where to start listening

• Harry Styles — Love On Tour footage. Arena pop drumming at its best.
• Hot Chip — live, any year. Dance music played by humans.
• Bat for Lashes — live footage. The dynamic, textural end of what she does.
• New Young Pony Club — “Ice Cream” (2007). Where she started.

Final thoughts

The touring drummer’s job is largely invisible by design, and Jones is very good at being invisible in the right way — the songs sound like the records, the shows feel enormous, and nobody in the crowd is thinking about the drums.

Which is a shame, because there is a lot going on back there: a hybrid rig, four genuinely different musical briefs across four bands, and a seventy-year-old drum kit doing arena duty.

See Sarah Jones’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Josh Dun — another drummer holding up a stadium show with a hybrid setup.