John Feldmann is as close as pop-punk gets to a super-producer, a svengali in spiky hair and board shorts. His group Goldfinger were major players in the genre’s first wave in the late 1990s. Even if you’re not familiar with his band, you’ll almost certainly have heard some of Feldmann’s work: in recent years he’s become pop-punk’s go-to guy, producing and co-writing for everyone from Blink-182 to 5 Seconds of Summer, with credits on albums that together have sold more than 34m copies worldwide. So what’s his secret? How do you pen a song that will conquer both the moshpit and the charts? Here’s his foolproof guide to writing a pop-punk hit:

John Feldmann

Lighten up!

Pop-punk came from the ashes of the dying grunge scene, which was a very heavy scene. We’re talking Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog. Pearl Jam came out of Mother Love Bone, whose lead singer died of an overdose. We’ve got Nirvana, who ended with a suicide. We’ve got some of the heaviest, darkest stories in the history of music. The mood at the time was anarchistic, nihilistic, political, very serious. But 1994 is really when pop-punk happened as a global movement. Dookie came out and it changed everything. It was about suburbia, jerking off and broken-hearted love songs. Every new music scene is a response to the last one. The Sex Pistols came out of seven-minute prog jams and arena rock. And it’s the same thing with grunge and pop-punk. There has to be a pushback.

Tap into teenage angst

Good Charlotte are a great example of this. Girls and Boys and The Anthem are very “coming of age”, teenage heartbreak, anti-college football kind of thing. Hope is the classic ingredient that most pop-punk songs have – that there is a way out. I can’t think of a harder time in life than between the ages of 12 and 16. There’s something about the hormones and growing up in that part of life that is so difficult. And a lot of times these pop-punk songs say: “This isn’t so bad.” They spread a message of hope.

Don’t outstay your welcome

A pop-punk song can’t be more than three and a half minutes. It just can’t! Sure, there are exceptions – like Green Day’s American Idiot. Rule one still applies! But then without the three-minute songs on Dookie, American Idiot wouldn’t have existed. And Billie Joe Armstrong reinventing what pop-punk is – that’s his right. He’s the guy who spearheaded the scene, after all.

Blink-182’s Travis Barker, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge at the Whisky a Go Go in LA in 1996.) Photograph: Jim Steinfeldt/Getty Images

Don’t get too political

If you look at the Spotify numbers for the biggest pop-punk songs, they’re not the heavy, politicised, agenda-driven songs. Look at NOFX – Linoleum is by far their biggest song. And if you look at the lyrics, it’s not really an intellectual game-changer. Linoleum is a song about being a drunk, broke idiot. Sleeping on a kitchen floor. And any teenager goes through those growing pains. Speaking for myself, as a teenager the biggest thing was: “How do I have sex?” That shit was all I really thought about. I was lucky to have a roof over my head – I never slept on the streets. Obviously, there are kids who have had that life – I’ve worked with the King Blues, for example [whose singer, Jonny “Itch” Fox was homeless as a teenager]. But for the most part, when you’re growing up it’s really about relationships and heartbreak.

Get to the chorus

Stylistically, you can add a double kick drum, a guitar solo, a breakdown or screamy verses. But for the most part, the people who go and see shows are not musicians. They’re not there to study how to play the guitar. They’re there to let loose all the stress of home. They want to sing along with the bands that they believe went through or are going through the same stuff. So a good chorus is always going to matter. So get to the chorus quickly and get to the point quickly: “This is what we’re trying to say and we’re saying it in a way that every single person can sing along.” There has to be that sense of melody.

There are no rules!

I would say in the history of pop-punk, Green Day and Blink-182 are the most popular bands. And if you think about Longview, the Green Day song about masturbation, and Blink’s I Miss You, the song has got a super major key chords, while Blink’s is minor key, super dark and Cure-sounding. So when you ask, “What are the rules of writing of writing a pop-punk song?” I can’t say that it has to be in a major key or go to the chorus to get to the relative major to get that lift, because that isn’t really what happens. But typically it has to have an anthemic chorus, be super-simple and really catchy. And it has to have some sense of humour.