Aqualung is the ‘one hit wonder’ that achieved longevity, including success in America, becoming a favourite of TV music supervisors, a go-to writer-producer for rising stars and all the time, a steadily developing musician and performer. Matt Hales’ classical training, eclectic influences and varied career has added up to the kind of musicality that will always produce music of real creative depth. And if you thought the key change is dead in pop music, then Aqualung will prove you wrong on the fabulous latest album Dead Letters.
Matt Hales is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer who has been performing professionally under the name Aqualung since the early 2000s. Aqualung had a big breakthrough in the UK with the song "Strange and Beautiful (I Put A Spell On You”), which was featured on a television advertisement for the new Volkswagen Beetle during the summer of 2002 and went on to become a Top 10 hit. Matt then followed familiar paths, albeit with some very interesting intersections.
After fading from view in the UK, Aqualung was hardly consigned to the legend of the one hit wonder. Instead Matt went to make his name and build his career in the USA - much of it through hard, steady touring - the opposite of the “instant success” in the UK. Aqualung bucked the trend for under-achieving British acts through the naughties, selling several hundred thousand albums and becoming darlings of the cool celebrity crowd, from appearances on Jay Leno's Tonight show to Grammy nominations and cool celebrities attending his shows. Matt Hales became what he calls “inadvertently cool”. How did that happen? By not compromising for one thing.
“I tried compromising at one stage, by writing hits and giving the A&R guy what he wanted, but it made me unhappy. So I made the quietest music I could, my Idagio, my quiet pet sounds. That turned out to be successful anyway!”
Hales also established a parallel music career by becoming a successful, sought after writer-producer: collaborating with Lianne La Havas (he produced her superb debut album), Bat for Lashes, Tom Chaplin, Mika, Paloma Faith, Disclosure and many others. This has set Matt free from the curse of every commercial musician out there i.e. attached to having hits.
“I’m very lucky a few things have worked out. You could say I’m a spoilt bastard, because I can afford to be philosophical [about success] because I get paid. Artists are so beset by statistics these days it’s easy to feel sorry for them. But, you can make uncompromising music that you love and also have it succeed. You don’t always have to make a pact with the devil or pimp yourself out”.
Still, despite being a collaborator for hire, Hales has released no less than seven albums as Aqualung. The most recent, Dead Letters, is something truly special. When I heard it I immediately invited Matt on the show to get the inside story on his rather unusual career journey. Hales is often compared with the great & the good, from Radiohead and Coldplay, to Elton John and Talk Talk. It makes sense when you listen to Dead Letters, an album in which he has let all of his influences come to the surface:
“This is a record where I am paying homage to the record collection that I was raised on. There is Elton, Stevie Wonder, Bread, Toto - Pet Sounds of course, that’s the muesli I was raised on”.
So, Aqualung is the ‘one hit wonder’ that achieved longevity, including success in America, becoming a favourite of TV music supervisors, a go-to writer-producer for rising stars and all the time, a steadily developing musician and performer. Matt’s classical training, eclectic influences and varied career has added up to the kind of musicality that will always produce music of real creative depth. And if you thought the key change is dead in pop music, then Matt Hales will prove you wrong on Dead Letters. As he mentions in our conversation, he can now literally “do anything he wants” (including opening his album with an eight minute long opus). Perhaps that’s the very definition of musical longevity. However, if that’s what you want, then as Matt advises, be prepared to “fight for it, like having a little chick that you need to keep alive. Why would you ever think it might be easy!”
Aqualung will be performing a ‘one night only’ show at London’s Bush Hall November 25th and will tour the USA in 2023.