After fading from view in the UK after "Strange And Beautiful" (a top 10 hit in 2002), Aqualung was hardly consigned to the legend of the one hit wonder. Instead Matt Hales went to make his name and build his career in the USA - much of it through hard, steady touring - the opposite of his “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 quieter version of 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. not attached to having a hit.
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 & 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 these 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”.
And if you thought the key change is dead in pop music, then Matt Hales is out to prove you wrong on Dead Letters. As he mentions in our conversation, he can literally “do anything he wants”.
Perhaps that’s the very definition of musical longevity.
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