One man brand

You may not realise it, but you are probably more aware of Matt Hales’ work than you think – albeit in another guise. Hales is currently working under the musical pen name of Aqualung and has produced a rather fine self-titled debut album. So fine, indeed, that you wonder why he chose to cloak himself in relative mystery.

“I didn’t want to make it explicit really,” he explains. “I quite like the idea that the Aqualung project is allowed to go wherever it wants to go, where I want to go with it. Calling ‘it’ Matt Hales gave too much away, pinned it down a bit too much. There’s a certain expectation about a solo singer songwriter. A band name can have all sorts of things going on behind it.”

The idea of the one man band has an interesting history, from the Divine Comedy and Nine Inch Nails to Cornelius, The Magnetic Fields and the more recent Satellite, as Matt agrees.

“That’s what I was wanting to align myself with to an extent. In a way the point of those projects, as well as mine, is not to do with the individual as an ego or a celebrity. I don’t particularly want my name to be that well known, I’d like people to come to the music, get engrossed in it and take whatever they like. It’s more of an umbrella under which different things could happen and I’m interested in developing other things within the world of Aqualung. It’s kind of a brand.”

Working alone in his home studio, Hales has fashioned a record of studied tranquillity and immense fragility – although he does admit that “sometimes you do have to keep checking how far up your own arse you’ve actually gone.” As for the sparse nature of the recording, he explains: “That decision was taken because the songs I was dealing with all had those themes and wouldn’t have suited a super slick production. Anyway, I made the album at home because I didn’t have a record deal and I didn’t have any money. As it happens, that worked well with the sort of material it is. I wanted it to be intimate, that was the main thing.”

All the more bizarre then that the track ‘Strange & Beautiful’ should appear on the latest VW Beetle ad, although unsurprisingly Hales is not really complaining – taking a pragmatic view of the whole thing.

“In a way it wasn’t really designed for public consumption on that level but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. I thought it worked. I would have hated the music to have to fight with some over enthusiastic voice over but as it happens, it was a very quiet advert visually so it wasn’t too much of a jolt.”