C2 Presents Aqualung @ Duke Of Yorks Picture House Cinema: Friday 13th Dec
Published 5th Dec 2002 by Alison@c2

If anyone can claim to have had their career choice in some way chosen for them, it?s Aqualung?s Matt Hales; born above his parents Southampton independent record store, with a piano dominating the front room, he was writing songs by the age of 4. By 11 he?d been commissioned to compose his school Song (the melody stolen, he confesses without a hint of shame, from Howard Jones? ?Humans Lib? album), by 14 he was co-writing with his brother a clutch of ?songs about road safety?. Awarded a scholarship at 16 to study composition in Winchester, by 17 he?d had his first symphony ?Life Cycle? performed by a 60-piece orchestra, with Matt himself conducting. No ordinary childhood. No ordinary child.

The parallel lives of Matt Hales- where classic(al) song-writing ran alongside the spit and polish of the rock format- really begins here, with Matt forming his first band with brother Ben, performing Police covers and selling cassettes at ?2 a throw outside his college gates. A Music degree course then followed at London?s City University- with 2 years at the Guildhall studying composition- where Matt developed engineering and production skills at BBC?s Maida Vale Studios, skills brought to bear so fruitfully with Aqualung. And while on the one hand his formal, quasi-classical compositions could already be heard gracing religious gatherings at The Royal Albert Hall, his new band incarnation Ruth were signing their first record deal and cutting their first (?over ambitious Supergrass?) album ?Harrison?.

Despite favourable early signs - Radio 1 support and bizarre national TV appearances - Ruth soon came to grief, dissolving in a welter of band infighting and record company debt. Yet, just eighteen months later, as new London outfit The 45?s, Matt and pretty much the very same cohorts were the objects of a record company bidding war, signing a deal with Mercury Records in Summer 2000. This was to be even more short-lived; 2 acclaimed single releases and tours with Electric Soft Parade and Cooper Temple Clause led to not very much at all, and whilst the label itself disintegrated, a disenchanted and out-of-pocket Matt opted out, to pursue more solo, musical goals.

Armed with an album of graceful and glacial, piano/vocal compositions, and inspired by the self-sufficiency of artists like Cornelius, Matt Hales sidestepped back to his other parallel life and waited for something to happen. And though clients as diverse as Mitsubishi and the Royal Ballet had already discovered and used his songs, it was this summer?s TV/Cinema campaign for VW Beetle ? underpinned by the haunting ?Strange And Beautiful?- that changed Matt Hales? life. With record shops besieged by people desperate to find THAT song, and Radio 1 eager to answer the demand, Aqualung was born.

An album of darkly haunting songs, conceived in the early classical years and realised in his home studio this Spring, is now set for a Worldwide album release this autumn. And the childhood prodigy that was Matt Hales has become Aqualung, the distillation of all the musical elements that inform his bizarre and twisting musical tale. Strange and beautiful indeed.

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