Matt Hales: In at the deep end

First there was the hit track behind the VW Beetle ad; then came the band and the album, both called Aqualung; and then, finally, there was the record contract. Matt Hales tells Fiona Sturges his extraordinary story

For an aspiring musician wanting to make it in the music business, there's usually an order in which things happen. First, you get a band together and rehearse in your bedroom and/or garage until you have a handful of songs. Next, you must test your material out on the public. That can involve playing to the barman and his dog in the corner of a sticky suburban venue until the word gets around that you're worth a listen. Keep at it for a year or two, and, if fortune is really smiling on you, you may catch the attention of a passing record-company scout. It's only once you have negotiated a record deal that you get to make an album and, perhaps, even bag your first hit.

Yes, that is the usual order of things. For Aqualung's Matt Hales, however, it didn't quite happen this way. In his case, the hit arrived well before the band came about, and it wasn't until he had finished his first album that he signed a record contract. By the time he had played his first show, he'd already sold 100,000 copies of his album.

You may have heard his debut single, "Strange and Beautiful", wafting from your television during the commercial breaks. The song – which, over the past few months, has been helping to sell the VW Beetle, is the kind that works its way into your consciousness without being invited. Indeed, you're far more likely to remember the song than the car. A sequence of sweetly sombre piano chords is followed by some breathy, Thom Yorke-ish vocals – "I've beee-en watching your world from afar/ I've beee-en trying to be where you are..."

Since the advert first appeared on our screens, the song has gathered a momentum of its own. After being inundated with requests from listeners to track it down, radio stations began to have it on a permanent loop. When it was finally released as a single a few months later, sales went through the roof.

I meet Hales, a tall, lean individual with strikingly translucent skin, in a restaurant in central London. He arrives half an hour late, after being stuck on a train from Brockley. The thought of taking a taxi hadn't occurred to him; clearly, his status as a top-selling artist hasn't gone to his head just yet.

It all began in April with the demise of his last band, The 45s. Having been dropped by their record label, the members decided to take a break from one another and re-evaluate their careers. "We had been playing on and off together for 10 years under different names, and it had gone as far as it could go," Hales explains. "We had got to the point where we couldn't surprise each other creatively any more."

Hales had also been composing scores for dance and theatre groups and writing occasional jingles for adverts. You can blame him for that ghastly cod country-and-western song on the Wrigley's Orbit gum ad; the Mitsubishi Space Star theme is also one of his. It was, he says, a way of staying financially afloat while pursuing his real ambition as a real musician.

After the band split, Hales began toying with the notion that he could combine the work he had been producing as a composer with his songwriting. Around the same time, he received a phone call from an advertising agency asking if he was interested in pitching for the Volkswagen ad.

"There was a lot of luck involved," he maintains, modestly. "It's not as if I was top of anyone's list. Thousands of people had been asked to submit songs. They had been looking for the right track for two years and they knew that the music was key to the advert's success. Volkswagen didn't want something written especially. They wanted something that already existed and just happened to fit the product. One of the many songs I had lying around was 'Strange and Beautiful' – I just thought it would work."

With just a day to go before it was due to be submitted, Hales and his wife Kim Oliver, the actress who plays Buki in ITV's Bad Girls, sat up all night working on the song – Hales got on with the recording in their hallway, while Oliver sat in the living- room tinkering with the lyrics. They sent the finished track in the next morning, and the following week it was being broadcast on television.

At the time, Hales saw an opportunity but was determined not to suffer the same fate as Babylon Zoo, the band whose song "Spaceman" was first heard on a Levi's advertisement. After rushing out a single and an album on the back of it, they sank without trace. So, as "Strange and Beautiful" worked its magic on TV viewers, Hales and Oliver stayed at home and set about writing a proper album.

"I've never been interested in having a novelty single," he states. "What would be the point in that? I knew that we were in a strong position and that the record companies were already putting in offers. But I didn't want them to have any input on an album, I wanted to do it on my own terms."

It wasn't until August, when the album was nearly finished, that Hales finally met with a handful of record labels. He eventually settled on the Warner-distributed indie label B-Unique, smartly negotiating a contract that has allowed him to retain copyright of his songs and left him with a "rather handsome" wage.

When I ask Hales if he minds being known as the musician that made his fortune through a car ad, he shakes his head. "No, I'm proud of it, and I think good songs can survive a change of context. It's not as if it's the Ketchup Song. I probably won't do any more adverts now because I don't have to. But given the financial situation I was in when I got the offer, I would have been a fool to take a moral standpoint and turn it down. That kind of attitude is a luxury of success."

When Hales was six years old, his parents bought a second-hand record shop in Southampton; it was here that he got his first taste of pop music. However, he insists that the most significant musical event in his life took place before he was born, when his father purchased a small upright piano. "As long as I can remember, I played on it," he recalls. "It was the big wooden toy in the corner of the room that made these really great sounds."

As a child, he had the odd piano lesson but found the daily diet of scales and arpeggios tiresome. His music teachers at school were more encouraging and even commissioned him to write a melody for their school song. He also began writing songs with his brother Ben: "Our first song was about road safety, and the second was about the cleaners who worked in the school. It was called the Thornton Classroom Cleaning Crew."

At 16, Hales won a county council scholarship to study with the Winchester-based composer David Glynne. That same year, he set about writing his first symphony. "It was mostly pretension," he says, wincing. "But also I wanted to try my hand at a big thing. But it all came a cropper. I think that the piece might possibly have some fragments of merit but the actual performance was lamentable. Everyone clapped but I knew that they were just indulging me. It was a pretty embarrassing start to a career."

Nevertheless, Hales wasn't daunted and continued to pursue his twin passions, classical composition and pop music. He studied composition at the Guildhall in London and, with his brother, formed a series of Bowie and Led Zeppelin-inspired bands, among them Meccano Pig, the Gravel Monsters, Ruth, and, eventually, The 45s.

Hales wants it to be known that, while things have certainly looked up for him in the last six months, he has paid his dues as a struggling musician. "I have played some of the smallest, grimiest venues in the country," he says. "I've done that living-in-a-van thing, and I've been unceremoniously dumped by record companies. At times, it was awful and I genuinely thought about packing it all in. But I guess it was worth it in the end."

The album 'Aqualung' is out now on B-Unique/WEA. The single 'Good Times Gonna Come' is released on Monday. Aqualung tour the UK in December