Happy landing: Aqualung are coming home

In the days before Natasha Bedingfield and Corinne Bailey Rae were fêted from New York to LA, such breakthroughs seemed distant prospects. So it was a surprise for Matt Hales, also known as Aqualung, to become the UK's third-biggest-selling act in the US in 2005. Hales enjoyed fleeting fame here, thanks to his hit VW Beetle advertisement soundtrack, "Strange and Beautiful", but has gone on to remarkable success in the States.

He followed the 2002 hit with an eponymous album that built upon his breakthrough single's quiet Radiohead vibe. A year later, he returned with the richer Still Life, which enjoyed further critical acclaim, yet little commercial return. He was dropped by his label, forcing him to pay attention to the overtures coming from across the pond. Hales headed out in 2004 and a year later a US label released a record that combined the highlights of Aqualung's first two albums.

For much of that time, his small group was on a gruelling itinerary across the States. Step by step, the group built a following. Today, the ever-youthful Hales is back at the recording space that he rents in south-east London. Relaxed amid the usual studio chaos of drums, effects boxes and, weirdly, a Victorian harmonium, he looks back with equanimity at the struggles.

"We were dealt with as if with we were an American act, because we were signed to New York, so the presumption was we were available for anything, which in a sense we were. It was quite agreeably old fashioned: you'd go to Seattle, do a gig and a radio show, and you sell more records and play a bigger venue, rather than the Russian-roulette aspect of success over here, where it happens in one big bang."

Hales's US fame culminated in two appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman. "You know who've made it when you're shaking hands with Ricky Martin or Richard Gere. Whenever I bump into someone like that, I just stand there and my mind empties. You hope you have a fantastic one liner, but with Richard I literally just said 'This isn't right' and walked off."

Hales was in the odd position of finding himself more highly regarded than other UK acts, notably Razorlight. He watched Johnny Borrell's group play a small club and found himself mobbed by fans. "I know they're selling out Earl's Court or whatever, but we met in Chicago where I was playing to 10 times as many people. Though it's not a big deal as you're part of a social circle that meets on this global circuit. Like, I live next door to [the rock band] Athlete, but only see them in Texas or Vancouver."

But fame came at no small cost to Hales's peace of mind, especially since he became a father and married his partner Kim Oliver, an actor who made her name in ITV prison drama Bad Girls, before taking time out to bring up their son Kofi.

"There were times when I thought about jacking it in, especially as we began revisiting places we'd played before and the law of diminishing returns applied. I would be in tears, or Kim would, and these moments were getting more and more frequent, but we've learnt now what we can handle."

The couple thought about relocating to the US, but decided that was not the answer. "It seemed it would be absolutely worse, because we would still be apart, because it's such a big country, but away from family and friends. And there's no particular part where I thought I'd like to live."

It also helps that Oliver is not only an understanding spouse, but also Hales's writing partner. In fact, while Aqualung is essentially his vehicle, it is something of a family affair. Its smallest live incarnation is the main writer with Hales's brother Ben as accompanist, though you are more likely to see a proper group, as at Glastonbury this year, when Kofi took to the stage with a tambourine.

Oliver, meanwhile, is involved with half of the songs on the forthcoming album Memory Man. "It's not something I strove for consciously, but they are people I trust and can be open with. Kim does, I think, bring a feminine touch. Her view on emotions is much more direct than mine. Ben is a great sounding-board and I can explain to him an idea for a song and he can come back with something really poetic."

London is still home for Hales, and his third album was recorded off Bermondsey Street, a focus for the city's modern arts scene, which seems to have encouraged a more conceptual stance, with extremes of delicate keyboards and slabs of guitar rock. While his debut was all wonky atmospherics, and its follow-up dominated by ornate arrangements, Memory Man sounds like a proper band sweating in a studio, as if he wanted to reach out to his fanbase of ordinary Americans.

"Touring Still Life for so long, I found that the music was teeing people up to go off somewhere. Our gigs went from being lovely, but quite polite, experiences, to something much more visceral and sweaty. So we stretched the arrangements and took them a bit further. We had this power from making colossal chunks of music, then coming back to the tiniest whisper."

Hales pursues this approach on Memory Man with tracks such as the opener "Cinderella", which takes on the ideas already used by the likes of Coldplay and Keane, but with more elegant delivery. "There's clichés to do with stately music, but I wanted to try something with a less standard texture, ideally a slightly cybernetic record. I was trying to make a record that would not automatically place it in singer-songwriter land. Still Life had that classic Seventies sound, but this one I wanted to be more disembodied."

Having become a dad since his second album, Hales was keen not to fill Memory Man with references to his baby boy. Instead, the inspiration appears in more oblique fashion, as on the forthcoming single "Pressure Suit", with its space imagery that boils down to having someone to face the big bad world with.

"I've started to feel things more fully, not at all a good experience, because some of it's the challenges, risks and horrors. When I started to write, I felt drawn to something less cosy. I couldn't do songs where everything's lovely any more. It's half fantastic and half horrifying, so there's two sides to the record."

Perhaps most alarming for Aqualung fans is how low their hero's voice is in the mix. It's all part of the plan, he says. "There needed to a bit more tension and there's something cosy about a grand piano and big, loud vocal. I wanted there to be some cosiness, but not as a default, not about having tousled hair and strumming a guitar. The synthetic and organic aspects represent a little bit the two poles in the songs."

Hales was a classical music student who wrote his first symphony aged 17, and is unsure how much influence such training continues to impose. "I can't really tell any more. I did the piano exams and did a lot of composition, but it was never one or the other. I was always making recordings and playing gigs. With this music, there are some moments where I'm thinking, 'oh, there's a brilliant bit in that Tippett overture', in the same way you hear a bit in a Led Zeppelin tune and try to capture it."

Hales found fame when he fused his education with an undoubted ear for a tune to create atmospheric music for theatre and dance productions. This direction eventually found a commercial outlet via "Strange and Beautiful", something he has returned to on Memory Man. He is back where he belongs.

'Pressure Suit' is out on 20 August on Epic, followed by 'Memory Man' on 3 September

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