everyone knows this, but just for the record (for when i am 40): Easier to Lie got to 60. hmmm. consequences. makes me wonder... had the Sunday Times article been released a week sooner, would it have fared better?

because it be would impossible not to love him.

In retrospect, passing on to a songwriter a friend's remark that the music he makes is "okay, but a bit middle-of-the-road" was a mistake. Yet not only was the reaction this comment goaded from Matt Hales, aka Aqualung, at variance with what some see as the slightly enervated and superficially easy-on-the-ear songs he writes, it also produced one of the most passionate and persuasive explanations/defences of the pop-songwriting art I have ever heard.

When even the Today programme is weighing in, as it recently did, to the debate about the current stranglehold on the charts of so-called easy-listening, or middle-of-the-road (MOR) music, you know something�s up. Both descriptions were, for years, terms of abuse, synonymous with the Carpenters and Barry Manilow; the antithesis, as purists saw it, of artistic endeavour, visceral truth and musical innovation. To many of the same people, the success of singers such as Katie Melua and Jamie Cullum is proof that the world still hasn�t learnt, 37 years after Engelbert Humperdinck kept the Beatles� Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever single off the top spot.

As is often the case, though, it�s considerably more knotty that that. Yes, Melua�s and Cullum�s blandishments are clogging up the charts. But questions of �science and progress�, as Chris Martin put it in Coldplay�s recent (unarguably MOR) hit The Scientist, come into it, too. And science and progress, Martin sang, expressing his frustration with his own inability to accommodate this, �do not speak as loud as my heart�. The problem is, emotionalism in music is often derided as sentimentality and successful exponents of emotionally direct music as traders in cheap knick-knacks of the heart.

So why, then, are bands such as Coldplay newcomers Keane and Aqualung so critically acclaimed and commercially vibrant? Is this, as an acquaintance sniffed when witnessing a sellout arena crowd holding their cigarette lighters aloft during Coldplay�s performance of their song Trouble, merely �mass hysteria�? Can pop music be both resident in the Top 40 and possessed of a profound, almost metaphysical resonance?

Yes, says Hales, rallying after the MOR accusation. Absolutely. �In a complicated world,� he argues, �I think the most significant thing that any artist can contribute is probably a three-and-a-half-minute answer to a very complicated question. The problem is, there�s a lot more vocabulary with which to describe technically challenging, upsetting music than there is for something that simply, for reasons you can�t explain, makes you cry.�

Hales is, as that answer suggests, an articulate evangelist. But in the weird, double-standard world of obsessive and tribal music fandom, such highbrow responses, bizarrely, count for little. Tunelessness is next to godliness; and there is no greater sin than its opposite. On art�s essential question � the set-in-stone mutual exclusivity, or the feasible coexistence, of accessibility and purity; of immediacy and mystery; of beauty and incomprehensibility � they know which side they�re on. Dancing Queen by ABBA can be held up (at arm�s length) as a diverting but manipulative example of mass-market MOR. It can�t, however, be one of the greatest pop songs ever written.

�Middle-of-the-road is funny,� says the classically trained Hales, not sounding remotely amused. �Anyone can choose to make complex-sounding, difficult music, but the same person can choose to make simple, moving music. The distinction is superficial.�

Hales�s career has both benefited from and been boxed in by this distinction. When his song Strange and Beautiful was used on a VW Beetle commercial two years ago, people began bombarding record shops and radio stations with inquiries about how to get hold of it. Yet just two weeks before the ad agency commissioned him, and after 10 years as, he says, �a struggling, penniless musician�, Hales�s then power-pop band, the 45s, had been dropped by their label.

Strange and Beautiful�s muffled, ghostly piano and breathy, Eric Carmen-like refrain of �I�ll put a spell on you� may have struck a chord with the public, but it was several months before they were able to buy it. When the song was finally released (after Hales had, almost pin-in-a-dictionary style, chosen the Aqualung name and signed to another major label), it went straight into the charts; the album from which it came went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. At the relatively late age of 30, here was a singer-songwriter indebted to a Beetle rather than to Lennon/McCartney.

Last year, Hales and his regular collaborators, his wife, the actor Kim Oliver (of Bad Girls fame), and his brother Ben, convened to record the follow-up. Like his debut, much of Still Life was recorded in the flat he and Oliver shared until recently in Brockley, Kent. Beneath the Bachian keyboards, choirboy-like vocals and doomed-romantic lyrics, stranger, more complex nuances make themselves heard over time. What Hales describes as "ambient sounds of Brockley" intrude, "a lot of buses, quite a lot of kitchen sounds. I might release a kitchen-and-bus-only version".

The humour and lack of preciousness in such a remark - and the low budgets his albums were made on - make Hales an unlikely Radio 2 easy-listening pin-up. You could argue that he is, instead, a genuinely radical artist; both for producing, by sleight-of-hand, often dark and multilayered music under cover of radio-friendly acceptability, and for attempting to communicate pain, remorse, longing, anxiety and bafflement in the candy coating of pop catchiness.

"So many of the classic songs have that double-edged quality," he says. "And choosing a naive voice deliberately, as an artistic statement doesn't mean you're actually naive and should be regarded as an idiot. Music doesn't exist until you hear it. It only comes into being when a person experiences it. The point of it is to transfer something from one person to another. So what is the value in music that nobody hears, or understands when they do hear it?"

He's not the biggest fan in the world of pursed-lipped music specialists who, as he sees it, value elitism over access. "There's a tradition among British music writers that is totally locked into the few years of wearing a black T-shirt and wishing you were Jim Morrison. But what Still Life is about is this point in your life when people start to lose their parents and become parents themselves [he and Oliver are expecting their first child in June]. It's a nodal moment, and those are fitting subjects for songs. Doing crystal meth is cool, or wearing a jacket that's made of leather and is too small is cool, but that's like a tiny snapshot. It's a sliver of life."

As he sings languidly on his new single: "To bear the weight and push into the sky ... It's easier to lie." You sense he's addressing, in Aqualung's customarily elegant and well-upholstered way, the conflict between artifice and veracity that will always rage at pop's heart. Later on the album, he marvels: "Sing my heart out, for a stranger: extraordinary thing." By which, he says, he means that he and his wife and his brother, "the two most important people in my life", can engage in a process of absolute privacy, passion and intimacy, and get to release the results (and have them bought).

"It's kind of cute to present myself as just a really nice guy who makes lovely music and doesn't care about the world because he's got his lovely wife and we're in Brockley, where everything's nice," he says pell-mell. "But it's not nothing, you know, what we're doing. We're actually investing something of ourselves in it. I am someone who looks at the stars and feels full of joy, but I'm also haunted by the fact that I'm going to die, and that Kim and Ben and I will all be parted, and it will break our hearts."

Setting this rapture and anguish to music, Matt Hales has made two albums full of songs you'll be haunted by long after those three-and-a-half-minutes have passed. Where he's singing from - the middle of the road, the upper or lower reaches of the charts - doesn't seem as important as the fact that its wellspring lies in the depths of his conflicted heart. You may find yourself whistling his tunes, but cheap knick-knacks? I think not. They cost him a little bit more than that.

i'd call my dad and tell him to rip it out, but i don't have his number.

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th since 5th october 2001