Having your song used in a TV ad can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand it’s instant mass exposure, a guaranteed money-spinner and a potential career launching pad. Where would The Dandy Warhols be without Vodafone? How much do Leftfield owe to the Guinness ad? On the other hand there’s Moby.

Getting a reputation for selling your soul to the devil is never a good thing in music; and in the late 90s the Canadian producer’s reputation as a dance innovator kind of got replaced by something closer to ‘that bald bloke who makes music for adverts’.

There’s also the danger of being that flash in the pan band that had that massive hit from the advert (usually Levi’s) and were then never heard of ever again. Does anyone remember Babylon Zoo? Exactly. Presumably, they now work in Tescos - along with the lads from Stiltskin and Spacehog.
These pitfalls, it seems, do not apply to The Asteroids Galaxy Tour. First of all, they’re far too cool. A couple of Danish hipsters by the names of Mette Lindberg and Lars Iversen, they’re like The Tings Tings but better looking.

Ticking all the right boxes for an uber-trendy male/female indie-dance cross-over duo (who ever thought that’d become a familiar format?) in 2009, it’s hard to imagine them sinking without a trace once the iPod ad that features their infectious single, ‘Around The Bend’ goes off the air. And there’s another thing: what trendier product could this Scandinavian twosome be linked to than the iPod Touch? If their tunes were being used to flog Toilet Duck the future might not be so rosy…

Seriously though, the ace up The Asteroids’ sleeves is their songs. Having recorded their album over a period of two years (it was due out in May but has now been pushed back to ‘hopefully sometime this Summer’) in Iversen’s Copenhagen flat, the Asteroids’ sound is a multi-layered, labour of love.

“His apartment is just one room and then a kitchen,” says the beautiful Mette Lindberg, in an equally cute Danish accent. “It is a home studio, just one room with a balcony. I think he has really nice neighbours. They never said anything about the noise.”

It’s true that Iversen must have had understanding neighbours. The Asteroids’ sound has its roots in 60s soul, and uses a lot of trumpets and sax, which were recorded live in the flat.

“We never stopped recording so at one point we had a lot of songs,” continues Lindberg. “We would then sometimes cut some of them and then just keep on going until we had the whole album. It stayed fresh all the time because it was always constantly in progress.

“Most of the recording is Lars playing most of the instruments: the guitar, the bass, the drums. But then we’d have the drummer in the apartment for some parts and we managed to get all the horns in there at times too. I’ll say it again, we had very nice neighbours.”

To achieve the Motown sound, Lars used vintage microphones and equipment (how very Mark Ronson), and at times Lindberg would even record her vocals from behind blankets to get that muffled, retro feel.

Coupled with the 60s influence are obvious dance and pop elements, which sound quite psychedelic at times. This is particularly prevalent on tracks like ‘Hero’ and their previous single ‘The Sun Ain’t Shining No More’ (released in September 2008 before the iPod boom), where the richness of the sound tells you that Iversen is a more than competent producer.

“We seem to work well together,” says Lindberg. “Lars would call me and say ‘hey, I’ve got this new idea, this new sound in my head’, and then he would force me to listen to it and then I would just be like ‘yeah, that’s great’ you know. I loved all the horns and the sounds he came up with, it just what I was looking for at the time.

“The writing is mostly Lars. He might come up with an idea and then I might add some melody or some lyrics and then we work on the sections, just give it a go and do some jamming. It’s mostly Lars but we do work on it together as well and see what we come up with.”

Iversen and Lindberg soon realised they were producing a big, multi-instrumental sound and – having been asked to support Amy Winehouse for the Danish leg of her tour - started to wonder how they were going to reproduce it live.

“We never wanted it to be just the two of us with a backing track so we had to recruit a lot of extra people to join us on stage. Now we have a band with a trumpet player, a saxophone player and a drummer, as well as piano and guitarists.”

And what about the influences? Predictably, they’re being linked to every musical genre under the sun, from sixties soul to nineties rave, but to be fair there is a lot at play in the couples writing and specifically in Iversen’s production.

“We do like that all old Motown stuff,” says Lindberg, “but we also like a lot of jazz and hip-hop. I like The Beatles and The Stones too and Michael Jackson. I think the inspiration comes from all of that stuff mixed together you know.

“You don’t really think about where it’s from. It’s very weird to read about what people think because they say that we draw from a certain period and it might be something that we never really thought about. For us though, we really don’t want to put a label on it. It comes from so many different places, and we really think that is the beauty of our music. I guess you can call it what you want.”

Okay. Well, for the moment we’re going to call it ‘that song from the iPod advert’. Something tells us, though, that label might not stick too long.