Project Description

Interview with

MAT McHUGH

from

THE BEAUTIFUL GIRLS

by Vicky Hebbs

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How did you all first get into music? When did it become a serious concern?
My Dad always played music around the house. He was a country music fan so I heard a lot of that growing up. There were always guitars around the house so it was pretty natural for me to pick one up. I don’t actually even remember not playing one. Music never really became a serious concern, still isn’t haha

What kind of music did you grow up on? What artists inspired you and which do you still look to now for ideas?
Always around the house was Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings. Also Sinatra, Dean Martin and Elvis. Those artists all inspire me still. There’s so much music in the World that it’s just about having an open mind to inspiration. There’s always examples of what to do and what not to do in every piece of music.

What are the origins of The Beautiful Girls? How would you describe the ‘sound’ of The Beautiful Girls for anyone who is not yet familiar with your work?
The Beautiful Girls began as a project I put together to play a couple of open mic nights around the beaches of Sydney. It wasn’t anything too serious. I made a demo tape for 300 bucks, took 3 hours to make, which when on to become the debut release ‘Morning Sun’. A couple of songs on there got put in the hands of a radio DJ and they spun them on air. The recording has gone on to sell over a hundred thousand copies, warts and all. I think the sound is best described by someone else but it’s a mix of all the things I love about soul, blues, dub, folk, punk rock and hip hop.

Your new single, Beautiful World, is such an uplifting track! Did anything in particular inspire you to write it?
Total destruction inspired it. I had bad management a few years ago that caused me to lose every single dollar I had earnt in my career. I was sitting at home in debt, with no gigs booked and no money. All I had left was my heart and whatever talents I possess. I decided I had a choice in how to react to the situation. I could be the victim or I could choose to fight. The darkness has always been with me, peering over my shoulder, but I choose to stare it down and wrap my arms around all the beauty I can find in this fucked up World. 

How have your childhood influences impacted the music you create today?
They’re in me. They’re in my blood and my DNA. Music isn’t really a conscious thing for me. I go by feeling and emotion. All the music I’ve let into my heart has it’s on the wheel for every musical decision I make. I’m just another student of the art, always paying respect to those who’ve walked ahead. 

How would you say your music has evolved over the years?
Those things aren’t for me to say. Like always, I still feel like I know absolutely nothing every time I sit down to write a song. Exactly how I like it. 

If someone had never listened to The Beautiful Girls before, what song of yours would you recommend if they could only listen to one?
Impossible. I have no answer for this question.

You have just wrapped up a month-long tour of Europe! How was the tour?
It was great. TBG is a solo project with a revolving collective of musicians. We did the tour as a three piece. Myself, along with Paulie B on bass and Bobby Alu ( ex – Xavier Rudd ) on drums. No computers, no backing tracks no safety net. Whatever magic we could pull out each night was up to us. I consider myself a musician first and foremost, as opposed to an ‘entertainer’, so the important hing is the musical conversations we can spark up. I’m close with the guys and our styles work really well together. The European tour had some of my favourite onstage moments ever. 

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Can you share any particularly fond memories from on tour?
I had a Thai massage on my birthday in Amsterdam. When I put my shorts back on I got stung on the ass by a wasp. I decided I should smoke a joint to ease the pain and then eat some food. I smoked too much of the joint and greened out. I spent the rest of my birthday sweating, naked on my hotel room bed, with a sore butt cheek. Loved it. Woke up super hungry at about 2am though … 

You are bringing your Beautiful World tour to Australia at the end of this month. What are you most looking forward to while you are here? 
A Summer Tour of Australia is becoming a bit of a TBG tradition. I love the people and the weather and the beaches. I also love the fact that I am home and that I get to be with my family.

Who else will be joining you on tour, making up The Beautiful Girls collective? 
Same team as the European Tour. Myself, Paulie B ( bass ) and Bobby Alu ( drums and main support ). We are bring our sound guy over from Europe and we have the same Australian touring team as we’ve had forever.

For anyone heading to any of your Aussie shows, what can we expect from a Beautiful Girls concert? 
It changes night to night. But, the band is sounding as good as it ever has, maybe better. Maybe best. We play all the songs people know and recognise as well as some new tracks and new versions.

What do you like to do to unwind when you’re not touring or making music?
Family, yoga, surfing, cooking, watching the sky.

How does you feel when you look back on your career, with the countless music releases, and over ten years of touring? 
Over 15 years !. Feels good. We were having this talk the other night. For the last ten years I feel like I’ve been holding on by my fingertips. I wouldn’t even pick up an instrument when I wasn’t either writing or on stage. Now I’m practicing guitar every day and really enjoying the shows and the art of music itself. I’m only just getting started. All the best stuff is still to come. It feels like my apprenticeship is done and now I’ve got the job.

What can we expect next from The Beautiful Girls? More touring?
I’m not sure what happens next. More new music but I’m not sure what name I will release it under. Cosmos willing, I’m always going to be making music and being on tour somewhere in some way, shape or form.

If you could pick absolutely anyone to bring on tour with you, whom would you pick and why? (Dead or Alive)
My Dad died when I was just ten years old. I know he would be so proud of everything that’s happened and just to have him see me play would be all I would ever want.

What are your major goals or milestones for the future?
I just want o be a good father, a good friend, and a good person. They’re my only goals.

Finally, this is a paragraph dedicated to some quick discovery. Really corny, but for the fans, can you tell me your favorite album, artist, movie, place, drink, meal and person (living or dead) and some brief reasons why? Answer some or all please?
ALBUM – John Coltrane – A Love Supreme. The sound of the entire Universe inside a human heart.
ARTIST – Bukowski – answers only to himself and his muse. No concession to dumbing down his art to entertain the masses. A beacon in a sea of horse shit.
MOVIE – Girl On A Bridge – It’s a love story about finding your soul mate, knife throwing and suicide.
PLACE – The Ocean – after my dad died the ocean became by best friend and protector. I spent all my available time in it. It’s still where I go to connect back to real life and get away from all the noises and lies.
DRINK – Single Malt Scotch Whiskey, 3 rocks – smokier the better
PERSON – My son – my blood. My heart now lives outside my body

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Mat McHugh
is
The Beautiful Girls

What’s in a name? South Carolina singer-songwriter Sam Beam launched his international career under the “band name” Iron & Wine, while fellow South Carolina native, singer, songwriter and producer Chaz Bear travels as Toro Y Moi. The world knows Canadian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Afie Jurvanen far better as Bahamas, while, fresh out of Western Australia, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Perth’s Kevin Parker, has conquered the world in his guise as Tame Impala. Similarly, over on the east coast, fellow Australian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mat McHugh is and always has been The Beautiful Girls, though for some reason, that fact seems to have often proven oddly elusive to both fans and media alike.

“Even from the very early days,” recalls McHugh, “when it all first started, it was a toss of a coin whether the project would be under my name or something else. I’d just come back from overseas in 2001 and the earliest incarnation of the songs were completely four-tracked, back in the day of four- and eight-track tape machines – pre-computers – and everypart would be written – every drum fill, every bass line… I’ve always just heard fully-formed songs in my head, and pretty early on, I figured out the easiest way to communicate them to people was to record them myself. Those tapes ended up in the hands of a couple of friends who agreed to come and play some shows with me. Thatwas the beginning The Beautiful Girls.”

Within a year, McHugh had independently released two Beautiful Girls EPs – Morning Sun and Goodtimes – with the collective’s debut album, Learn Yourself, released in 2003. From its inception McHugh always operated The Beautiful Girls as a “collective” rather than a “band”, a project in which various players came and went depending on what the music he was writing at the time required.

“Writing the songs, I’d approach it like a playwright. I knew the ‘actors’ – the musicians – and I knew their strengths. So if I had a saxophone part, I’d know who I wanted to play that part and knew how they would play and I’d write for them. Similarly with drums and keyboards, I would write for that person, and then in an ideal world we’d all go out and perform that album, and line-ups would be different from album to album, from one tour to the next.”

Musically The Beautiful Girls has always been as diverse as the music that inspired him growing up.

“I grew up in a single-parent low-income suburb by the beach,” McHugh explains, “and, while my mother was working, I spent a lot of time being raised by the surf and skate community. I’d always be hearing hip hop and reggae and punk rock on the sound-systems at parties or blaring out of the back of cars on the way to the surf. Now that I look back on it, and even when I started writing my own music, all these sounds kind of mashed together into one combined soundtrack for me. When it was my turn to contribute musically, I only ever wanted to make a sound that was representative of the sound that I was immersed in growing up. A mash-up of allof those styles that I loved would be, I figured, the perfect way to express my past, my present, and might help create my future. There wasn’t really anyonedoing something similar locally when I started. I was fooling around with my acoustic songs by adding dub bass lines and hip hop grooves on a beat-up old drum kit in my garage. I was singing in a mellow style about my real feelings while all my other friends in bands were playing punk rock and screaming at the world. I still really love that stuff but I felt like my own musical expression lay elsewhere.’”

McHugh’s music was obviously a “mash-up” that struck a chord, not only in Australia but internationally. Two years after releasing its debut EP, The Beautiful Girls were touring Japan, Canada and the US. Throughout, McHugh kept writing, with another EP, Weight of the World, released in 2005, and a Brazilian musician, Felipe Kmiecik, joining the collective on keyboards, melodica and harmonica for the subsequent Australian tour. Kmiecik also featured on the second album, We’re Already Gone, released in July that year and reaching #19 on the ARIA Album Chart as well as being nominated for an ARIA award, a Triple J ‘J Award’, and scoring a coveted spot on Richard Kingsmill’s top 10 albums of the year list. Julia Stone was another guest vocalist on the album.

“As the music has evolved,” McHugh adds, “it’s become more about intensifying each of the elements. To this day, I still have the same blueprint. There’s always got to be this underpinning dubby rhythm and a certain propulsion to the groove. I try to keep the lyrics raw and real and to keep a punk rock spirit in the approach… All the elements, I feel, have just become more refined and better articulated over time. More life, more fire.”

The third album, Ziggurats, released in May 2007, reached #21 on the ARIA chart and included I Thought About You, which was nominated in the 2008 APRA Music Awards in the Blues & Roots Work of the Year category. Along the way, The Beautiful Girls continued playing stages across Japan, the UK, Europe, Brazil, the US and Canada as well as Australia. By now, however, it was also becoming increasingly obvious to McHugh that there was so much music pouring out of him that he needed to release a ‘solo’ album, which he duly did – Separatista! By 2010 The Beautiful Girls could look back on a dozen world tours in just eight years, no mean feat for any act but particularly impressive when you consider McHugh was doing it all independently – not a single major label or corporate sponsorship in sight!

Between Beautiful Girls releases – 2010’s Spooks and 2014’s Dancehall Days– and despite being forced off the road once again – there’d been a motorcycle accident in LA in 2008 – this time by a ruptured appendix, McHugh also managed to squeeze out a second solo album, Love Come Save Me, in April 2012. And in the past decade, every song sung, every note played, every beat struck on a Beautiful Girls record has all been down to Mat McHugh.

“I think what’s happened now,” he says, “is that I’ve reached a style that I can call my own. I feel like it really sounds like me and it’s honest and authentic. I can hear where I came from and how long it took me to get here,” McHugh reflects. “Along the way there’s been a lot of challenging both myself and the audience from one album to the next; a lot of restless experimentation to see how far I could stretch out. All I know is I feel super fortunate I’ve been given the support to be able to grow and get stronger over the years. In some weird way I feel like I’ve only, just now, reached the starting line. From the moment I first started writing music I’ve always felt that it’s important to fight for each moment – that it’s the only place where people, and songs, are truly alive. It’s only after time has passed – I’m learning – that all these moments, someday, they all add up to something.” 

So, what’s in a name? Mat McHugh was, is and always has been The Beautiful Girls, and there’s a lot more extraordinary music yet to come from the man behind the name.

MICHAEL SMITH

AMNPLIFY – DB