An Interview With Mat McHugh

The Beautiful Girls have returned in 2010 with a fresh sound on ‘Spooks,’ crossing dub, dancehall and rock to rave-review garnering results. Max Easton spoke with front-man Mat McHugh back in March as they were putting the final touches to the album, as he writes in this retrospective.

Regardless of where you stand on the band, the Beautiful Girls are an act that should have earned your respect. Coming from surf-folk beginnings alongside artists like Jack Johnson and John Butler, they fast kicked that crowd and began to toy with a meaner sound; working their way through distorted guitars and reggae to the undeniably rock effort, ‘Ziggurats.’ That album not only climbed the charts as one of their most commercially successful outings, but brought with it world-wide fan backlash and abuse. But rather than try to please their audience, the Beautiful Girls have moved on again to ‘Spooks,’ delivering a sound that, yet again, was an entirely fresh take on their brand of music, venturing into the echo chambers and samples of dancehall and dub. 

We spoke with Beautiful Girls front-man Mat McHugh earlier this year about what was then an album in progress. The first single, ‘Don’t Wait’ had hit the airwaves and the typical simultaneous groans and cheers from opposite sides of the fanbase followed, lending a bit of mystery as to what ‘Spooks’ would end up sounding like; and Mat made all the assurances that more change was on the horizon.

“It’s radically different,” McHugh starts, “ ‘Ziggurats’ was tracked pretty traditionally, but this time everything’s gone more towards a hip-hop production…it’s not very purist at all. And I’m completely cool with that, I’ve never wanted to be a purist, I’m always trying to take something and use it for what it’s not designed to be used for. So I’d take a resonator and play reggae on it, something incongruous. Same with this [Spooks]; we’re a band, but I try to chop it up and mash it up, add some weird noises to it…because stuff that I get really excited about hearing is pretty current production stuff. Gorillaz, Danger Mouse…a bunch of stuff where they take technology as well as good playing and turn it into something pretty hip, which is how you gotta do it to take it into the future.”

The future of music is obviously something that’s been on McHugh’s mind. He speaks about music as someone who is less influenced by nostalgia as he is by the possibilities inherent in what’s to come. He’s developed a philosophy based on the steps that some of music’s greats took, without feeling these inspirations dominate his train of songwriting thought.

“If you think about it, back in the day, Hendrix and the Beatles and everyone, the shit that they did then was so futuristic. Now, you have bands trying to copy what they did, but we’ve got a whole bunch of different shit that we can do with the technology that we have available now.”

“It’s fine to be nostalgic, I’m that way too,” McHugh concedes, “but I like ‘Meet the Beatles’ and also ‘The White Album’…if they hadn’t moved where they moved, then you don’t get any artistic progress in any regard from any artist. I remember when ‘Kid A’ first came out and I thought ‘shit, these guys are brave.’ It was so out there, but I just love that record and so many people came around to loving it in time. The sad thing is that nowadays, there aren’t many bands who have the balls to do it. You can hear John Butler and Xavier or any of these people we were originally lapped in with to our chagrin…and they’re exactly the same. They’re all the same a long time down the road, so from where they started to where they are, maybe it’s a little more polished, but it’s still exactly the same. That happens in rock, it happens in hip-hop…and I don’t understand it. None of the people that I admire and grew up listening to are like that.”

While acts like Radiohead underwent drastic change to create albums that were admired in retrospect, at the time, reception could best be described as fanatic furor. Indeed, the Beautiful Girls are no strangers to that sensation, with stories of crowds booing them on their US ‘Ziggurats’ tour ringing all too clearly in McHugh’s mind. 

“It’s always a bit scary,” he says, “every single time we do something, there are people who applaud the courage to try something different, even if they don’t like every song - and the truth is I don’t like every single song on all our albums either, but I feel like I need to go through with the experiment - and then there’s another percentage of people who feel the right to drag you under the coals…screaming ‘what the fuck? I thought you were this.’ “

“We had a bunch of commercial fans because of ‘I Thought About You,’ and my whole agenda was to lose them and get out of that world because it’s a pretty shit world to be living in. So this one’s a bit more dub and dancehall…more for people who like music and less for people who like Thirsty Merc. There will be a bunch of people who rag on us for not having a commercial album. The same thing happened when we did ‘We’re Already Gone,’ because ‘Learn Yourself’ did so well, but I thought that album was too basic and cliché. So many people in the industry and people I knew just bagged me out because they thought it was committing career suicide cos it was reggae and weird. But we should be used to that by now…I’m just bracing myself at the moment. It’s part of the fucking procedure I think.”

Change is a theme that McHugh embraces musically, and with ‘Spooks’ now out on the shelves, selling well and satisfying, it’s one of the first times for the band that evolution hasn’t been followed by revolution. There’s no doubt that McHugh’s seeming fear of stagnation has informed some of the band’s best work and like some of music’s best, has seen them remain continuously relevant in all circles for their near decade long existence. However, he’s fully aware that commercially, there’s a degree of sacrifice that comes with his philosophy.

“In 2010, the smartest thing is to just be a product. Get your sound and keep rehashing it. It’s the McDonalds theory, where you know what you’re gonna get when you walk through those doors, and I understand that for the casual music listener…but I’m not a casual music listener and I can’t think that way.” 

“I admire someone who can do the same shit over and over again,” he continues, “because there’s a skill in that too which I just don’t have. For me though, you just gotta talk to who you are and do what makes you happy. You have to be willing at any stage to say, ‘that’s it for me, it’s time to get a job.’ I’ll never stop playing music, but I’ll always look back and know that I at least had the courage to try something that I liked. Like I said, I don’t like every song off every album, but I think they all lead to somewhere, and that’s more important than just trying to write a hit song every time.”

The Beautiful Girls are halfway through a massive and comprehensive Australian tour in support of ‘Spooks,’ with all dates detailed here.