In his own words, Mat McHugh of The Beautiful Girls is happy to not be dead.
And so he should, having survived a tour that involved a traffic accident that wrote-off their tour van and circling Sydney Airport for 90 minutes during severe turbulence.
“I feel like the tour's been really lucky,” Mat says. “There's been so much crazy weather and there's been some strange things happening, and we've seemed to skirt around it, so everywhere we've been we've timed it really well.”
When the spectre of death wasn't looming over them like a bad smell in a confined space, Mat says the recent 'Seaside Highlife' tour for The Beautiful Girls, in support of their latest album 'Seaside Highlife: Greatest Hits Vol. 1', went remarkably well.
“It's the best the band has by far ever sounded, it's insane,” Mat boasts.
“The Beautiful Girls is basically a collective of musicians that have been in a musical relationship for a long time. So when it comes to being in the studio, I make all the records myself and then I have these guys, who are such freaks, on speed-dial basically. I always try to put together the dream team.”
For the 'Seaside Highlife' album, Mat says he wanted to create a retrospective that snapshots The Beautiful Girls' catalogue of music that has been built over the past 17 years, rather than a typical 'greatest hits' album.
"I feel like we haven't had 'hits' hits, so it's kind of funny calling it that,” he says.
“I guess the inspiration for this was the Paul Kelly compilation he put out 'Songs From The South Vol. 1', that's why ours is a volume one. It's more of a collection gathering a bunch of tracks together to give a good perspective on what the band is about.”
Discussing the longevity of The Beautiful Girls, Mat suggests the reason they've endured is because he and the band have avoided the trap of major labels, instead often running at deliberate tangents to the norm.
“I think that a lot of artists with a lot of leverage behind them as far as major label budgets and stuff, they can almost dictate a narrative of what's popular just by buying into that, and we've never run that race,” he says.
"We're always off to the side doing our own thing, unconcerned about what's current and trendy, and I feel like people are catching up to what we've been doing, in a weird way.”
With the 'Seaside Highlife' tour wrapping at the end of February, the next moves for The Beautiful Girls include heading to Dashville in the Hunter Valley for The Gum Ball in April.
“Anything that's grassroots and music-based and full of love, I'm a big supporter of,” Mat says of the festival.
“You can really smell a corporate rat a long way away; I'll take the corporate festival money any day of the week, but there's something special about being in a place that's created by people who really care, and this festival is one of those.”
