How A Reality Check From His Partner Encouraged Mat McHugh To Celebrate The Beautiful Girls' Milestones

Fifteen years is an eternity in the modern music industry and especially in the Australian music industry. For a band that plays a style of music that's a fair old hop, skip and a jump from the mainstream, to last this long in this industry in this country is a minor miracle. But Sydney-based indie/pop/reggae outfit The Beautiful Girls have done it, although pragmatic main man Mat McHugh, speaking from his home on Sydney's northern beaches, is very much taking the milestone in his stride.

"I'm not really that much of a nostalgic person, so I dunno," he states in no-nonsense fashion, when asked how it feels when someone says his band has been around for a decade and a half. "Sometimes I think it's impressive and other days I think, 'Who gives a shit?' 

"What I do think is funny, is that as soon as you put a number on it it becomes a thing and people are like, 'Oh, man, 15 years! That's crazy! You guys have been around so long.' But then I think John Butler and Silverchair and Xavier Rudd and Cat Empire - the list goes on; all those guys have been around far longer than us."

While very practical about it in this manner, McHugh also realises that it is something he needs to get used to and ultimately embrace, celebrate even, as the band are heading off on a massive tour of the country in late November to mark the occasion. He is now coming around to the idea as the tour approaches with the aid of someone very special to him.

"It's a weird milestone because traditionally you think of the ten-year thing or the 20-year thing," he says. "We kinda did something around the ten-year thing, but not being nostalgic I kinda shy away from that sort of thing. The idea was floated and would I consider doing it? I was initially against it again, but my partner was like, 'Why don't you just pull your head in? Stop thinking about yourself'.

"So I started to realise that it's actually a happy occasion. Any marking of a milestone in times like this is a fun thing."

When McHugh first formed the band back in 2002, however, he reveals, "I had no aspiration at all to do music as a career. I just kind of did it for fun on the weekends, just as a reason to have music at house parties we were having. It was just like, 'Hey, let's start a band! We'll just call it some funny name and everyone will listen to it, and we can travel around'."

The Beautiful Girls will try to cover as much of their illustrious back catalogue as possible during these upcoming live sets, although McHugh admits, "It's hard because there's a lot of songs, but I think we'll do more of the first two, Morning Sun [2002, EP] and Learn Yourself [2003, debut album]. I don't think we're the kind of band that will just play those records in chronological order, track order or anything. I think it'll be based on the feeling of the night, but I think we'll focus on those two and celebrate them.

"Then it'll be songs from all the rest of the records that people are likely to know, and then whatever else we feel like chucking in. Whittling it down is the hard part - unless we do four-hour sets," he laughs.

Although they're 15 years into their career, the band are far from done. In fact McHugh is currently hard at work on some new material. "There's a bunch of songs that are getting close to being finished and the plan is to get something out there next year," McHugh reveals.