The Beautiful Girls To Celebrate First 20 Years With Greatest Hits Tour

To celebrate the first 20 years of The Beautiful Girls, Mat McHugh and co are heading out on tour. 

The band will be on the road from early January, playing through to the end of summer, all across the country.

The tour announcement comes with the news that McHugh has curated a greatest hits compilation entitled Seaside Highlife: Greatest Hits, Volume 1. 

The record will feature McHugh's favourite tracks from across all five albums and the band's debut EP, along with 2018's Beautiful World, and will be available to preorder from 24 October for a 5 December release.  

“Seaside Highlife is representative of a particular era of the band and a stepping-off point for the next one," McHugh explained. 

"That’s why we put 'Volume One' in the title. To top it off, the artwork has photos from right across The Beautiful Girls’ career. What I really wanted to do with a ‘best of’ is… I really wanted to create a good introduction to The Beautiful Girls for people and what better than to have it on vinyl? If you’ve never heard of the band and want to hear it at its highest quality and best sound ever, this is the way.”

The tour will see the band play the new album in full. 

“We’re basically going play the album – four sides, double vinyl – all of it, in order but we’ll also rotate some songs off other records every night, which will be really nice," he shared. 

"So we’re taking out an expanded six-piece lineup – guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, horn section. We’ve kept it back the past couple of years and done it as a three-piece but a lot of this music has a lot of detail and a lot of layers to it, from We’re Already Gone onwards – there are keyboards and horn sections – so I’m excited to put that whole arc from the beginning to the end of the record, to try and cover that in a live set.

“In putting this record together there hasn’t been a corner cut, artistically, and I’m approaching the tour in the same way. I want to really celebrate what’s been achieved and have a party before I begin the next volume. It’s gonna be like the Rolling Thunder Revue! It’s just going to be like this travelling circus through Australia in the summertime, which is completely befitting really. It’s exactly the environment for The Beautiful Girls. It’s the perfect way to spend summer.”

Tickets for the tour go on sale 24 October. Scroll down to theGuide for all the details.