Mat McHugh
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Mat McHugh

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“The Beautiful Girls, right from the start, has been like a one-man show as far as making records and the music and the operating of the business is concerned,” he explains, “It has been as much like a singer-songwriter as you could get, except that I gathered together a bunch of friends and paid them to come on the road and play my songs.”

Mat has recently stepped out from under The Beautiful Girls’ name and started promoting himself as simply Mat McHugh, a gesture he describes as ‘taking ownership’ of his art.

“I’ve stripped everything back and I feel like I want to grow it again. I feel like I have a long career ahead of me – more ahead of me than there is behind. The way I look at it is that The Beautiful Girls were a great education for me, but I don’t think it will define my output as a musician. I think it was great, I learned a lot from it, and now I’m ready to really start properly.”

Starting properly means standing on his own two feet, according to Mat. The beloved Australian artist set off for his first ever solo tour towards the end of last year, supporting John Butler at gigs across the United States and Canada. Taking to the stage with little more than an acoustic guitar and a microphone, he claims to have reconnected with the essence of being a musician: speaking directly to an audience. Far from the 10,000 strong crowds The Beautiful Girls have played to in Australian and Japan, Mat faced rooms of 200 to 300 people each night on his first one-man tour – and that was on a good night.

“It’s different, yeah, but it’s like comparing apples and oranges. You get used to playing to certain size audience with a band, but this is more of a singer-songwriter thing, and it’s better suited to a smaller audience right now. I’ve played to fifty people on that tour, and it was one of the best shows of my life,” he says.

On his return from the States, Mat recorded a new EP called Go Don’t Stop – not the first record he made alone, but the first one to be released under his own name. He also welcomed his first son into the world. Now twelve weeks old, Kingston McHugh (named after Toots And The Maytals’ Funky Kingston) is one of the driving forces propelling Mat forwards as an artist.

“I went into fatherhood thinking I would avoid the cliché of going into fatherhood and writing all these gushy songs, which is just like that cliché of someone going on tour and then their next record is all about hotel rooms and isolation and shit. It’s one of those things I was aware of, but when it all happens to you, your perception becomes a bit sharper.

“I don’t want to have any stuff artistically that I feel is irrelevant, now. If I write a song, I want it to be as to the point as I can. I want to strip away all the artifice and all the bullshit and leave behind something that was a real indication of who I was and what I thought, rather than just going, ‘Look how clever I can be, look at the career I can have.’ I used to be interested in pushing in different directions and doing something different, but I don’t care about proving myself anymore, I just want to express myself… The search for meaning in life, that’s what interests me.”