Mat McHugh; The Interview

14 January 2009 by Max Easton

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Seperatista!

After seven years of fronting Sydney band, The Beautiful Girls, singer-songwriter Mat McHugh recently released his debut solo effort, Seperatista! to critical acclaim. Ahead of his first national tour of the album, Soulshine’s Max Easton catches up for a chat about sound, music and listeners.

Mat McHugh is a man who's constantly breaking expectations. As the front-man for the Beautiful Girls, he has been directly responsible for the dramatic change of sound on each of their albums. Whether it was Blues, Surf-folk, Reggae or Rock he has a tendency to polarise his fan-base as a side-effect of his exploration of the band's music.

"That perverse part of me enjoys pissing people off and having them annoyed, having them going, 'Stop fucking with me!' and I like that. You should get fucked with from time to time," he says candidly. "It might make you question why you listen to music. Are you listening because you're into a style, because it fits into your lifestyle and your image of yourself, or are you actually into the music and what the musician is saying?"

Audiences were so affected by the tour following the release of Ziggurats that their entire demographic changed. The release of the amped up rock record brought a whole stack of commercial success, but seemed to elicit a feeling of betrayal of sorts from die-hard fans.

"We've had some interesting shit with the Ziggurats thing. I think every record we do is a bit of a social experiment in a weird way. They're always different, and people always hate them to begin with and then slowly come around. When we did Ziggurats, it happened in Australia and it happened in America, but when we toured over there we started to do good in the States and have packed houses. So we'd start out with Learn Yourself stuff and some acoustic stuff and they'd love it, but then we started to get more current and move into more rock and they started to switch off 'cause they just weren't there for that."

"I was really adamant about the value of those songs. I think every night I was fighting myself saying, 'Look you guys, these songs are coming from the same people, the same hearts, they're just dressed in different clothes. They're still just as meaningful to us as the other songs.' Just because one song's on an acoustic guitar instead of an electric guitar doesn't make it any more earnest or truthful,and the Americans would just start booing and shit. There's no more soul in a guitar than there is in a synthesizer or anything, it's from the person who's making it. Just open your minds a little bit."

So with this in mind, where does it all come from? What makes Mat McHugh's music so prone to change and evolution?

"It really boils down to sitting down at a guitar and if a song has a similar chord pattern or lyric or theme, I just won't pursue the idea. You sit down at a guitar and start playing something that you're familiar with or have played before; at that instant I'll nip it in the bud and go 'Nah, I don't want to play that song, this has been done.' But that's a blessing and a curse. It seems like guys that get massive go 'This sounds like something I've done before, cool, awesome [laughs.]' I admire that in a weird way too, someone like John Butler or whoever just do their thing, they hone it and hone it, trim the fat from it. I don't think I'm that kinda person, I get restless kinda easy which I guess explains the mix of styles that I' always been interested in. I love mellow folk music, but if I'e made an entire record of that without any groove or anything, I just get super-depressed. I couldn't make a whole reggae record, or a blues record even though I love that stuff to death, I just couldn't do that one thing all the time 'cause it feels like I'm working in a factory."

He writes with a rhythm in mind, starting off by fooling around on guitar before following the bass and drums and wrapping the rest of songs around that. So it seems from speaking to him that genre isn't the first thing on his mind: "I try to not even pay attention to what genre it is, it's pretty much 'that's a dope rhythm!' then I try to do something else. I find it completely natural to do that, I have a bit of a hard time understanding how people stick to the same thing all the time 'cause they're so strong in their genre. I think 'How do you do that? Is that the only rhythm that comes to you, or the only thing you have?' Not that it's bad, but I struggle to see how you can get endlessly inspired by slight variations. I reckon you need to stretch out a little bit."

And stretch out is exactly what he's done with Seperatista! Whilst taking obvious cues from early Beautiful Girls records like Morning Sun and Learn Yourself (the ancient, much bootlegged TBG favourite, "Numb" makes it onto this album,) he branches out again through a whole range of styles and grooves mashed in with the acoustic surf-feel he's classically been known for. The question then, must be asked as to how different this was from the experience of writing a Beautiful Girls album.

"It was super easy this time. The funny thing with Ziggurats was that if something was easy to play, or sing, or whatever, I felt like it was lame. It was really 'We gotta push it a bit and make it hard for ourselves.' But this time it was all really, really easy; all the vocals were recorded first take and we recorded it really quick, then it dawned on me that that's probably the way it should be. It should be easy, enjoyable and you should be able to put yourself in it without worrying how to show people how good you can be. It's about communicating an emotion, or a feeling or a vibe. It's taking your own vibe as a human and presenting that musically to people."

"The weird thing is for me, the solo record is no different to how a Beautiful Girls record is done. When I write songs at the demo stage, they're finished. The bass-lines are done, horn-lines, whatever, and it's all 'Here you go, you guys learn this, let's play it.' So it'll be under a name the Beautiful Girls, and this one just had my name on the cover. I had so many questions going through my head when I did it. Like 'Uh, should I just get the other guys to play on it and make it a Beautiful Girls record or should I even bother doing it?' I dunno, I like the songs, but so many questions, I was gonna record overseas and I didn't know whether to do that, and I ended up deciding against it. It's just a really strange thing to do, like it feels like I've been playing music forever, but I was a bit nervous about it for some weird reason. I'd always been reluctant to do anything under my name, 'cause I think singer-songwriters get this thing where they go all megalomaniacal and think they're jesus or something, you know, they put it under their own name and all of a sudden they're all 'check me out, check me out'.[chuckles]"

For a solo record, Seperatista! still has that big band feel to it. With the usual ensemble of bass and drums, as well as hints of melodica and horns, Seperatista! seemed to be less of a solo album and more of a side-project. The album isn't as much of a departure from the Beautiful Girls, as it is a compliment to the band, the solo project allowing the Beautiful Girls to keep working on that new sound, while Mat explores something else.

"I love having a band and always wanted to become a singer-songwriter and be recognized for one, but I always wanted to be surrounded by a band, maybe like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds or Springsteen and the E-Street Band, where the songwriter writes the songs but the band is supremely instrumental in making the thing happen, so I don't want it to be me on stage being a sensitive singer-songwriter, I want to say 'these are the songs I wrote, we're coming out and this band is gonna play these songs.' I'm trying to navigate the waters as an independent musician on how I can do things and keep them fresh creatively, and interesting for people who come out to the shows. I don't want it to be exactly the same every time, for myself or for anyone else. I just want it to be fun, new and exciting."

"Nothing I've done hasn't been from the heart regardless of what sound it is, so I think we'll see what happens with this one. It'll be easier for people to take because it's not a million miles from what people have heard before. When Learn Yourself came out, I felt like it was so of its time. I felt like there were some really Jack Johnson moments and acoustic surf shit where I cringe a little bit, there's some good songs, but it's like releasing a record in the 90s in Seattle -- you do all the stylistic trademarks of that genre, and in hindsight I go 'oh fuck, I can see why people bagged us for being Jack Johnson this or Ben Harper that or whatever.' With this one, it's acoustic and it's mellow but I don't think it sounds like anyone else. I feel like it's my own thing and it's taken a while to get to that point. To have that as a debut solo record is great, because this is me, this is my turf and this is what I'm doing."

Expectations are placed on this record just as much as they were for every album he's been a part of prior to this and it seems (from overwhelming positivity towards the record critically) that he's pleasing more people than he's turning off.

"People just expect something of you as a musician. When you hear an artist, you snapshot what you think about them into a little 5 second thing. You hear Damien Rice and you go 'that's what Damien Rice is,' and forever they just stay there. Or you hear Slayer and go 'that's what Slayer is.' So anyone who's shifting around within that runs the risk of pissing someone off. Gone are the days of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin or that shit where you're allowed to do that. There's not many people asides from maybe Radiohead who can sort of get away with it nowadays."

This commerciality seems to be something Mat's trying to avoid. He speaks of big bands not with jealousy or bitterness, but with a deep acceptance of what you've got to do to sell out stadiums and rake in the cash. He's happy to play music his own way, letting the tunes follow the muse, but he's all too aware of the direction he could have taken.

"With music these days, it seems to be a super successful musician you have to build up a brand or something, like Jack Johnson, John Butler or Kings of Leon who just do the same shit, but they do it good. They do their thing and they do it good and they keep doing it over and over. As a result, the audience gets bigger and bigger (and maybe even dumber and dumber). It becomes more and more watered down and I find that shit so boring, I find it real hard to play that game; I've never tried to make two records sound the same and have people know what they're gonna get. I just feel like I'm copping out. So I've wanted to set myself up in a position where I can have a thing that people expect to change a bit and be happy to go with that. I understand that it won't be in the same sphere as Kings of Leon, 'cause I know you have to dumb your shit down and repeat yourself a bit to become commercially successful, so I'm trying to go down the middle -- pay the bills, but keep it interesting."

"I'm good at being pretty chilled and it's taken a lot of time for me to realize to stop running from that. This is what I do, and this is how I like to do it, yet I still try to mix it up within that. It's a good place to be at mentally and as a human being, aside from being a musician, I just feel pretty comfortable with it all. I'm looking at the tour and am really excited, because I love the songs and all the songs that we play I really love playing them."

With Mat in his comfort zone, a fantastic debut solo record under his belt and his sights on the country for the upcoming tour, where does his focus lie?

"I'm definitely going to favour the solo thing for awhile; might even do another solo record before I do more of the Beautiful Girls. You know, the Beautiful Girls has been a big, big chunk of my life for the last seven years or whatever, and everything you can do in a band despite being the biggest band in the country (which we almost did as far as playing shows and festivals) gets to the point where I go 'OK, that's cool, I'm happy with where it is.' I have some songs ready for The Beautiful Girls, but I don't have a really strong impetus to do it. I love the guys and I love the band, I'm just interested in doing something else for a little bit to see how that goes, get back to the start again and try to build it up from zero. With all the shit, like taking the about faces and U-turns, and doing what people didn�t expect us to do as a band, I've sort of come back to what it was like when TBG were started."

Recently crashing his bike in the States, McHugh spent months in a hospital bed unable to play guitar or do very much at all while he recovered. As a way of getting back into the groove of things, Mat McHugh played a few small shows at a mate's newly opened bar in Manly in late December.

"[It was a way] to get people to become aware of the bar and just have fun and start playing again. I thought it'd be pretty good to just play a couple of shows and not announce them. [A bunch of people] came down and hung out and it was really mellow, which was really cool 'cause it's what I wanted, you know. It was a lot better than: 'here's some shows, they better be good, what are we gonna get compared to the Beautiful Girls show,' and I loved it, it was completely going back to when TBG started."

"It's really hard to describe without sounding like I'm ungrateful for what's happened to TBG, but as the band gets bigger it becomes such a big show, with lights and that, there's a lot of people in the crowd and you lose that connection. Sometimes there'll be a couple of thousand people in the crowd and there'll be no connection for me anyway, it's just a bunch of people getting drunk and dancing around, but you play a small show like the ones at Safety Wolf and there's only like 50 people and you go home buzzing from it. Where it's just about music, there are just people there to listen to music, and everyone goes home feelin the same way and that�s just how Beautiful Girls shows used to feel."

Mat McHugh takes the album and his band The Blackbird across the country in January, February and March, encompassing capital cities and rural areas as he drags around his unique brand of music for the comfort of your ears. Seperatista! is out now on Shock Records, with the tour running through the country for the following dates:

Thursday 5th Feb- The Vanguard- NEWTOWN, NSW

Friday 6th Feb- The Vanguard- NEWTOWN, NSW

Saturday 7th Feb- Heritage Hotel- BULLI, NSW

Sunday 8th Feb- Brass Monkey- CRONULLA, NSW

Thursday 12th Feb- The Toff in Town- MELBOURNE

Friday 13th Feb- Rubys Lounge- BELGRAVE, VIC

Saturday 14th Feb- The Palais- HEPBURN SPRINGS, VIC

Thursday 19th Feb- Settlers Tavern- MARGERET RIVER, WA

Friday 20th Feb- Fly By Night- FREMANTLE

Saturday 21st Feb- At the Beach, Scarborough Amphitheatre, WA

Sunday 22nd Feb- The Spiegeltent, Garden of Unearthly Delights- ADELAIDE

Thursday 5th Mar- The Zoo- BRISBANE