The Beautiful Girls: More Than Skin Deep

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By T. Virgil Parker

There is a kind of purity that comes from knowing nothing at all, and a much more profound purity that comes from knowing enough to avoid the things that swallow so many of us. It matters whether your motivations are coming from yourself, or from what you think the world wants you to be. This has a direct bearing on what you give the world, and what you take from it. We often find ourselves doing things we don’t like in exchange for stuff that we don’t really want.
When we listen to music, are we sharing experience? Are we helping someone buy a Lexis? The question goes to the heart of the way Aussie band The Beautiful Girls serve up their uniquely pristine music. If most bands are trying to hack away at a diamond, The Beautiful Girls are planting small seeds here and there, and letting the fruit ripen as if by itself.
Talking with Mat McHugh is very much like listening to the music of his band. You don’t get the slightest clue that he has a huge following in Australia, and is beginning to make a serious splash here in the States. You wouldn’t guess that he has a new disk hitting the stands. It is obvious that his devotion to Roots music is the result of his unusual talent at getting to the core of meaning, and shaving away all the petty spirit-stifling distractions.
T.V.P.: A lot of our readers are from New York. It looks like New York had a profound effect on your vision as a musical artist.
Mat McHugh: I lived in New York for almost a year, back in ’99. I came there inspired by a singer/songwriter called Chris Whiteley. He used to perform in Washington Square Park and he used to play on the streets and I thought that was a pretty romantic notion.  I had lived in India for a year and when I moved to New York, I played wherever I could.
T.V.P.: It seems like you tuned in on a different New York than a lot of New Yorkers tune in on.
M.M: The inspiration for me playing music didn’t come from New York. If New York did anything it kind of gave me a kick in the pants. It made me realize that there were so many amazing artists out there struggling to be heard. If you’re going to get heard  in this world then you’re going to have to get your stuff together. It was motivational for the most part but t was also inspirational because it was such and amazing city. I get inspired by the vibe I experienced on the beach growing up. I try to be honest as to where I came from, rather than trying to manufacture some spirit or vibration or whatever.
T.V.P.: Most people who are trying to make an impression in the music industry try to take it as far over the top as they can go. You appear to be doing the exact opposite.
M.M.: I like spacey music. My favorite records are all Jazz and Blues records. Miles Davis, Coltrane, there’s spaces all over those records. They’re not filled up with studio stuff that will sound good compressed on MTV or VH1 or whatever. It’s actual music in conversational form, which is what music should be. It shouldn’t be a thick chunk of information just dumped on your head. It should stay a living and breathing thing, and that involves space and subtlety. I’m interested in those things.
T.V.P.: There’s a real purity to the sound, nothing extraneous. Does that require a lot of discipline on your part?
M.M.: It depends on what kind of aesthetic you get stuck in your head. I think you can go at things in certain ways. The tendency in our day and age is to make things huge. If there’s space, fill it up. It’s kind of like cramming a million ideas into one little space. There’s a million jump cuts in every video, like the attention span has been reduced to one second. It’s just all slammed in together and it doesn’t really sit with me too well. I like to just chill with things. It doesn’t require too much effort to just strip things back. You have to have the confidence to go with it and be prepared for people the say that there isn’t enough music. It’s nice to stand out because of the spaces in your music as opposed to other things, I guess.
T.V.P.: You spent some time in an ashram. Did it help you to get the internal space required to get at an open sound like that?
M.M. I think definitely, in a lot of ways.  I spent a lot time thinking about my motivations. I tried to get to the essence of things as closely as I could. What’s the reason I’m playing this song, or why am I even playing music? What am I trying to communicate, of myself, in the music. It instilled in me the idea of not just doing something for the sake of doing it.  I just wanted to do it for a purpose and a reason. It’s in there now, that approach to making music.
Like anything you do it forms your output creatively. That had a huge effect on myself and on whatever music I’m involved in. I would say.
T.V.P.: Do you feel that there’s a lot less authenticity out there now?
M.M: People who look for authenticity have to find other ways of looking for it. Because everything is such the industry now, it’s all packaged and processed and really easy to digest. It’s served to you on a plate, and if you don’t go looking you’ll just eat what you’re served. It’s like sitting down at the dinner table and having the same meal over and over again. You have to be thinking that there’s nice, tempting food out there and you just have to go and look for it. There’s a lot of people who react to one side of the music industry and go straight to the other. In our travels and in the bands we’ve played with and at the places we’ve played, I think that there’s a lot of authentic people and musicians. I don’t think they often make it to the top of the charts, but I like it that way too.
T.V.P.: At this point in the band’s history I’m guessing that the industry is talking to you, and I bet that the band is going to stay as independent as possible.
M.M.: Our first set of demos became an album in Australia and one of our songs immediately got heavy rotation nationally on the radio. We’ve had major labels dangling brass rings ever since the band started. They talk big deals and money and tell us we’re the next big thing. None of us have ever been interested. We have different agendas.  We’re happy with being independent because there’s nothing more fulfilling than being able to work, and employ your friends and have all the creative control that you require. All the things that are great about being independent are worth too much to throw away. It is a lot harder, but it’s all the more satisfying in the end.  We enjoy how we do things and it keeps us in a good enough mindset to keep us making music that means something.
T.V.P.: That’s unbelievably refreshing.
M.M.: I can’t look at it any other way. I’d be selling myself short, and I don’t think I’d be able to go to sleep at night, really. It depends on what value you put on what you do, as opposed to what you can get out of it.
T.V.P.: What is the band’s composition style like, is it more spontaneous, or is it more structured?
M.M.: The songs are all skeleton-structured, so they go from A to B, but how they do that depends on what goes down.  We try to get into the space of what the song’s trying to get across. That’s why it’s still really fun to play the songs. Every single night we inhabit the songs, so they change, they grow. It’s all living and breathing music. I’ve been in and around bands where it’s all very heavily structured, where every little pick attack on the guitar strings is all militantly observed. We’re not like that. If it feels good, it feels good. That’s the main criteria.
T.V.P.: I’m thinking about the song, Girl, Lately Things Have Been Changing on the new disk. It’s almost like a chemist or an engineer sat down to synthesize a complete fusion of Blues and Reggae. I have to wonder, did you just do that, or did you sit down and plot it out?
M.M.: That was the fastest one that we did. We were in the middle of recording and I was at home watching television and I came up with the riff, brought it in the next day, and within five minutes we banged out the song. The lyrics are just off the top of my head.
T.V.P.: That’s a melodica lead in there, right? A little piano that you blow into?
M.M. A lot of the horn lines on the record we play live with the melodica. It’s a sound we really like. There’s a lot of early dub records that use that. You can get melodies and set a kind of mood with that sound.
T.V.P.: You’re touring a lot in Australia and in the U.S. How different is the American audience these days.
M.M.: The only difference really, is the size. We’re pretty big in Australia right now. So, the only difference is the size, since we’re just beginning to catch on in the U.S. The people are surprisingly similar. It’s surprising how similar it is all around the world. It’s bizarre and refreshing at the same time. We go to Japan or Denmark and wonder what the people will be like and aside from a few cultural differences, most people’s hearts are the same. Of course the people we see are like-minded enough to get into our music. The weird thing is how similar people are.
T.V.P.: You can almost hear the sunlight pouring out of the CD. Do you think there’s a sense of local color in the music?
M.M.: Where we grew up is a pretty nice area, nice as in the environment. We grew up on the beach, not too different from Southern California or Hawaii. The bands we grew up around were all pretty Punky and pretty tough. To me those bands sounded like bands from elsewhere. I wanted to honestly represent what it felt like being from where we were from. We’ve tried to make that an underlying thing in our band. We’re not from an urban area that has drive-by shootings and such, we’re from the beach. The east coast of Australia is pretty nice. We didn’t want to represent ourselves in a false way.
T.V.P.: A lot of heavy bands seem to be going out of their way to be generic, limiting themselves to, it seems, the same three notes.
M.M.: There are only twelve notes. I don’t want to point a finger, but you can train yourself to any degree to play music. A lot of bands see a band on MTV who make a lot of money and get laid every night. They aspire to those things, and they use the music to get to those things. So they play the same kind of music. A lot of people make music as a means to an end. There’s a huge difference between doing that and making music because you have to and because the world gets to you. You have to have something to say back to the world. Listen to a generic metal band and go listen to Bob Dylan. You’ll see the difference. Without real inspiration there’s only so many notes you can play over and over again.
T.V.P.: Because being real is a strong motivation for you, how do you know that you’ve got it right.
M.M.: You know when you’ve got it wrong. I get an uneasy feeling if it isn’t right   I have a sound in my head and I know how it should be presented. If it isn’t that way, you keep on chipping away, if necessary until it’s all gone. We brought in a great percussionist and got him to play all this great stuff, and when it came time to mix it down, we were like ‘let’s take this out’ and so on. We were left with one little tiny conga hit every four bars, and it was just right. He was wondering to what happened to all his tracks. Then he really listened and it made sense. The best thing to do is leave your ego at the door. If you’re worried about people thinking you’re a great musician, you’re missing the point. The best stuff you can do at times is the most innocent, endearing stuff that won’t land you in Percussion Player Magazine.