If you had been asked to predict what the last 12 months would have in store for The Beautiful Girls frontman Mat McHugh, it’s likely you wouldn’t have come close.

Despite him (understandably) not wanting to focus on being “the sick guy”, it’s hard to gloss over the almost crippling spinal injury McHugh faced last October, three shows into a tour for his solo album, Waves.

“It was a pretty stressful year,” he says. “I’d made two records sitting in a freezing garage by myself within a 12-month span, kinda stressing about budgets and getting it made and, you know, giving it away for free, paying rent and not eating and drinking very healthy. Just not really looking after myself, in a nutshell. I had a fracture in a vertebrae in my neck, the fracture got a bit worse and then one of my discs just basically exploded and pressed on my spinal cord and the nerves to one of my arms.

“I couldn’t use my arm and lost strength in both arms. I’ve got a five-year-old son, I couldn’t pick him up, I couldn’t go surfing – I couldn’t do anything really. My main concern was just getting back to having a normal life. I couldn’t care less if I ever played music again. On the upside, the advice was to get surgery and I didn’t do that. Everything changed in my diet, I just worked hard and did a lot of stretching and physical therapy and I’m feeling pretty good. In other ways, I’m feeling healthier and better than I have in a long time. Like anyone who has an injury or sickness or whatever that they come back from, it can be a blessing, I think, but it was probably the hardest six months of my life.”

It didn’t take long once McHugh was on the mend for his focus to move to shows again. Having played Beautiful Girls gigs over summer with limited arm mobility, touring Waves was never far from his mind – as was a reinvigorated appreciation for life on the road.

“That was kind of the frustration, that it’s my favourite record that I’ve ever done and I didn’t get to tour it,” he says. “So that motivation was there for sure. It makes you just appreciate everything. If you do every single thing you do with the mindset that it could be the last time you ever do it, then you’re going to do it the best you can and get the most out of it.”

At face value, all this positivity and talk of living like there’s no tomorrow may sound like McHugh is preaching gratitude and his new outlook on life, but he communicates it so naturally that it’s clearly just in his nature. It’s hard for anyone speaking with him not to find motivation in his sincerity – even more so now that he’s making and playing the kind of music he wants, and not what fans expect. This has led to a few encounters with unreceptive audience members after gigs, leaving McHugh irked. The night before our chat, he responded to a Facebook comment asking if he “has a bass player” for his shows yet.

“Oh man, people have a narrow perception of things,” he says. “I understand that people don’t get it sometimes – it depends how far along the line of your musical evolution you are. What kind of pisses me off is people saying stupid stuff like that. It’s like their opinion is, ‘Well, in this style of music, this has to happen.’ Well, yeah, maybe it has to happen for you,”he laughs, “but that’s cool, so either start your own band or find a band that ticks all those boxes.”

Despite receiving a few unsavoury remarks, McHugh has had an overwhelming amount of support worldwide. Waves has been downloaded more than 100,000 times since its release in October, and many opted to pay for the record, despite it being free.

“The crazy thing is when I hurt myself and gave it away, I was going to pay rent off the touring money and people all of a sudden just started buying it, I think as an act of support,” McHugh says. “I was pretty emotionally and physically fragile and to see that wascrazy. On top of it, I don’t think it’s even had a single review in any kind of press anywhere. There hasn’t been any significant radio play. On a purely musical and connection level, having people come to it on their own choice, I feel like it’s a super honest connection. There’s no smoke and mirrors, there’s no hype, and for me that’s the greatest thing. As pure as it gets, really.”

In line with making the most of his time, McHugh isn’t chilling on his days off. When he’s not on the road, he’s in the studio, and what’s coming next may surprise Beautiful Girls fans.

“I’m doing an electronic collaborative album that is mash-ups of a lot of the Waves tracks as well as some of my other stuff and new stuff with some bigger electronic artists out of Berlin. That’s going to be coming out pretty soon, so I’m going to go over and tour that … The Beautiful Girls is there, but for me, this is freedom at the moment. There’s no real skeletons in the closet, I don’t have to adhere to some thing that people think I am.

“The good thing about doing Mat McHugh shows is I don’t really have that anchor around my leg, so I can do ’em however I see fit, make those decisions purely artistically and not so much worrying about getting punched in the face after the show by some angry people.

“At the moment, there’s two of us onstage – we don’t have any computers but we have all our songs chopped up and mashed up and we have a couple really clunky old samplers and heavy analogue bass synth and guitar with crazy effects. We’re basically seeing how much grooving and how much sound we can make out of two people.”

Waves is out now independently and available here; plus Mat McHugh plays Newtown Social Club on Saturday June 25, and also The Brass Monkey on Friday June 24 and Sunday June 26.

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