WHEN The Beautiful Girls start playing at the Coffs Hotel in a couple of weeks time, expect the sound of early songs to be stripped back to their original bare bones.
It's been 15 years since Mat McHugh, Paulie Bromley and Paul Derricott released their debut eight-track extended play Morning Sun, followed quickly by the first studio album and the Learn Yourself tour is a tip of the cap to those early days that captured the Australian music scene's imagination.
McHugh said the Beautiful Girls, which at one stage stretched out to an eight-piece band, have decided to strip back the performances to their original essence - a striking three-piece sound which first brought the band to attention.
The lead singer did admit though that being back in a smaller group does bring an element of pressure.
"There's nowhere to hide. There's just three people, guitar, bass and drums and some vocals and you have a very limited palette and you have to make it interesting and make it come across live as that,” McHugh said.
"That's a challenge but I think it's a really healthy challenge and it's been good because of that.”
He did admit though that being the guitarist in the band has its advantages.
"I get nervous when I do solo shows when I'm walking on to the stage with just a guitar and myself, but with a band being a guitar player in a three-piece, there's so much of it that rides on the rhythm section so I feel like they're like a force field. I have to do something monumentally terrible for people to notice,” he said.
"I can chalk it up to improvisation.”
Celebrating the release of Morning Sun and Learn Yourself, McHugh said it's great to get back to the original essence of the music and concentrate on simply playing.
"We're all musicians first and foremost. We're definitely not pop stars. We didn't design music to be pop stars, we played music and made music because we're musicians,” McHugh said. "When you're a three piece you get to be that a lot, which is really satisfying.”
With band members focusing at different times on solo projects, many believed The Beautiful Girls had broken up but McHugh said that was never the case.
"We haven't really been apart. It's a funny misconception,” he said.
"I understand why it (the misconception) is there because we had not so great management for a year or so and I was releasing a lot of music under my own name and it was suggested that if I'm doing that we should do a last ever Beautiful Girls tour, to which I acquiesced but I wasn't really into it.
"Not long after that tour we were doing shows again.”
Lately the band has been playing in Europe, as well as a few shows in Western Australia and South Australia.
That means that by the time the trio hits the Coffs Hotel on January 6, those in the crowd can expect a tight show from extraordinarily talented musicians.
"The consensus from the crowd, and especially from up on stage, is that the band never sounded better,” McHugh said.
"It's because the experimentation has been done and satiated. The experience is there, the energy is there because we're all excited to be doing it so it kind of all comes together and we're feeling really good about it.
"All of the arrangements and the songs that we're doing all make a lot of sense and it gives us all a chance to really play.”