Mat McHugh Announces Extensive 'High Up!' Summer Tour In Early 2017

Veteran singer-songwriter Mat McHugh has been making every day count since a spinal injury in 2015 that left him worrying that he would never perform again.

Indeed, he's already knocked over one sizeable national tour this year — a rescheduled run to make up for shows he had to cancel in the wake of his incident and recovery — that took him to a wealth of major and regional centres between May and July, but that won't do for the man behind the moniker The Beautiful Girls; rather, he's just announced another extensive run of shows for January and February, dubbed the High Up! Summer Tour.

The sojourn takes its name from McHugh's so-titled song, which has just been given the remix treatment by acclaimed German electronic act The Yum Yums, along with another of the troubadour's tracks, Pocket Full Of Shells.

The latter of those tunes is taken from McHugh's 2012 LP Love Come Save Me, while the former originally appeared on McHugh's lauded 2015 full-length, Waves; fittingly, then, McHugh has selected a bunch of locations in which to play that includes some of the country's best-loved beachside venues.

“Growing up on the beach on the east coast of Oz, I was surrounded by the sounds of punk-rock, dub reggae, hip hop, soul, digital dancehall and the smell of fresh surfboard wax and coconut sunscreen," McHugh reminisced in a statement. "Every song I’ve ever written has those ingredients in its DNA. The culture and the sound are inseparable. And, of all the places I play music each year, none ever make as much sense to me as the coastline of Australia in summertime. The songs get to hang out at home for a while."

To that end, he'll be hitting the road (with good mate and long-time collaborator David Briceno in tow, for two-piece performance action) from early January to woo audiences in Bellingen, Gold Coast, Yamba, Sunshine Coast, Manly, Cronulla (twice), Hillarys, Fremantle, Yallingup, Rye, Torquay and St Kilda, where the tour wraps up in mid-February. 

Tickets for Mat McHugh's High Up! Summer Tour are on sale now through a variety of outlets.

For a full list of dates, venues and other booking information, see theGuide.