Living it up: the inside story of the band that soundtracked a decade

The new-wave, pop rock, art-school garage band was joyful and carefree. Cool, kitsch and offbeat. Australian, suburban, "serious about being unserious". They felt like an ad for Cherrylane clothing - all clashing colours and geometric patterns - come to life.

Mental as Anything, formed by a bunch of art school students in a Sydney pub in 1976, might best be summed up as chaotic hedonism.

They also lasted longer than the average eighties trend.

(Their hit, Live It Up, first released in 1985, more than three decades later topped the United Kingdom music charts thanks to Scottish football. The song was adopted by the Glasgow Rangers in 2020 as their unofficial anthem. Rival team Celtic also took on the song to goad the Rangers whenever they beat them. Hey, there you, with the sad face....)

Mental as Anything might be turning 50 this year but its music never really dated.

Their big hits - The Nips Are Getting Bigger, (1979), (Just Like) Romeo and Juliet, If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? (1980) Too Many Times (1981), Spirit Got Lost (1982) and Live It Up (1985) - were the soundtrack to a decade.

The band was also a bunch of workaholics, contrary to their playful image, as they progressed from playing in community halls and at parties to rocking out sweaty, beery, frenetic pub gigs. Then came the coveted appearances on Countdown, tours, awards, international success and a kind of reckoning around corporate music. They made 13 studio albums and had 25 top-40 hits in Australia.

"It was a bit of a blur," band member Peter O'Doherty said.

"We were young and had a lot of energy for it, which helps. We were often playing five, six times a week, sometimes twice a night.

"You don't kind of think about it while you're in it. It's only after you think, 'God, that was a lot of work'. We called one of our albums, Creatures of Leisure. There was a bit of irony in there. Because we weren't creatures of leisure, we were working like dogs."

Now, like their original Gen X fans, Mental as Anything is in its 50s, and celebrating with a live tour and a new documentary, called, Live It Up: The Mental as Anything Story.

Martin Fabinyi, who discovered the band playing pop covers every Monday night at The Unicorn Hotel in Paddington, co-produced the documentary.

"I just thought it was such a great story and it hadn't been told," he said.

Fabinyi created Regular Records just to release Mental as Anything's records.

"We were known as for quite a while as 'AM Radio', because we only operated on one band, which was Mental as Anything," he said, with a laugh.

But Regular records soon had a significant roster of talent including Icehouse and The Reels. Fabinyi's brother, Jeremy, became the manager for Mental as Anything.

All that history is told entertainingly in Live It Up: The Mental as Anything Story.

Like the band, the film can't help but make the audience smile, capturing not only the Mentals but, perhaps, also a more innocent time in Australia, especially around how music was made during the 1970s and 1980s.

Written and directed by Matt Walker, the doco took three years to come to fruition, with hundreds of hours of archival footage and photographs trawled through to bring their story to the big screen.

"Growing up in the '80s, Mental as Anything was a part of everyday suburban life," Walker said.

"As a kid, it seemed normal and correct that they existed, dressed in tin foil, singing unforgettable songs that made you happy. Later, you realise how great those songs were and how much of an impact they had.

"This film is a celebration of the magic of the Mentals and their extraordinary story and is well overdue for the big screen."

Mental as Anything, at its core, was Martin Plaza (guitar, vocals), Reg Mombassa (guitar, vocals), Andrew "Greedy" Smith (keyboard, harmonica, vocals), Peter O'Doherty (bass guitar, vocals) and Cooma-born Dave Twohill, aka Wayne DeLisle or "Bird" (drums).

Peter O'Doherty is Reg Mombassa's younger brother. He replaced Steve Coburn, son of the artist John Coburn, on bass in the band's early days. Reg, meanwhile, changed his name from Chris O'Doherty. The band loved creating pseudonyms. Peter O'Doherty was, in fact, the only member who retained his real name.

"We were always giving each other stupid names, just to entertain ourselves," he said.

"Reg had several names before he became Reg Mombassa. He'd also been Dorky Bladder and Brett Orlando," Peter said, with a laugh.

On the video call, Reg chimed in deadpan: "I could have got stuck with a worse name".

Peter almost went down a similar path.

"I had 'Ouzo Pork' [picked for a name] and we were about to go into print with the first album, Get Wet, and I just thought, 'Oh, I don't know if I can live with that'," Peter said.

"It was about the only real sensible decision I made in those years."

Reg said his name change was part of the band's sense of the ridiculous.

"It's been convenient, a bit like being a cartoon character you hide behind," he said.

"I know my father was a bit disappointed that I became famous with a false name. But I quite like 'Reg', it's just like a truck driver's name. I don't mind that.

"The Mombassa part was the [misspelt] name of a city in Africa with which I have nothing to do with and have never been to. So it's a completely ridiculous and random choice of a name really."

The name Mental as Anything nowadays might not pass muster but back then, it was just an expression about something being fantastic, bloody good, memorable.

"Occasionally, there would be people questioning the name, whether it was making fun of people with mental issues, but it was just that old Australian saying 'mental as anything' and we didn't even think up the name," Mombassa said.

Who actually came up with the band's name was "a bit murky" but most likely artist Paul Worstead who did the artwork for the Mentals' album covers and posters, some of which are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

"I think he had a list of five names and we said, 'Choose one of these for our band names' because he was making a poster for The Settlement, the place he ran in Redfern, which was like a community hall for the local kids. So he chose that name," Mombassa said.

The band had four songwriters in Plaza, Smith, Mombassa and O'Doherty and all were competitive about getting the song they had written released as a single. It made for a hotbed of creativity.

"It's been really good fun rehearsing and singing those songs again," Peter said.

"It's a really good songbook we're looking at, quite a deep well of songwriting. There were four main songwriters and Bird, the drummer, also contributed a couple of songs here and there. There's a lot of stuff in there, not just the singles, but the album tracks as well."

The Mentals also brought their art-school sensibility to the music videos they made, whether it was dressing up as Vikings on the beach for Berserk Warriors (with its references to ABBA) or walking through a classic suburb with real people in the background for He's Just No Good for You, capturing a slice of Australiana.

"There was always this artistic strand running through the imagery," Peter said.

It's, perhaps, a surprise to realise Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty haven't played with the band, until now, for more than 25 years.

As the Mentals' success grew and the music-making became more corporate, some disillusionment set in. Peter left first, in 1999, followed by Mombassa, in 2000. Dave Twohill left in 2004.

Peter said at the time they left there was a sense of "you can't break the family up" among the other band members.

"They were surprised and upset, but it wasn't acrimonious because we weren't trying to take the band name. We sort of resigned very slowly," Reg said.

"It was kind of weird seeing them play with new members, but we got used to that. We stayed in contact with the band and on good terms with them."

Greedy Smith and Martin Plaza continued with the band for many more years, with a rotating roster of other musicians. Plaza says in the film he felt a sense of loyalty to Smith, so kept playing, even after he was diagnosed with cancer. Plaza was a fine singer, with his deep, lilting voice, and the one all the girls loved, Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty said.

"Martin was the lead singer early on and had the most amazing voice in the band," Reg said.

"Mark Opitz, who produced Cold Chisel, once said to me, Martin was the best tenor singer in Australia. Martin could sing an Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison song effortlessly and they were very difficult songs, because they have a high register and a large vocal range."

The band came to a crashing halt in 2019, when Greedy Smith tragically died of a heart attack aged 63.

"It was a big shock because we all thought Greedy would last the longest," Reg said.

"He wasn't a big partyer. He liked to drink but he wasn't a heavy drinker. and he exercised regularly. So it was very shocking when Greedy passed away like that. No one expected that."

For the Mentals, art in all its forms was important. All of them were painters. Reg Mombassa went on to famously create surreal, gloriously vulgar, very Australian art for the Mambo clothing line. But he'd been creating art well before the Mentals.

"When we left 26 years ago, it was because partly we just wanted to have more time to do the art," Peter O'Doherty said.

"Reg has been doing it all the way through and showing big shows from the mid-70s onwards. He could have easily not been a musician and just been an exhibiting artist but he had the two things going.

"I sort of started a bit later, painting. The last few years of the Mentals I was taking my paints on the road, which extended my time in the Mentals in a way. When you're travelling, it gets pretty boring. You spend a lot of dead time travelling and being in motels and waiting around to do gigs.

"Reg would always be drawing and I'd be painting on the road anyway. Being an art school band that was another thing that kept the band intact in a way, it was our common factor that linked us all up. So if we all got sick of each other on the musical front, at least we could have another side we could talk about and do."

The brothers also formed the band Dog Trumpet, which they have played in longer than the Mentals.

Now, Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty are the only original members of the Mentals embarking on the six-date national tour in June to celebrate the band's 50^th anniversary.

They will be joined by Simon Rudston-Browne on guitar and vocals, Shannon Stitt on keyboards and vocals and Declan O'Doherty, Peter's son, on drums and vocals. Martin Plaza and Dave Twohill are not joining the tour due to health issues, but Twohill will be making some appearances with the band.

Reg and Peter say they were "pretty" nervous about playing the Mentals hits live again after a break of a quarter of a century and without Martin, Greedy and Dave on stage with them. But, the new, younger members, have sparked them all up.

The new Mentals have already played an all-ages gig in Manly and Reg, in typical Mombassa understatement, reckoned that it was a "pleasantly gratifying feeling" to know the band was still very much loved.

"There were lots of young faces there in the audience singing the songs....A lot of them probably had parents who played our music around the house," he said.

Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty say watching the documentary about the band, meanwhile, has been "fairly bizarre".

"It's quite strange having to confront your own previous life and history and the fact, for us, it pretty much stopped 25 years ago," Peter said.

"I think with the film, the good thing about it is it puts the spotlight back on the songs. Like any band, what you leave behind is the work, the art you made. I think we can be proud, we made some pretty good records. I think some of them were very odd or uneven. But there's a lot of stuff in there that still stands up."

And as for the Mentals turning 50?

"I still feel like I'm about 25, except that my body doesn't always tell me that," Peter said.