Led by Reg Mombassa and Peter O’Doherty, Mental As Anything will celebrate their 50th anniversary with a co-headline performance at St Kilda Festival.
It’s 50 years since art school students Reg Mombassa and Martin Plaza shirked their studies and formed the new wave rock band Mental As Anything, and 25 years since they played St Kilda Festival.
Mombassa – the stage name of songwriter and visual artist Chris O’Doherty – and his brother, Mentals bass player Peter O’Doherty, recently revived the band for a series of 50th anniversary shows.
Mental As Anything
- Where: St Kilda Festival
- When: Sunday 15 February, 3pm
- Tickets: free
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Mental As Anything will co-headline Big Festival Sunday at this year’s St Kilda Festival, alongside Jessica Mauboy and Sneaky Sound System. They’ll bring enduring hits such as Live It Up, If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?, The Nips Are Getting Bigger and Too Many Times to St Kilda foreshore on Sunday 15 February.
O’Doherty, who’s speaking to Beat over Zoom, joined Mental As Anything in 1977, a little over 12 months after Mombassa and Plaza started jamming. The band’s founders met when they were both students at Sydney’s Alexander Mackie College.
“My brother, Reg, had been on and off again an art student. It took him about seven or eight years to actually graduate,” O’Doherty says. “The last stint he did, he was playing a lot of music by that time, and he saw a guy called Martin Murphy playing with a couple of guys and he thought, ‘Oh that sounded pretty good.’ So they had a jam and then ended up forming a band. That would have been the very end of ’75.”
By 1976, Mombassa and Murphy, who adopted the stage name Martin Plaza, were joined by fellow art school students, drummer Dave Twohill (aka Bird) and bass player Steve Coburn. O’Doherty, who’s now a renowned painter, was still in high school in 1976. But he was hanging out with the art school crowd.
“In those days, it seemed to me like no one actually did very much work or ever seemed to be applying themselves to what they were there for,” he says. “But there was a lot of drinking going on, a lot of people going to pubs and talking, and a lot of forming of bands. So, Mental As Anything just came out of that.”
The newly formed band started playing shows in the pubs of Darlinghurst, Surry Hills and Kings Cross. O’Doherty was a regular at their early gigs. “And sometimes I jammed with them on guitar,” he says.
When Coburn went on holiday, O’Doherty was the obvious fill-in bass player. “This is in 1977, before they’d done any recording,” he says. “It took me about six months to actually buy my own bass after that because I wasn’t too sure if [Coburn] was coming back or not.”
Andrew “Greedy” Smith started jamming with the band around the same time as O’Doherty, and when Coburn chose not return, the band’s classic lineup was cemented.
“[Smith] was playing harmonica – only harmonica – and then eventually we thought maybe he could do something more interesting than just playing the harmonica,” O’Doherty says. “So we made him go out and buy a Farfisa organ, which changed the whole sound of the band quite a lot, added another whole big colour to the band.”
The lineup of Plaza, Mombassa, Twohill, Smith and O’Doherty stayed in place for the next 22 years, during which time they released the seminal albums Get Wet (1979), Cats & Dogs (1981) and Fundamental (1985). From Get Wet onwards, songwriting and lead vocal duties were split four ways, with Twohill the only non-writing member.
In the very early days, however, Mental As Anything was essentially a covers band.
“Everybody in the band seemed to have their own favourites,” O’Doherty says. “Martin loved 60s pop, and my brother loved blues and 60s psychedelia, and Bird, he loved country and rock and roll.
“We were doing covers of Booker T songs and surf instrumentals and old songs from the 30s and 40s and blues things and Elvis things. We just covered a lot of ground.”
O’Doherty left the band at the end of 1999, and Mombassa followed at the beginning of 2000. Plaza and Smith continued to lead Mental As Anything until Smith’s sudden death from a heart attack in 2019. Plaza and Twohill are absent from the 50th anniversary lineup for health reasons, but Twohill is slated to make a few guest appearances.
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They’ve added three new members to the lineup, including O’Doherty’s son Declan on drums.
“That was a fairly easy transition,” O’Doherty says. “We’ve got the core of the band, we’ve got the rhythm section, and we just needed a good keyboard player and a good singer/guitarist.”
Those roles have been filled by keyboardist Shannon Stitt and singer/guitarist Simon Rudston-Brown, who’ll sing lead vocals on Plaza’s songs such as The Nips Are Getting Bigger and If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?
The new Mentals lineup debuted in Manly in December, and they’re eyeing off a busy 2026, beginning with St Kilda Festival.
“There was a lot of trepidation in putting this together,” O’Doherty says. “Would it work? And is it something that we felt was authentic enough? I really wanted to make sure we honoured the legacy of what I think is the strong point of the Mentals, and that is some of the songs.”
The depth of the band’s catalogue will be on display at St Kilda Festival.
“We’re going back to Greedy songs and Martin songs and even some of the covers we did with with the Mentals, things like Working For The Man by Roy Orbison, (Just Like) Romeo and Juliet [by The Reflections]. But we also have some good album tracks in there that we’re pulling out and airing again. There is depth there, and it’s not hard to find lots of songs that people know.”
Mental As Anything will perform on day two of the 2026 St Kilda Festival, on Sunday 15 February. Full lineup here.
This article was made in partnership with St Kilda Festival.
