Mental As Anything are an Australian new wave and pop rock band that formed in Sydney in 1976. Its most popular line-up (which lasted from 1977 to 1999, and recorded all of its charting singles and albums) was Martin Plaza (birth name Martin Murphy) on vocals and guitar; Reg Mombassa (birth name Christopher O'Doherty) on lead guitar and vocals; his brother Peter "Yoga Dog" O'Doherty on bass guitar and vocals; Wayne de Lisle (birth name David Twohill) on drums; and Andrew "Greedy" Smith on vocals, keyboards and harmonica. The group's original hit songs were generated by Mombassa, O'Doherty, Plaza and Smith, either individually or collectively; and it also had success on the Australian charts with covers of songs by Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Wreckless Eric.
Their top ten Australian singles are "If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?" and "Too Many Times" (both from 1981), "Live It Up" (1985) and "Rock and Roll Music" (1988).Australian chart peaks: Top 100 (Kent Music Report) peaks to 12 June 1988: N.B. The Kent Report chart was licensed by ARIA between mid-1983 and 12 June 1988. Top 50 (ARIA) peaks from 13 June 1988: "Baby You're Wild" (ARIA) peak: Top 100 (ARIA) peaks from January 1990 to December 2010: "Overwhelmed" (ARIA) peak: "Whole Wide World" (ARIA) peak: N.B. The HP column displays the highest peak reached. Internationally, "Too Many Times" made the Canadian top 40 in 1982, and "Live It Up" peaked at No. 3 in the UK, No. 4 in Norway, and No. 6 in Germany, after it featured in the 1986 Australian film Crocodile Dundee.
All of the early members are visual artists and had combined studio displays, some had solo studio displays, with Mombassa's artwork also used as designs by the Mambo clothing company. The majority of the group's record covers, posters and video clips were designed and created by the band members or their art school contemporaries. On 27 August 2009, Mental As Anything was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame alongside Kev Carmody, The Dingoes, Little Pattie and John Paul Young. Most of the original group members left during the 2000s, and Andrew "Greedy" Smith—the only original band member still touring with Mental As Anything—died on 2 December 2019, aged 63, after a heart attack. This effectively ended the band's activies at that time, and Mental As Anything was neither a recording or performing unit from the end of 2019 to late 2025. However, various surviving group members from the classic 1977-2000 era participated in interviews for a book-length study of the group and an upcoming film documentary.
Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty (who had both left the group in 2000) reformed Mental As Anything as of late 2025. The revived group played a free warm-up gig in December 2025, the appeared at the St Kilda Music Festival on Sunday 15 February 2026.They will embark on a 50th Anniversary Tour beginning in April 2026 at Byron Bay Blues Festival. Mombassa and O'Doherty are the only original group members in this reformation, although original drummer David Twohill is expected to make a few selected guest appearances.
Style Mental As Anything's music is characterised by poppy, accessible and well-crafted melodies and lyrics, and their work showcases an ironic, satirical and self-deprecating sense of humour. They are a typically "Australian" rock group, with their music and their satirical, good-time image deeply rooted in the milieu of Australian suburbia, although two key members (the O'Doherty brothers) were in fact immigrants from New Zealand. The group's art school background and visual design skills also made them pioneers of the music video form in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and their videos rank as some of the funniest and most imaginative produced in Australia at that time.
History 1976–1979: Formation and early years The group formed at an art school in Sydney in 1976 when Martin Murphy (Martin Plaza) met fellow student, New Zealand-born Chris O'Doherty (Reg Mombassa) at Alexander Mackie College at East Sydney Technical College, now known as the National Art School. The duo was soon jamming in guitarist and vocalist O'Doherty's Darlinghurst flat. Murphy, on guitar and vocals, brought in his college friend Steve Coburn (son of artist, John Coburn) on bass guitar, while another student, David Twohill (Wayne de Lisle), was recruited on drums.
They were first billed as Mental as Anything on 14 May 1976, after some early party appearances without a name. Prior to the gig at a Chippendale Settlement Dance, they provided the promoter, Paul Worstead, with a list of possible names. Worstead chose Mental As Anything—which was how fellow artist Ken Bolton described them after one of their earlier party performances—and designed an accompanying poster featuring an image of a truck hauling a giant cabbage. The phrase "mental as anything" is late 1970s Australian slang for being crazy, outlandish, having extreme fun, or 'going off'.
Late in 1976, another fellow East Sydney Tech student, Andrew Smith (Greedy Smith) made guest appearances with the band on harmonica while still a member of another band, and by year's end Smith had joined full-time and he also played keyboards. Coburn left the fledgling band in 1977 and Mombassa's younger brother Peter O'Doherty joined on bass guitar completing the "classic" line-up. The first performance of the new line-up was at the National Art School's Cell Block Theatre on 17 August, the day news broke in Australia of the death of Elvis Presley. They played numerous Elvis covers and two original songs, together with their usual set of Blues, Rockabilly, Country and 1960s covers including Roy Orbison and The Monkees. The band built up a live following in Sydney with their residencies at the Unicorn Hotel in inner-city Paddington on Mondays and the Civic Hotel in the CBD on Thursdays. At the Unicorn Hotel, their stage was on top of the pool table to free up floor space.
The band was spotted by film-makers Cameron Allen and Martin Fabinyi, who founded their own independent record label, Regular Records, in September 1978 to record and release the group's music. Fabinyi's brother Jeremy Fabinyi became Mental As Anything's manager. Their debut release was a three-track EP, Mental As Anything Plays at Your Party, in December. It featured all original tracks, and is their only release on which Plaza and Mombassa were credited by their original names, Martin Murphy and Chris O'Doherty, respectively. Sydney radio station Double Jay (now Triple J), gave airplay to its most popular track, "The Nips Are Getting Bigger", a drinking song written by Plaza, which showed a stylistic debt to British new wave. Soon after the EP's release, the Australian arm of Festival Records took over distribution of Regular Records and released a remix of "The Nips Are Getting Bigger" as a single in July 1979. This was followed on 1 November by the band's debut album, Get Wet, with Allen producing. With support from nationwide TV pop show Countdown, "The Nips Are Getting Bigger" became the group's first Australian Kent Music Report top 20 hit, and also made No. 1 on the UK alternative charts when released there by Virgin Records and remains one of the group's most popular songs. Get Wet achieved a top 20 position on the Kent Music Report albums chart.
By the time of the LP's release in November, all but Peter O'Doherty had adopted a pseudonym: Chris O'Doherty became Reg Mombassa; Murphy became Martin Plaza—his name copied from the title of the pedestrian plaza in central Sydney, also known as Martin Place; Smith's voracious appetite saw him dubbed "Greedy"; and Twohill became Wayne "Bird" Delisle. (Starting in 1995, Twohill was later billed under his birth name). Shortly before the names had been settled, Peter O'Doherty was using the pseudonym Ouzo Pork, but he elected to keep his birth name for professional purposes. His nickname, as used in interviews, was Yoga Dog, but he was never billed as such. The band completed their first national tour in late 1979, supporting British rockers Rockpile, with members Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe.
1980–1984: Success in Australia Mental As Anything's next two singles—Plaza's "Possible Theme for a Future TV Drama Series" (November 1979) and Mombassa's "Egypt" (January 1980)—did not reach the top 50. Their second LP, Espresso Bongo, released in July, was named after the Cliff Richard movie, and it peaked into the top 40. Their fourth single, "Come Around", returned them to the top 20 in June, and it was followed by a top 30 hit with "(Just Like) Romeo and Juliet", an upbeat cover of the 1964 hit by The Reflections, as a non-album single in November 1980.
They scored a No. 4 national hit with Plaza's "If You Leave Me Can I Come Too?", released in May 1981. Smith penned the follow-up, "Too Many Times", which became a No. 6 hit. It was accompanied by a music video shot on a building block in a Sydney seaside suburb and brought Mental As Anything international exposure by becoming a top 40 hit in Canada in July 1982, when they toured North America in support of Men at Work.
The next single, "Berserk Warriors" (December 1981), was a satirical tribute to ABBA, although the concurrent release of the pop hit "Swords of a Thousand Men" by British band Tenpole Tudor prevented Mental As Anything from realising their plan to make a Viking-themed music video to promote it, although they did eventually make the clip as planned and included it on their subsequent video album compilation. All of the 1981 singles were included on their Bruce Brown and Russell Dunlop produced Cats & Dogs, which became their biggest success to date, reaching No. 3 nationally. Mombassa's "Let's Cook" (April 1982) was a radio-only single. "Let's Cook" was also an MTV Video. Mental As Anything members were also visual artists and held their first exhibition of their works in May. In June, during his tour of Australia, Elvis Costello heard them and produced their next single "I Didn't Mean to Be Mean" (August 1982), written by Plaza.
A compilation album, If You Leave Me, was released in September 1982 in the United States and Men at Work, then at the peak of their popularity, had included Mental As Anything as a support act on their US tour. Peter O'Doherty wrote the band's next single, the sentimental "Close Again" (November), from their fourth album, Creatures of Leisure, released in April 1983 and produced by Brown and Dunlop, which peaked at No. 8. It provided two more singles, the Smith and Mombassa collaboration "Spirit Got Lost" (March), which was accompanied by an imaginative animated video clip, and Pete O'Doherty's "Brain Brain" (September). To promote, "Spirit Got Lost", Mental As Anything performed the single on Countdown with the episode's director, Kris Noble, using a dry ice-filled coffin with a band member due to emerge; complaints from within the coffin were ignored by Noble with "It's only another 30 seconds", until a crew member remembered that dry ice could cause nausea, choking or even death.
Their final 1983 single was a cover of Roy Orbison's "Working for the Man" (November), produced by Mark Moffatt and Ricky Fataar. Internationally, Creatures of Leisure was altered to drop three Australia-only tracks and replace them with both sides of the "Working for the Man" single.
It was another year before their next single, Mombassa and Plaza's blackly humorous Christmas release, "Apocalypso (Wiping the Smile off Santa's Face)" appeared in December 1984, which was one of the first Australian recordings to be remixed as a 12" 'disco' version. The innovative stop-motion video by B Sharp Productions to promote "Apocalypso" later shared the "Best Promotional Video" award—with INXS' "Burn for You" by Richard Lowenstein—at the 1984 Countdown Awards held in 1985.
1985–1989: International success