Mental As Anything Live in Brisbane: The Hits Were Alive, Even If the Ghosts Were Just as Loud

Mental As Anything

The Princess Theatre, Brisbane

Saturday, 27th June 2026

Photos - Chris Searles

Words - Ben Preece

Mental As Anything have never quite landed as a tidy band. They've always been a bit beautifully odd for that. Too art-school. Too suburban-surreal. Too funny in a way that always feels slightly sideways. Even their biggest songs, the ones now filed away permanently in the national good-times cabinet, have strange little shadows moving through them. The Mentals write pop songs that are barbecue anthems hiding a nervous breakdown underneath, which goes some way to explaining why they still mean so much to so many people.

As a crowd of long-time believers pours into The Princess Theatre for some Saturday night shenanigans, it's obvious they're ready to behave like it's 1982 again. Given the Mentals' history, it makes sense that their 50th anniversary reboot tour should arrive with its own odd emotional weather.

Because this is Mental As Anything, but also not quite the Mental As Anything most people first fall in love with. Greedy Smith is gone. Martin Plaza no longer tours due to health reasons. Those two absences are far from footnotes. They are the room. Greedy and Martin sing and write a huge amount of the band’s most beloved material, and when you remove those voices from the centre of the thing, you are not just changing personnel, you are shifting the energy and changing the chemistry.

Leading this version are brothers Reg Mombassa and Peter O’Doherty, back under the Mentals banner after spending the last couple of decades largely devoted to their own excellent Dog Trumpet world. They have every right to be there, of course. Reg’s guitar, voice, face and entire visual universe are deeply embedded in the band’s DNA, while Peter is central to the classic line-up and carries a huge chunk of the story with him.

Still, the question hangs there for a while: what exactly are we watching? A reunion? A tribute? A reclamation? A continuation? A very beautifully dressed question mark? The answer is probably a bit of all of the above.

The band is rounded out by Simon Rudston-Brown on guitar and vocals, Shannon Stitt on keys and vocals, and Declan O’Doherty on drums. Rudston-Brown has the hardest job on stage by a mile. He is required to carry much of the vocal weight associated with Greedy and Martin, which means he is not just singing melodies. He is stepping into people’s memories. That is dangerous territory.

Technically, he does the job well: he hits the parts, handles the higher reaches and knows where the choruses need to land. But there is a certain caution to the performance, as if he is operating inside a very carefully drawn chalk circle. He does not embarrass the songs, not even close, but he does not quite inhabit them either. At times it feels less like a frontman channelling the spirit of Mental As Anything and more like a very polished singer doing faithful work in an extremely well-drilled covers band.

That sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but it is also the central tension of the night. These songs are not museum pieces. They need a bit of rogue energy, a bit of wonky theatre, a bit of pub sweat under the collar. The Mentals are never merely “good players playing good songs.” They are gob-smacking pop writers with a ridiculous string of hits. Their magic lives in the personalities crashing into each other, even if that same friction eventually helps pull the classic line-up apart. Without Greedy’s warmth and Martin’s honeyed weirdness, the hits can feel slightly too neat around the edges.

Mombassa, thankfully, remains impossible to replicate and equally impossible to tidy up. He brings the darker, stranger end of the band’s personality back into view, introducing songs with dry little stories that remind you how peculiar this catalogue really is. His introduction to ‘Troop Movements in the Ukraine’ is one of the night’s stranger moments, not because it is slick, but because it isn’t. It has that Reg quality: funny, bleak, oddly prophetic and somewhat poetic.

Peter O’Doherty is also a grounding presence, offering stories that give the night more shape than the performance sometimes manages on its own. His affection for the band’s history is genuine, and his role as keeper of the flame gives the show a much-needed emotional spine. There is something moving about watching the brothers reclaim this material, even when the reclamation itself feels complicated.

And it is complicated.

At times, the show feels caught between two instincts. One is to honour the Mentals’ strange, beloved, multi-headed Australian pop beast of a legacy. The other is to deliver a hit parade to people who have paid to feel young, or at least younger, for a couple of hours. The audience, it must be said, has no such crisis. They love every millisecond of it. Rabidly. Joyfully. With the sort of full-body affection that makes any kind of criticism feel rude.

When the big songs arrive, the room does what rooms do when songs have lived in them for decades. It sings. It grins. It forgives. Opening with ‘Come Around’ before moving early into top five single ‘Too Many Times’, the band quickly reminds everyone how deep the catalogue runs. ‘If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?’ is still the perfect little song with that perfect title-hook snap, ‘He’s Just No Good For You’ remains that relatable anthem and the simplistic beauty of ‘The World Seems Difficult’ is intact. The covers, Roy Orbison’s ‘Working For The Man’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock ’N’ Roll Music’ and The Reflections’ ‘(Just Like) Romeo & Juliet’, are so good you forget they’re covers, while their biggest ever hit ‘Live It Up’ does exactly what it is built to do and lifts the room into the air on muscle memory alone.

The encore is, of course, ‘The Nips Are Getting Bigger’, which remains one of the great Australian debut statements, ridiculous and sharp at the same time.

That is the thing about this set: it is filled to the brim with great songs, they evoke memories and bring a metric fucktonne of joy. They certainly don't need to be perfect, but they do need to be let loose, even if it is to preserve the legacy of one of the country’s finest ever pop bands.

Is it disappointing? Well, yes, a tiny bit. Not because the band is bad, but because the absence of Greedy and Martin is simply too impossible to ignore. You can hear the missing voices inside the songs. You can feel the places where their personalities used to bend the room. Rudston-Brown sings the parts capably, but capability is not quite the same as spark. The new players keep the machinery moving, but the machinery occasionally wants more grease, more danger, more unruly Mentals nonsense.

Is it a sham? No. That feels too cruel, and not quite true. Reg Mombassa and Peter O’Doherty are not imposters in their own story. They are part of the story’s bones. But this version of Mental As Anything is also not the classic band resurrected. It is a lovingly assembled, slightly uneven, historically sanctioned afterlife. A tribute act, perhaps, but one with bloodline, blessing and a real claim to the name.

And maybe that is enough.

For all the reservations, it is still genuinely wonderful to hear those songs in a room again. They remain strange little marvels of Australian pop: witty, melodic, unpretentious, full of suburban fizz and emotional undertow. The audience does not seem to be grading legitimacy in real time. They are too busy singing. Too busy remembering. Too busy enjoying the fact that, in some form, Mental As Anything are in front of them again.

That may be the fairest way to understand the night. Not as a perfect return, and not as a cynical cash-in, but as a messy, affectionate celebration of songs strong enough to survive their own impossible circumstances. The Mentals have always been a bit crooked. This version is crooked too, just in a different way.

Setlist

Full Photo Gallery by Chris Searles