The Band That Forgot Live Aid

Stories from behind 'Started Out Just Drinking Beer — the Mental As Anything story'

In 1985, Mental As Anything played Oz for Africa, Australia's arm of the biggest broadcast event in music history. The global Live Aid audience that day has been put at well over a billion people.

Last week I sat in a Sydney kitchen and asked Reg Mombassa and Peter O'Doherty about it.

"Did we do that?" said Reg.

He wasn't being coy. Neither brother has any memory of the biggest audience of their lives. There's footage on YouTube — four or five songs, the first band in the world to go live on the broadcast that day, thanks to the time zone. Doesn't matter. Gone.

Here's the thing, though. Ask Reg about a Dog Trumpet gig at Melbourne's Corner Hotel in the nineties, and total recall. Two people came. Both were on the guest list. The band set them up a little table in the middle of the dance floor, and when the publican offered them the night off — "you don't have to bother playing if you don't want to" — the response was pure Mentals: "Oh, we've done the soundcheck. We may as well play."

They played the entire set. The audience of two, Reg reports, had a really good time.

"I'll never forget the two people. But I don't remember Live Aid."

Across the years of interviews behind the book — band members, managers, producers, wives, roadies — this is the pattern that kept surfacing. The big official moments have evaporated. The ARIA Hall of Fame induction? "A gold watch for long service," delivered with a shrug (and a malfunctioning keyboard, in front of the entire industry, which they remember vividly). The Sydney Olympics closing ceremony, watched by hundreds of millions, for which Reg designed giant dirigibles and Midnight Oil's stage? "I was pleased... and also pleased that it was over."

But the towel stolen mid-corridor at Macy's, leaving a naked O'Doherty to greet the entire leather-clad membership of Hello Sailor? Preserved in loving detail for nearly fifty years.

Memory doesn't file by importance. It files by story.

Which makes writing a band biography a strange kind of detective work. One person swears the manager was slapped in a legendary industry confrontation; the man himself says it never happened. The band remembers being filmed at a famous concert; the footage apparently doesn't exist. Even Pete, cheerfully unbothered, gave me what could have been the book's epigraph: "Don't let the truth get in the way of the story... but people's memories conflate earlier and later things and get them mixed up, which is fair enough after 50 years."

Fifty years of gigs — some to twenty thousand people on Bondi Beach (also forgotten, incidentally, until someone sent Reg the video), some to two people at a table on the dance floor. The billion-viewer broadcasts blur into nothing, while the absurd, the humiliating and the human stay sharp forever.

Maybe that's the real story of Mental As Anything: a band whose stated ambition was to make themselves laugh, whose ambitionlessness (their word) produced ridiculous album titles and no strategy meetings whatsoever — and whose memories, forty years on, have kept exactly the moments that match.

That story — and fifty years' worth of the others — is in Started Out Just Drinking Beer: The Mental As Anything Story, out now in paperback, ebook and audiobook.

And the two people from the Corner Hotel, if you're out there — I'd still love to hear from you.