MENTAL as Anything was at the height of Australian music in 1980s, with tracks such as Live It Up taking them up the charts here and internationally.
More than three decades later and the band are still performing, transporting audiences back to what vocalist and keyboardist Greedy Smith called the “heyday” of music.
He said the band’s performance at this weekend’s Channel Seven Mandurah Crab Fest presented by LiveLighter will prove to be no different.
“People do tend to identify with the songs and tend to say: ‘It’s funny, this takes me back to the 80s,” he said. “I always say in return: ‘That’s funny, we’ve never left the 80s’.
“It was much more of a grassroots [industry] then. You would put a band together and with lots of practice you got to make a living out of it.”
In one of the music industry’s biggest urban legends, it is said Mental as Anything started their journey as a group of arts students pretending to be a band so they could get free drinks.
Smith said only part of that’s true.
“We all had a common interest in music and we were at art schools at the time,” he said. “If you had a few friends who were interested in music you would form a band in those days. We were lucky to get a weekend residency and another year later we got another one.
“But we needed more songs so we wrote some. People were more allowing to hear music they hadn’t heard before in those days so that gave us more confidence.
“It was the perfect storm for us.”
While they still hold the 80s in their hearts and music, it’s a new dawn for Mental as Anything.
They are starting to embrace social media and their website has just been relaunched.
“We’re going on a social media blitz at the moment,” Smith said. “I’m writing a serialised memoir of the band at the moment which will eventually go on social media. I’m working on one week in 1980 at the moment when I was in London promoting the band. I was there two days after Bon Scott from AC/DC died. It was a momentous time in music and for us, big things happened during that week.”
Smith said now more than ever the band made a conscious effort to go back and work on their songs, ensuring they were accurate on stage.
He said the band had to adapt as, along with their original fans, it is also playing for a new generation of music lovers who expect onstage performances to be the same as the “music videos on YouTube”.
That being said, Smith added Mental as Anything’s spirit has always lived on.
“I think it’s because we don’t have just one songwriter and they don’t always write together,” he said. “We had an ethos to have fun, we covered some serious issues but we still wanted to have fun. And we tried to not be pompous and be approachable. I think that is accounted for in the music.”
Mental as Anything will play at 4pm on Sunday, March 15 on the Crab Fest stage.
