When The Nips Are Getting Bigger came into Martin Plaza’s head he was chugging over the Sydney Harbour Bridge in his ’63 VW Beetle, toward the end of 1978. “I had to keep humming the chords to myself until I got home, so I didn’t lose them” he recalls. “Thankfully there were only three of them.”

Much of rock’s glory evolves around the three chord pop song; something that occurred early to the endearing bunch of truly lovable lunatics who came together in an East Sydney art college, trundled down the hill to the Unicorn Hotel on Oxford Street, perched themselves precariously atop a pool table and, having delved deep into their record collections, began ladling out lashings of crisp and cheerful classics (or songs soon to be).

In Australia at the back end of the 70s there was a climate conducive to creativity, to be sure – perhaps the most intense and exciting ‘band scene’ since the mid sixties. A few years on from the punk revolution, the people making the music really had taken control of significant aspects of their own destiny. The huge sprawling suburban ‘beer barn’ pub rock environment had evolved with the proliferation of smaller and more adventurous pub and club rooms closer to the heart of the main cities and the employment of any halfway-decent outfit capable of drawing a consistent thirsty crowd. Indie labels and even canny studios and record shops were signing and recording bands at a frantic pace, while some started long careers by pressing up their own moments of magnificence (Sports, Saints, Men At Work and, having burst the Unicorn at the seams and moved down to the Civic Hotel, one Mental As Anything).

The stranglehold of commercial pop radio had been broken by Double/Triple J in Sydney and R in Melbourne. Rock TV forums like Nightmoves and Rock Arena provided a balance to Countdown and Flashez, and RAM, Juke and Roadrunner weighed in with informed but enthusiastic print coverage. All of a sudden bands had stages to stride, audiences to command, labels to disseminate their fertile outpourings, journals to convey their doings, and programmers who cared. Heady days indeed.

The Mental As Anything Plays At Your Party E.P. (Extended Play for those who may have forgotten), sold from the boots of the cars of Greedy Smith, Martin Plaza, Reg Mombassa, Peter O’Doherty and Wayne ‘Bird’ Delisle, placed them right in the thick of this fertile, bubbling environment. But it was their songs that kept them there, cemented in place; that place being the Top 40 (and 10 and 20 and 100). Rock scribe Clinton Walker thought they were “blessed with four songwriters producing unashamedly commercial, classic pop that’s utterly engaging, warm witty and charming.”

Music journalists, let it be admitted, rather enjoyed chronicling the Mentals, I know I did. I just dug up the words I penned about them for a book on the 1986/87 Australian Made tour, which saw them traverse the country with INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Divinyls, Saints, Models and Triffids, and these are they: “Throughout the month-long jaunt, the Mentals warmed hearts as the joke that never grows stale, and as an irresistible, irrepressible yet reliable ensemble of decent sorts of blokes who have transcended fads, trends and normal popularity lifespans while managing to appeal to all the people all the time. These five bright, charming, artistic and witty lads who know all about a good time and how to have it gave Australian Made much of its character and left all concerned in firm agreement with an observation by British rock paper Sounds: 'It is frankly inconceivable that a band of this class can fail to connect worldwide.' For, with all due credit to Andrew Loog Oldham, who said it first about the Rolling Stones, Mental As Anything are more than a band, they're a way of life!’”

Dave Graney once claimed that he was "grateful to be part of an Australian music scene that has people like Mental As Anything who aren't afraid to be intelligent and funny, have a lot of pizazz and exist because they want to.” Throughout the 80s their intricate yet instantly accessible pop gems, and their disheveled non-image image (when not bedecked in Mambo outfits, as they were on Australian Made, provided a sort of antidote to rotating crops of pompous, trend-tagged formula bands. By never taking themselves too seriously they stumbled upon a tonic for timelessness. Of course, having parallel careers as some of the country's leading visual artists assisted longevity considerably. They've long entertained richly with their irreverent approach. As legendary rock filmmaker Peter Clifton once said: "If you have a lead singer called Greedy Smith you're not the Vienna Boys Choir."

In the formative years they weren’t really anything much. “We were pretty naive musicians to begin with,” offers Martin, while Greedy insists, “We didn’t have a clue what we were doing, we just did it. We were very unfocused but so many things came together at the same time. I remember Martin saying that I couldn’t keep blowing a harmonica, I had to do something with myself on stage so he saw an ad in the Herald for a wedding reception organ going cheap and went and bought it. I played it on stage that night and I’ve been playing it ever since.

“There was a lot of kismet about it. It’s maybe not possible today, it might not work like that any more. We were in Los Angeles once, in a car park, and this new band came up and told us how much they liked us but what they really wanted to know was, who designed our look? We just laughed but it made us realise how easy we’d had it, in a way. These bands were all trying to get a record company to notice them and it was very hard for them.”

The record company that had noticed the Mentals was an indie imprint called Regular, formed by Cameron Allen and Martin Fabinyi, while Martin’s brother Jeremy came on board as the band’s manager (echoes of the Copelands in the Police saga perchance?). Allen was their first producer and Martin cites his “interesting way of EQ’ing” as a vital ingredient in the attention that arrived at the feet of the top twenty The Nips and Come Around singles and Get Wet album. Admirer Elvis Costello handled production on I Didn’t Mean To Be Mean and the American pop-meister Richard Gottehrer gave them the international gloss that assisted the substantial U.K., European and Canadian ascention of Live It Up and the Fundamental As Anything album “he was sensational” opines Plaza). But both Greedy and Martin now go out of their way to highlight the role played by the production team of Bruce Brown and Russell Dunlop in their audio evolution. “They really pulled our sound together,” says Martin. “From the Cats & Dogs and Creatures of Leisure albums came so many of the songs that work so well live now – Too Many Times, If You Leave Me Can I Come Too?, Berserk Warriors, Spirit Got Lost, Let’s Cook. I think that period really made us as a band.”

Though there was a wide song contribution from the band and a hit spread (one thinks of Queen for a comparison, well I do anyway) the creative core, both for composition and lead vocals, was Martin and Greedy, and what was essential to the remarkable longevity and hit flow (25 in 15 years, placing them in an echelon with Sherbet, J. O’K, Jimmy Barnes, John Farnham) was their camaraderie, and their aligned taste in punchy pop. (A band serving up covers of Roy Orbison, the Reflections, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley chestnuts within their canon can really only do such with a mutual assent). “Greedy and I are very close,” says Martin now. “I was relieved when he started writing songs because there was less pressure .... and they were really good.

“The songs are enduring and people do respond to them; that’s why we’re still out there I guess. It never ceases to amaze me how well they’re known and how much they’re liked. We have our audience bringing their kids to hear them and to sing them. You don’t get bored with the big ones, in fact after playing them for a long time you come to understand why they were hits in the first place. There’s no real regrets about those early naive recordings though I’d love to have released Come Around the way we do it now. We use Nips as a bit of a litmus test. We change it around subtley, try some different things with it, and it’s always the highpoint of the show. So yes, I am proud of it.”

“We’re quite fussy about how we perform now,” adds Greedy, “We take it quite seriously.“ Then perhaps they always did, while perfecting a means of making it look almost accidental. There’s been an enduring excellence, let here be no doubt about that. And a ceaseless quirkiness. When Beetroot Stains came across my desk in 2001 I found myself enthusing “With songs about Narelle, stretchmarks, crybabies, the GST and Charles Manson's audition for the Monkees, and a cameo by Sparkie the Wonderdog, this could only be a Mentals album. Having once perfected a brittle powerpop style based around a tinny organ sound, the Mentals now seem more at home with an anchor-riff that arrived with the 1995 hit Mr Natural. There is still a songwriting wealth, with Martin Plaza and Greedy Smith coming to the same point from entirely different directions. Chock full of imagination, musical flair and a stated aim to improve the quality of music that strippers dance to. Irresistible.”

In a Sydney Magazine cover story a few years back I quote Martin telling me : “It was a strange surreal sort of thing. “I was just being kind of silly and singing my favourite songs and suddenly we were on Countdown and everyone was singing The Nips Are Getting Bigger. “We fluked it. I had no serious aspirations at all for a career in music but at the same time I wasn’t looking forward to the bitchy art scene either. It was more fun to be a pop star with everything done for us and it was all so easy up until the end of the 80s when our songs weren’t automatically played on the radio any more. There’s only so much time on the airwaves and we had a damn good turn.”

The Mentals were able to taste the feeling of global domination, albeit for five minutes, but Martin insists “I don’t regret that we didn’t have huge success out of Australia because touring endlessly kills you – you can go mad in hotel rooms. We did it for a while overseas, early on, and I know it was really hard for Reg, who was the first one of us with a family. He is a generous, thoughtful man with great artistic talent and it came as no real surprise when he decided that a touring rock band took much of his time away. We did have fun in Europe, on the back of Live It Up and Crocodile Dundee. It was well organised and we were treated well and it’s good that we all got to experience that before there were changes.

“I think we’ve made a mark. I can hear us in other bands. “But I’m still a pop sponge and I enjoy playing live music and making Mental records, though I’ve also been able to continue painting and have regular showings.” The pop monger in him was responsible for a 1986 solo album, Plaza Suite, which gave him a national number one hit with a slick cover if Unit 4+2’s Concrete & Clay, included herein.

So dig deep, for it is all here, all that we loved about an irreplaceable band that perpetually brought a smile to our collective face, who painted a Melbourne tram, enshrined the Victa lawnmower in the national consciousness well before a postage stamp got around to it, and created a virtual cinematic sub-genre with some of the cleverest and entertaining film and video clips ever made in this country (future Tropfest entrants do note). They’ve never left us but if they did we’d certainly insist on coming too.