Strolling with Chris O’Doherty through his Sydney neighbourhood, Glebe, nestled between harbour’s-edge parklands and the greater inner west, is a trip through decades of family memories. It’s also an absorbing conversational journey as the visual artist and musician (AKA Reg Mombassa, perhaps best known as founding member of celebrated Australian band Mental As Anything) talks rock’n’roll lifestyles, paintings, UFOs, reincarnation, ageing, death – and his mysterious father.
Before we enter the lane through the back gate of the lived-in family terrace where O’Doherty and his wife, Martina, have lived for 45 years and raised three children, now adults (one, Los Angeles based actor/comedian Claudia, still keeps a bedroom), we sit for a few moments in the kitchen. It’s alive with the signs of his artistic life: a small, battered, Gibson amp; guitars leaning against chairs; his art on the walls, a kitchen table strewn with newspapers, pencils, crayons and sketchpads.
Amid the peripatetic life of a travelling troubadour, this is clearly a much-loved hub for O’Doherty and three generations of family (including a cat), the place he and his partner occupied as young people and which remains their familial haven.
“The kids went to school around here. We used to walk through these streets and ride bikes together … have birthday picnics down in the park. I’ve got a grandchild now. We sometimes take her down there – it’s got a nice big sandpit.’’
Jaunty, thin and clad largely in black (including wide-brimmed hat from under which falls long, grey hair), the 73-year-old New Zealand-born artist is warm yet contemplative, speaking quietly with a hint of Kiwi accent.
The neighbourhood, especially the once heavily industrial foreshore around Rozelle Bay, has changed greatly since the O’Dohertys arrived. Long gone is the old Maritime Services Board building, demolished long ago to make way for Jubilee Park. In the 1980s it was an artists’ squat (including for actor/musician brother-in-law Tony Hughes) known as Federal Art. The Mentals performed there at parties.
Mental As Anything have not been active for years, and O’Doherty and younger brother Peter left the band almost two-and-a-half-decades ago. But Chris O’Doherty hasn’t slowed down too much. He has a new book – and soon, a new album with Dog Trumpet, the band he formed with Peter. The book, Hypersonic Realism, features landscape pictures he has created over the past six decades.
Mombassa devotees, including those who have long embraced his celebratory and iconoclastic takes on Australian suburban life in his vividly coloured paintings – and on countless Mambo board shorts and shirts – won’t be disappointed. The book is a remarkable showcase for the incredible range of his work over many decades. It vividly reflects his creative and intellectual preoccupations in landscapes featuring the motifs that have always distinguished his work – dogs, guitars, telegraph poles, roads, cars, spacecraft, robots, the Sydney Opera House – alongside the seemingly prosaic urban and rural buildings that intrigue him.
He includes early paintings of houses his father (Irish Catholic-born, British Army veteran Jim O’Doherty, who migrated to New Zealand post-the second world war) built in and around Auckland. After the O’Dohertys migrated to Sydney when Chris was 17, his father constructed homes around Avalon beach. He later made doll’s houses.
By then Chris O’Doherty was a student at Sydney’s National Art School. As we walk down towards Jubilee Park on this hot winter’s morning, he recalls how his father suggested he paint miniatures to adorn the walls for the dolls. He kept painting them for decades until failing eyesight stopped him. They feature in the book.
We sit in the shade of the old stand by the white picket-fenced cricket oval. A rough sleeper shelters nearby.
His dad, I say, sounds interesting.
“Yeah, well he was brought up in Ireland – that sort of hard Irish Catholic way, before the second world war. He went to England to look for work. He had artistic ability. He’d had a scholarship to go to art school at 16. But his dad died suddenly and he had to go out to work so he became a carpenter.’’
Unusually for an Irish Catholic (Ireland remained neutral in the war) Jim served in the British army medical corps in north Africa and Italy.
“He had an interesting life … he got married at the start of the war and then he was away for most of it. When he got back his [Irish-born] wife had a child. Then he went to Canada for work, leaving them in England. He eventually … I’m not sure what went on exactly. But she sent the police after him to Canada, so he fled to New Zealand. And then he married my mother. So dad was a bigamist. He had a child from a previous marriage and we never got to the exact truth of it,’’ O’Doherty says.
“But when I was two dad was arrested for bigamy in New Zealand, and charged. Mum didn’t know about it [the previous marriage] so there was always this tension between them. Mum was always a bit angry with him and we never knew why. It wasn’t until Dad died that we found out … we had a half-sister, [English-born] Valerie, who lived in Toronto, Canada.’’
Yes, families are complicated, he says.
“That was something we knew nothing about until after dad died. And Mum was very upset that we found out about it. They’d kept that secret from us and Mum didn’t believe it. Her story was that Dad had got off the bigamy charge because the ex-wife had had the child with somebody else but I don’t think that’s true because Valerie does look a bit like Dad. But that was Mum’s story and she stuck to that. Our half-sister Valerie – she thinks that Dad went to prison in New Zealand for bigamy but we could find no record of that.’’
His parents were both proud of their sons in the Mentals. Though Chris O’Doherty says his dad would have preferred him to perform under his real name: each band member adopted a slightly ridiculous pseudonym combining an ordinary Australian name like Reg with the exotic (Mombassa).
“Mum used to put our records front of the pile in the shops,” he says.
O’Doherty’s celebrated work is in the collections of national and state galleries. It is prized by international collectors. Fellow musician Elton John and actor Ewan McGregor have bought his paintings. As a visual artist he is perhaps equally recognised for his designs for the popular surf wear label, Mambo.
As we walk on the conversation ranges from the US election with which he is heavily engaged (“I worry the return of Trump would turn the US into a fully fascist state”), to the potential perils of artificial intelligence and robotics – and unidentified flying objects.
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He talks, as we walk around the edge of the park, more about his mother, Trudy, a Manchester-born Anglican. “She believed in reincarnation,’’ he says.
“I neither disbelieve or believe anything, really. But reincarnation is a thing, I think, that is possible.’’
He is similarly open-minded about UFOs. And, so, they feature in his work.
“Obviously people think you’re mad if you talk about UFOs. But I think it’s a real phenomenon – I don’t know what’s causing it but people – scientists – are starting to look at it more seriously.’’
O’Doherty’s artistic and intellectual curiosities may seem edgy to a few. But a distinctive, precious, national-treasure-like antipodean devil-may-care irreverence has led to an enduring embrace of his music, visual art and laconic, if disarmingly modest, un-rock star persona.
By the time the Mentals became one of Australia’s most popular bands in the 1980s, and toured nationally and internationally, Chris (who was a founding member with brother Peter) was already married with children.
He wasn’t much for the rock’n’roll life.
“I took it easier than some of the others who were not married at the time. They’d be going out a bit more … I wasn’t a heavy drug user but I’d smoke marijuana pretty consistently. Beer and marijuana were my drugs of choice for most of that period. There were fun aspects to it. But I mean there were a lot of frustrations and disappointments at being in a band. And some of the touring … I mean when you’d sit in a van and drive for 10 hours and then you do a sound check and then wait around and then do the gig. They are long days and there are a lot of disappointments.’’
He spent the tour-bus time sketching, and taking Polaroid and disposable camera landscape photographs as studies for paintings.
He maintains contact with some Mentals’ members, including lead singer Martin Plaza (Martin Murphy) and drummer David Twohill – aka “Bird’’. He was especially close to Andrew “Greedy’’ Smith who died in 2019 and with whom he shared a love of books. (Recently O’Doherty has been reading books about the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt and the history of Paris.)
He and Peter continue to record and tour with Dog Trumpet, with upcoming gigs and a new single released ahead of their ninth album.
“I still enjoy playing live. But as you get older it’s physically and mentally more demanding – we don’t have road crew any more. We lug all our own gear and drive ourselves around pretty much.’’
Does he think about ageing and death?
“I don’t feel old but I feel the physical effects of ageing. I’ve had a few hospital visits in the last couple of years and I’ve got a few problems that are under control. But I’ve got to keep up the blood tests and the Cat scans and that sort of thing,’’ he says
Many of his contemporaries are not around to be feeling these signs of ageing. The average life expectancy for a rock musician, he says, is about 60. “I’m just grateful I’m still alive,” he says.
He smiles and nods.
“I feel very fortunate that I’m having a life where I’ve been able to play my music and do my art and make a living from it. Others more talented have not been so fortunate.”