In a world obsessed with noise, swagger, and overstated “creative genius,” Chris O'Doherty remains a study in the opposite. Who's he? Oh, you might know him better as Reg Mombassa: the weird guitarist from Mental as Anything, the Mambo shirt artist, or one half of the band Dog Trumpet.

Unassuming, softly spoken, sometimes seemingly half-distracted, Reg is nevertheless one of the most quietly productive artists and musicians Australia has ever produced. As Mental As Anything celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2026, what emerges is not just the story of a band (in book, documentary, touring, and new live album form), but of a man whose creativity has persisted for five decades through something far more durable than inspiration: a lifetime of focus, habit, and near-monastic work discipline.

Reg laughs at the idea that creativity can be systematised or forced. “The creative impulse is pretty mysterious,” he tells me as we chat around his inner-Sydney kitchen table. “There’s no real structure… ideas just seem to pop into your head.”

But if the spark is mysterious, the practice isn’t. Reg simply keeps showing up — to the canvas, to the guitar, to the studio — as he's done every day and night, for decades.

Though he famously joked in his TED Talk about smoking “25,000 joints” Reg is clear that real work requires sobriety. “Generally If I’m drawing or painting… or playing live, I like to be pretty sober.” He admits that ideas sometimes strike when altered, but the execution, the “real work”, is always done clean. “Being stoned is not a good idea for finishing things.”

His creativity depends on long concentration arcs, the kind that require clarity, routine, and the comfort of being fully present.

His art may be eccentric but its making is grounded and steady.

His greatest muse is the everyday world, filling his "cranium universe" with varied inputs. This can be retreats to places like Frank Watters' former bushland north of Mudgee, Arthur Boyd’s 1000 hectares of bush at Bundanoon, the Heysen Trail in the Flinders Ranges, or the Larapinta Trail in central Australia.

“Some ideas come from images in the paper or magazines.” He sometimes rips them out and keeps them in folders. Landscapes, houses, faces, patterns: raw material for later.

Likewise, early in his painting life, he found unlikely inspiration in real estate booklets. “I’d copy pictures out of them… use them as the basis for a drawing or painting.” He's also an avid reader of war stories and ancient history books.

It’s a wonderfully unpretentious process: gather scraps, follow curiosities, and wait for unlikely associations to form. “You can get ideas from anywhere really,” he says. But he can't fully explain where some of his weirder ideas originate, paintings with titles like 'Australian Jesus Reading to a Maggot Infested Business Horse by the Light of a Potato'. His oversized contributions to the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony included massive dirigibles of a 50m-long Football Serpent with a Holden Head, and Frankenstein’s Kangaroo Monster which was carrying the Harbour Bridge. This was hailed by 'The Washington Post' as being like 'the Macy's parade on LSD'.

Though he famously joked in his TED Talk about smoking “25,000 joints” Reg is clear that real work requires sobriety. “Generally If I’m drawing or painting… or playing live, I like to be pretty sober.” He admits that ideas sometimes strike when altered, but the execution, the “real work”, is always done clean. “Being stoned is not a good idea for finishing things.”

When asked how these fragments become finished works, he shrugs at the mystery: “It’s semi-conscious… ideas just bubble up.”

Reg has two main workspaces. One is his kitchen table, the other his cramped attic studio: piles of clippings, sketchbooks, half-finished canvases, guitars always within reach. Easy access facilitates the flow state.

Reg’s practice is slow and steady. “Sometimes I’ll get an entire song down in half an hour,” he says. “Other times it takes years. You just turn up… you sit there with a guitar… and something crops up.” He calls it “noodling” but it’s really a lifetime of disciplined curiosity.

Back in the day, the Mentals criss-crossed Australia endlessly, a 20-year big blur, filling venues like the Orange Ex-Services Club. HIs art and music were always inseparable. "I have always liked the country west of the Blue Mountains, including Bathurst, Orange, Mudgee, Cowra, Hill End, and Cassilis. I have done a lot of drawings and paintings either from sketches made en plein air, from cars, or from reference photographs taken in those localities." A few years ago he had a small art show at Lolli Redini restaurant in Orange (now closed) and has been in group shows at the Bathurst and Orange regional galleries.

He combines gentle obsession with a craftsman’s patience. No frenzy, no burnout drama, no tortured-artist mythology.

It’s a creative life almost autistic in its consistency — hyper-focused, self-directed, and intimately tethered to repetitive routine.

As the band matured, so did the approach. Reg and brother Mentals' bassist Peter now perform under the banner of Dog Trumpet, and describe a kind of mellow diligence in later years: rehearsals, refining arrangements, and recordings trying to return sonically to the womb of 1971.

Despite already having one of the most recognisable art styles in Australia and multiple musical hits across decades (he penned Mentals songs such as 'Egypt' and 'Apocalypso (Wiping the Smile off Santa's Face)' Reg insists the next great work could still arrive tomorrow. Scribbled on an old set list on his table are some lyrics and chords that would become a new song 'Space and Time' about going back to the beginning of time for a little look-around.

“You never know,” he says. “You might come up with a better one.”

But he's not interested in the "ridiculousnessness" of pop stardom anymore. It’s not false modesty. It’s the genuine worldview of someone who has never stopped being curious — someone for whom the next idea is always possible, always waiting, always just a piece of scrap paper or a guitar riff away.

In a culture obsessed with immediacy, Reg Mombassa is a reminder of a rarer truth: creativity is less about fleeting brilliance than about staying at the table long enough for brilliance to visit.

regmombassa.com Insta: @regmombassaofficial mentalasanything.com