THE humour in Reg Mombassa’s songs has become darker in recent years and even turned to anger.

 Songs like ‘Gangrene’, ‘Lonely Death Cleaning Company’ and ‘Gravity’, a song about depression, on the 2020 album Great South Road were a huge departure from the fun and irreverence in a lot of his former band Mental As Anything and even the earlier works of the band he formed with his brother and Mentals bandmate Peter O’Doherty, Dog Trumpet.

“There has always been a bit of absurdity and stuff that I do and some of the other guys in the Mentals as well I suppose but occasionally you have to get a bit more serious,” Mombassa said.

“My wife describes me as a gloomy catastrophist and that’s kind of true. A lot of my art and songs have got that fairly bleak aspect.

“I’m interested in history of the world and religion and science and it does strike me that the human race has been … apart from all of the great things, the great art and great music and a lot of people managed to live in times or in places where they have reasonably peaceful, prosperous lives, but a lot of people don’t.

“A lot of human history is really this blood drenched, unpleasant, unjust, cruel - people with irrational belief systems imposing them on other people. A lot of it is not very optimistic, not very uplifting.

“The last few years, it was a weird time. It started off for me late 2019. I had a big show at a gallery in Canberra, I’m talking about my art not music, and I just started to promote that and then Greedy died, [former Mental As Anything bandmate Greedy Smith].

“Greedy was the most positive person I’ve ever met. Even if things were going badly, he could find the bright side. I’d seen him only two or three weeks before he died and he seemed in good shape and it was a shock to us all because we thought he would last forever.

“So, suddenly all the interviews were about that, which is fine. But that was a shock. And then the bushfires started up and then Covid and the floods and the mouse plague and all of this weird politics going on in the world. It’s been a pretty strange three years for everyone, really. It’s like what the hell is going on?”

The first single from Dog Trumpet’s latest offering ‘F…ing Idiots’ is in response to the rise in war and militarism.

“Some people have complained about the swearing and I explain I feel it was appropriate because I was angry about it, particularly when the world’s got all of these enormous problems and then we’ve still got these nations with enormous armies and arsenals and they use those armies to bully their neighbours or their own people.

“Australia doesn’t do that. We’ve got a tiny army and we don’t bully people with it.

“The caveat with all of that stuff is that when you’ve got someone like Stalin or Hitler or Putin, people do have to fight back unfortunately. That’s the catch 22. It would be good to do away with all militaries in the world and to use all that money to feed people and solve the climate crisis and solve other problems but that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

Chris O’Doherty, aka Reg Mombassa, has been one of the creative mainstays behind surf brand Mambo since 1986.

Dog Trumpet began as a side project to Mental As Anything in 1990 and soon became second to his art after he and Peter had left Mental As Anything by 2000.

“We did Dog Trumpet for 10 years while we were still in the Mentals. We only did two albums and a lot more since we left the Mentals because we had a bit more time. With four songwriters in the Mentals we often had a few spare songs so it was good to use them somewhere else.

“We’ve always been serious about Dog Trumpet but we’ve been a relatively obscure independent band. Recently we’ve had our back catalogue released on English label Demon. We have been trying to be a bit more professional, a bit more on the case in the last 10 years but obviously we’ve still got our day jobs as artists.

“I’m very grateful for the fact that I’ve got to earn a living doing this. I know a lot of really talented artists and musicians. I’ve had a couple of lucky breaks and if you don’t get those breaks you do struggle. I’ve been fortunate and I’m well aware of that.”

As Covid struck, Dog Trumpet released Great South Road and had to move beyond their comfort zone and explore the avenues in social media to promote the album and managed to reach a new audience.

“That was the only bright spot in all the Covid lockdown stuff that we actually did a few ([ive performances on Facebook] because it meant we could play old Mental songs and old Dog Trumpet songs that, some of them we’d probably never played live.

“So, it was a good opportunity to do that but it was actually quite stressful because any mistakes are going to be up there forever and Peter and his wife Susan had to operate the equipment. At times we were sideways and all sorts of technical problems. It was pretty funny.

“But it was a bit weird playing to the bedroom wall.”

This week Dog Trumpet tours Queensland for their first shows here in a decade to kick off their national Shadowland Tour.

“It will be the first time I’ve been on a plane in three years,” Mombassa said.

“We’ve played southern New South Wales a lot, we’ve been to Canberra and we haven’t been to Melbourne for five or six years either.

“We had a tour booked when the whole Covid thing started so that was the end of that.”

• Dog Trumpet play at The Imperial Hotel Eumundi on Friday, February 3; Doo-Bop Bar, Brisbane on Saturday, February 4; and Mo’s Desert Clubhouse on the Gold Coast on Sunday, February 5.