Just in time for summer, Australia’s quintessential party band, Mental As Anything, celebrate the 40th anniversary of its debut album, Get Wet, with a new greatest hits anthology titled Surf & Mull & Sex & Fun – The Classic Recordings of Mental As Anything - showcasing some of the biggest and best loved songs in Australian popular music from the seventies and eighties.

Since the release of Get Wet in November 1979, Mental As Anything has had 25 singles in the Australian Top 40, a record for an Australian act that the Mentals held until the mid-nineties. They also had chart success in Europe, the UK, Canada and New Zealand, and their iconic single “Live It Up” still has constant radio rotation in the UK and Europe more than 30 years after it charted at number 4 in the UK, number 3 in Germany and number 1 in Scandinavia.

Mental As Anything was the first signing for Regular Records, who released the band’s first single, “The Nips Are Getting Bigger”, in August 1979 ahead of the Get Wet release. Through more than a dozen studio albums the songs included “Come Around”, “If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?”, “Too Many Times”, “Berserk Warriors”, “Spirit Got Lost”, “You’re So Strong” and “Live It Up”, which was released in 1984 and was guaranteed its international longevity by being featured in the 1986 movie Crocodile Dundee.

Mentals songs also turned up on the soundtracks of other films including Young Einstein, Animal Kingdom, and most recently in this year’s British indie hit Blinded By The Light.

Since their first gig in 1977 – on the same momentous August date that both INXS and The Boys Next Door made their public debuts, also the date that Elvis Presley died – membership of Mental As Anything has varied, but the mainstays of the band have always been Greedy Smith and Martin Plaza, and in those hit making years Reg Mombassa and Peter Mombassa were equally pivotal tunesmiths.