Dog Trumpet
Live Forever
2025
Dog Trumpet’s new album is cheerfully bleak. Bubbling melodies float on an undercurrent of anxiety about the state of humanity and the future of the planet.
Yet founding member Reg Mombassa says there is still hope.
The current version of Dog Trumpet is brothers Reg Mombassa (aka Chris O’Doherty) and his brother Peter O’Doherty – original members of ARIA Hall of Fame band Mental As Anything – Peter’s son Declan on drums, and singer-songwriter Bernie Hayes on bass.
Live Forever is the ninth album for Dog Trumpet, a band whose influences include The Kinks, The Small Faces, The Beatles, and The Stones, but also Dylan, American folk music, and the blues.
Their first album, Two Heads One Brain, was described as a meld of inventive pop, psychedelia, folk, and country that instigated the intertwining electric, slide, and acoustic guitar sound typical of albums to follow.
The 1960s pop and psychedelic influences have certainly survived on Live Forever, with its surreal, whimsical, and literary-inspired lyrics.
And it’s wistful. Many songs are tinged with sadness, particularly about the results of – or need for – change.
Reviewing an earlier album, Bernard Zuel noted Dog Trumpet’s melancholy and shadows but said the songs didn’t drag you down; they held you up.
Live Forever’s cheerful melodies are buoyant and strangely comforting. Expressions of anger in the previous album Shadowland have been toned down by introspection and ambivalence – the acknowledgement of fear and shame.
The title track says, “Sometimes I am afraid/Of everything in the world/I’m afraid of angry people/Great big alpha males …”
Mombassa said he was being self-critical. “I do get angry at times, impatient and short-tempered.”
About the melancholy tone, he said, “We’ve always tended to have pretty melodies but lyrics that tended to be bleaker or more gloomy.
“It has always struck me that there is an essential sadness to human life, partly because everyone you know, including yourself, at some stage is going to get ill or die.
“That’s always what’s in the background for what’s going on for humans.
“Another thing I’ve always thought about is humans’ cruelty and violence towards each other. And towards animals and the earth. And it seems to be getting worse at the moment.”
The questioning in Mombassa’s songs is balanced by the tuneful observations and nostalgia of Peter O’Doherty.
Marianne is a song about Marianne Faithfull. First recorded and released by Mental As Anything in 1995, it has been re-recorded with a new sound and updated lyrics.
Under Water was written for a fundraising record for emergency services, and the jaunty Eileen was inspired by Anna Funder’s book Wifedom about Eileen Blair, the British poet and psychologist who was the first wife of George Orwell.
High On The Rocks is about a lifelong fear of falling, childhood, and anxiety: a reminder that change is constant and nothing repeats or remains the same.
Waltz of the Wind, by New Zealand band The Windy City Strugglers, ends, “I thought that nothing would change/The only thing that stays the same/Is the waltz of the wind.”
Mombassa said, “We like Waltz of the Wind because it is a beautiful song with sad lyrics. I don’t particularly like change but change is an aspect of existence, unfortunately.”
Despite the references to regret and longing, Mombassa said he still had hope.
“If you didn’t have hope you’d be pretty miserable. You have to hope that things will improve. It’s a fairly big ask but my feeling is that, unless the human race can alter its consciousness somewhat, we are doomed to extinction.
“If we keep up the highly competitive, extremely violent tribal loyalty, alpha-male patriarchal dominance that we have stuck to for our recorded history, if that continues, we will be doomed.
“We have to effect a fundamental change in our thinking. We have problems with nuclear warheads, countries at war with each other, and countries at war with themselves. The United States seems to be at war with itself at the moment.
“Unless we get beyond that way of thinking we are going to be in trouble. And we are in trouble already. But I am hopeful things will improve.”
Mombassa has long been interested in the history of the world, religion, and science. That all coalesces in Dog Trumpet’s psychedelic oeuvre: moving outside of conventional perceptions of time, gaining an awareness of undifferentiated unity, and seeing familiar forms dissolving into moving, dancing structures.
Space and Time, described as “a fun song about our universe” and aligning with Dog Trumpet’s concerns about the state of humanity, recalls Monty Python’s Galaxy Song, which ends, “Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”
The band’s webpage for the song has Mombassa saying: “It expresses a desire to visit the beginning of time and space at the big bang and the end of time when all the stars are extinguished, and the last free-floating proton has decayed to nothing.
“I would like to visit these mysterious places as they may be where all the gods and demons and dead humans exist. Maybe the gods and demons live in black holes, and that’s why we can’t see them.”
Ding Dong Butterfly is written from the perspective of an alien looking at the human race in a critical way. “It’s more or less saying goodbye butterfly because we are destroying a lot of those things. The song lists a lot of things about being alive and being human, and then the chorus is saying it may not last for too much longer unless we do something.”
Medicine Balls is a space song set in the future that Dog Trumpet recorded on an EP in the nineties. Mombassa said he enjoyed playing it because the band often did a free-form jam in the middle.
He said, “I have always had a strong interest in science, astrophysics, and quantum physics. At the scale of the very large and the very tiny. It’s very weird and interesting.
“I have been looking lately at something physicists are calling panpsychism (a philosophical theory that consciousness is not just limited to humans and animals but is a basic property of all things, even at the level of electrons and quarks). I like that idea. That even atoms are conscious at a level different to humans.”
He is also interested in quantum entanglement, where two or more particles become linked in such a way that they share the same fate, regardless of the distance separating them.
“Apart from science I am also interested in unidentified anomalous phenomena. People have been seeing weird things in the sky for thousands of years. And it seems to be ramping up, with more sightings. A lot of people in the UFO community are saying there will be disclosure of this in the near future. And scientists are now beginning to look at the data.”
Regarding the launch of the new album, Mombassa said, “It’s always fun playing live. Some aspects of travelling and waiting around and lugging gear around can get a bit tedious, but the actual getting up and playing to a live audience is a great experience.
“It’s also a great experience writing songs, and getting to record them is a privilege. For this band that is down to my brother because Peter does all the production and engineering on our records. For Live Forever he had his son Declan, who is our drummer, assisting him. It was good to have a younger set of ears on the job. You can see that in the sound of the record.”
Mombassa said he had just written a new space song and Peter also had some new songs to record.
“You can’t stop. You have to keep going.”
