Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party

Everything about the Birthday Party was deceptive. Nick Cave looked like a delicate Romantic poet but was so intrinsically violent that no headphones would survive a recording session in tact, or pilot survive a flight unpunched. Mick Harvey was the rhythm guitarist and therefore just the spare, but arguably most responsible for their stones-on-barbed-wire sound – and, even more astonishingly, was basically straight edge in a band known for its gargantuan chemical consumption. Rowland S. Howard was the noise guitarist who wanted to be a singer-songwriter absorbing the most esoteric corners of 20th century culture. Bassist Tracy Pew looked like a rapist cowboy leather daddy at the most nightmarish sex dungeon, but was a cunning intellectual with extensive tastes in literature. And Phil Calvert was a drummer and ... well, everyone underestimates them.

Together, they formed a band so unhinged and strung out that they firmly believed that "Release the Bats" was a catchy pop song (which it is, with Cave's coda that it is still demented). Soft-spoken degenerates whose pioneering genius was constantly undermined by their self-destructive catastrophic nature. Well, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, noses, drum kits ...

There's undoubted humor to be found in having this definitive documentary oral history of Australia's favorite purveyors of sonic carnage be directed by Ian White, since he earned his first music journalism credentials as a graphic designer for Smash Hits (think Tiger Beat with less teeth). He did go on to be an award-winning designer for the Birthday Party's label, Mushroom, and his design work is vital here, with illustrated interludes to supplement the plentiful archive footage (although, considering how infamous Cave was as a heroin abuser, it's almost shocking that he has to use animation to reflect that: meet any noted 1980s Goth and they all seem to have a "strung out Cavey" anecdote or 10). That said, his reliance on recorded interviews over the top of footage, with little to no indication which of the five members of the band it is, can lead to some frustration. Who is talking about their addiction now, one may wonder?

But what White captures is the raw yet deliberate, accidental but structured energy of the Birthday Party, and how a certain level of discomfort seemed to fuel their creativity and success. Without directly addressing the question, White makes clear how their dissatisfaction with their native Melbourne sent them to London at just the moment when post-punk was starting to get too glossy for their brand of minimalist stomp. It's in how they finally found a scene of like-minded noiseniks when they moved to Berlin (as did seemingly every band with a hint of Bowie's Mitteleuropean era in their music) just at the point when they were clearly become untenable as a unit.

Mutiny in Heaven would make a fitting pairing with White's 2012 TV documentary, Junkie Monastery, another tale of hedonism and cerebral discourse clashing. It seems glib to say that the Birthday Party's demise was germinating in their success, but the idea that a band built on both danger and intellect could survive seems absurd. Studio footage of Cave seemingly deliberately misinterpreting Howard's musical direction as a bored and strung-out Pew nods along/nods off explains why the Birthday Party couldn't make it out of 1983. Or maybe, as White implies, it's just something as simple as Cave and Howard growing past their post-high school carnage, and rejecting the audience that just wanted to see them bleed. That not everyone made it out alive may be the true and inevitable tragedy of the Birthday Party.