In his explosive new documentary Mutiny in Heaven, director Ian White explores the contradictions at the heart of the menacing Melbourne band destined for self-destruction
n 1981, at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Melbourne, a band is making a video. The idea is to recreate a vision of hell. A cartoon death’s head with six limbs flashes on the screen. We see a young and scrawny Nick Cave – “a fat little insect” – pole-dancing in the middle of a circus tent. The song is an ode to self-loathing calledBehind him, the Birthday Party swings and stumbles.
White had witnessed the band at its frightening apex during this time. “Even 40 years after the fact, those gigs still resonate with me,” he says. “They’d probably be only a handful of gigs I’ve seen which had that sort of impact.” Part of it, he says, was the palpable sense of danger that surrounded the band, though White said he feared more for their safety than his own.
They were such an odd contradiction of different things – intelligent and literary, yet visceral and brutal Not that the Birthday Party were built to last. They made just one more album, Junkyard, after which Calvert was abruptly sacked, in late 1982. He bears no grudges. “It wasn’t long after I was gone that somebody else had to be found as the whipping boy, and of course that was Rowland, and then that was the end of the band.”
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