‘Not for the fragile’: Film charts Nick Cave and co’s ascent into hell

The crowd wants blood. A menacing hum from the stage threatens to oblige. Young Nick Cave smokes and sweeps back greasy hair. “You’ll know next time not to come up the front when we play, won’t you?” he jeers. “The front row is not for the fragile, my dear.”

Entering Mutiny in Heaven, the new documentary by Melbourne filmmaker Ian White about Cave’s early band Birthday Party, feels like entering Hell. Emaciated guitarist Rowland S Howard lurches ominously. Baleful bassist Tracy Pew glares blankly in string vest and black cowboy hat.

Neither, sadly, are alive to elucidate this scene. Cave, considering his drained pallor, might not be a reliable witness four decades on. Sitting around a kitchen table in Fitzroy are the two members blessed with clear memories of a volatile adventure.

“For all his reputation, I don’t think I ever saw Rowland stoned on stage,” drummer Phill Calvert tells his old Caulfield Grammar friend, Mick Harvey. “He always had respect.”

The guitarist agrees, but “Tracy would get very drunk sometimes. In fact he was always a bit drunk. Nick could have been on anything. Speed, alcohol, heroin. Depended on the night. He was probably the most unpredictable factor...

“But sometimes when all the chemical conditions were in some weird kind of balance, really amazing things could happen,” Harvey says, echoing the premise of White’s film: a gang of highly educated Melbourne misfits morphs from post-punk rock band into a reckless art experiment drawing on a dangerous collision of extremes.

“That idea of going so far into something that it starts going out of your control… that was something that would happen sometimes,” Harvey says. “When a gig was going well it would just veer off into this space that was… a bit unintelligible, really.”

From left, Phill Calvert, Mick Harvey, Nick Cave and Tracy Pew in the early days.

“It would drive the audience and the audience would drive the band,” Calvert says. “It wasn’t just about the music coming off the stage. In some cases the total energy in the room became part of this whole thing. I still don’t know how you describe it.”

It’s aptly described by the film, which defies the band’s short, chaotic history to unearth extensive and remarkable live footage, linked by striking archival images, new animations and previously unheard interviews with all members except the enigmatic Pew, who suffered a fatal epileptic seizure in 1986.

Nick Cave and the Birthday Party in a pub in Kilburn, London, in October 1981. Credit: David Corio/Redferns

The seed of the film, and probably the lion’s share of its narration, comes from interviews with Howard shot by record producer Lindsay Gravina a few years prior to the guitarist-songwriter’s death from cancer in 2009. One effect of this is to temper the reductive impression of the Birthday Party as “Nick Cave’s old band”.

“It was a classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts,” says White, who witnessed the band’s fabled tenure at the Crystal Ballroom in early ’80s St Kilda. “You had five really idiosyncratic individuals who all had enormous charisma and talent. Their best shows, consciously or not, were pushing towards some sort of transcendent experience.”

Humanity under extreme duress is the filmmaker’s chosen territory. The director of Junkie Monastery (2012) and Before the Fall (2015) says, only half jokingly, that he has “covered wars, refugees and opium, and revisited all three in this film”.

Contact sheet of Nick Cave and the Birthday Party at a portrait session in a disused church in Kilburn, London in October 1981.Credit: David Corio/Redferns

“I think that’s what makes stories compelling: when people are pushed to situations that most of us won’t get to experience,” he says.

The key situation Howard underscores in the film is the band’s move to London, a valiant precedent for a slew of artists to follow but a miserable cocktail of poverty and alienation for the former Boys Next Door.

Nick Cave and Rowland S Howard found London difficult, says Mick Harvey.

“Rowland and Nick found London very difficult for slightly different reasons, and some of the same reasons,” Harvey says. “It gave them something to be angry about and to focus them. It actually gave them a way to energise the musical ideas that were happening.”

Over three cycles in as many years, those ideas would coalesce in Melbourne studios to pierce London’s resistance. But chaos seemed hardwired to the experiment. Pew was first to fall: jailed one Melbourne summer for a string of offences that sends his friends into a spiral of fond memories going back to Year 9 English class.

“I really had to laugh at one bit of the film,” says Harvey. “There’s all this discussion about how Tracy’s so unfathomable and you can’t really explain his character and he’s not what you think he is and then he’s gone to prison for stealing some sausages and a sewing machine!”

Nick Cave and the Birthday Party in a disused church in Kilburn, London in October 1981. Credit: David Corio/Getty Images

“Well, he had a lot of priors,” Calvert says, alluding to permutations of unlicensed and intoxicated driving. “But he really was one of the most brilliant and funniest people.”

Pew was released in time to play the last Birthday Party shows in 1983, by which time wheels were wobbling in all directions. Calvert harbours no grudge against Harvey for sacking him prior to the band’s last-ditch escape to Berlin.

“I always knew that eventually Nick would go and be Nick. You know, Nick Cave and the E Street Band or whatever,” the drummer says as Harvey splutters up his sleeve. “So it ran its course. For me, it’s just sort of incredible that people want to make a movie about it 40 years later.”

“I was always the hirer and firer,” Harvey says. “As soon as Phill wasn’t there, then another scapegoat had to be found very quickly and I actually think Rowland was next. And that’s why he felt quite aggrieved about things on the way out.

“Rowland had a version of events which was pretty subjective. He had an interesting, kind of extreme take on things. And he’s quite inventive with his information, which is great. I’m not saying that in a negative way. He’s got a very particular, passionate way of going into the subjects he’s talking about.

“Ian, to his credit, chose to leave a lot of the discussion around the break-up out of the film ... I think that was a good idea because it’s just going into a negative space and that’s not what the band was about.”

Rowland S Howard “had an interesting, kind of extreme take on things,” says Mick Harvey.Credit: Mutiny in Heaven: The Birthday Party

Calvert agrees. He laments the absence, given the pre-digital age, of footage of his friends “just being humans on the road,” laughing in hire cars; or miraculously translating Cave’s unmusical gesticulations and Howard’s more structured designs into actual songs that define a truly unique legacy. Not that either of them care much for that word.

“Some of those moments where things came together and the band got it were just fantastic,” Calvert says. “I think in any creative process, when those things happen, the sound comes together, and the song becomes a thing, the hairs on the back of your neck, if you’ve got them at that age, go up. That’s what I remember.”

Mutiny in Heaven: the Birthday Party opens in Melbourne on October 23 and Sydney on November 2.