Upcoming Attractions: Mutiny In Heaven
a special review of a new documentary screening at the Paradise Theatre!
Hey WEP!
Trying something new here once more! We were asked to cover an upcoming documentary screening at the Paradise Theatre right around the corner from WEP Central and through it would be a great addition to our newsletter! We’re always looking to find new ways to bring arts coverage to your inbox, so keep an eye out for future features on things happening in the west end!
xo
WEP
Mutiny In Heaven - the Birthday Party
Niko Stratis
Nick Cave is one of those guys it’s easy to feel like you know. The memory of a friend you haven’t seen in ages, whose voice you can hear so clearly with any passing mention of his name. Cave’s work is confessional and otherworldly, hauntingly poetic and revealing. A heart bleeding ink onto the page and seeping into all the notes that follow. But the Nick Cave we often think about is the modern era of a man, the Nick Cave who appears with the Bad Seeds or his atmospheric soundtrack work with fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis. A man in a crisp suit stalking stages wielding a microphone like a torch only he may carry.
A new documentary, Mutiny In Heaven directed by Ian White, presents a rare opportunity to look into all corners of the Nick Cave that preceded all of this by looking at his first band, Australian post-punk pioneers The Birthday Party. Here we see a Nick Cave of a different tenor, scrappier and deadlier but no less possessed of the ethereal spirit that draws out of him music of such great and powerful weight.
The Birthday Party is legendary in the destruction left in its wake, and the film — the first authorized documentary on the band — honours the spirit of the band with few punches pulled. There are no secrets held of Cave and most of the bands addictions, or the rapturous spirit of their aggressive tendencies. And they are told with stark honesty here, facts that are never glossed over or waved away but told with care nonetheless.
Using archival footage interspersed with hand drawn animation accompanied by narration from the band, and featuring a bounty of archival footage, Mutiny In Heaven is a fascinating glimpse into the early years of an artist who has often defied definition.
Frenetic and moving, the documentary moves with an expedient rhythm that the music demands, charting the bands course through their scrappy origins to being signed to 4AD and being discovered by the legendary John Peel, the ordeal of filming the music video for single “Nick The Stripper”, through to the bands climatic conclusion in 1983.
Nick Cave is the obvious standout of the group, not just as the growl behind the microphone at the center of their spotlight but also as the figure he would continue to impose as he moved on from the Birthday Party, but he is never the singular focus here. The Birthday Party was a group emboldened by the strength of all its pieces, the banshee wails of dissonant guitars, the steady and hypnotic bass lines and drums that could pound your soul through the earth into hell itself. Mick Harvey, Tracy Pew, Rowland Howard all feature prominently, given ample room for them to tell their own stories.
Music documentaries are difficult beasts at times, often they linger too long in all the wrong places or set a discordant tone but luckily this is not the case with Mutiny In Heaven. In telling the story of The Birthday Party we journey back to the inescapable moments when music was raw and young and free. You can feel the heat of the room in the footage presented, the sweat of the dance floor and the blood in the air and remember for a moment that this was all so dangerous once. Nothing is here forever, we all grow older and slow our feet and the fire of our passions burn lower and steadier but the light of the fire never truly fades. This is the grand lesson of Mutiny In Heaven, that we will never, none of us, ever truly fade and even our hardest memories will only ever serve as reminders that we lived with such passion, and for good or bad it has delivered us here.
An exclusive theatrical run of Mutiny In Heaven screens Thursday October the 5th and Monday October the 9th at the Paradise Theatre on Bloor, you can find more info and ticket links at their website