Noise, drugs and rioting fans: Inside the mayhem of Nick Cave's early days with explosive rockers The Birthday Party

These days, Cave is one of rock's elder statesmen. But decades ago, he started out in a band who caused chaos wherever they went, as new film Mutiny in Heaven recounts, writes Daniel Dylan Wray.

On his US tour, the Bad Seeds frontman Nick Cave – who for the last 40 years has been a revered songwriter known for writing music that veers from tender beauty to raging noise – will also undertake several intimate book events with fans in of Faith, Hope and Carnage, the book he co-wrote with journalist friend Sean O'Hagan about his "inner life", comprised of long conversations between them.

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At these events, in intimate settings, Cave will speak candidly to devoted fans about a life and career that in more recent years has been shaped by grief after the tragic loss of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015. It's in stark contrast to the earlier relationship between Cave and his fans displayed in a new documentary, Mutiny in Heaven, which tells the story of his wild days starting out in his pre-Bad Seeds band, The Birthday Party.

The Australian band landed in London in 1980 with a thud of disappointment. "We hated the place," the band's singer, Nick Cave, says in an archive interview featured in the film. "It was repellent", offers the band's guitarist, Rowland S Howard, who died in 2009.

A moderately successful band back home, originally known as the Boys Next Door, they left to conquer England and renamed themselves The Birthday Party – although they arrived broke, with drug addictions, and in a country that was as indifferent to them as they were disdainful of it. Within just three years the band would implode. But they left behind a short yet incendiary legacy and a catalogue of music that four decades on from the post-punk boom, remains a potent collection. While mimicked, their sound has arguably never been matched for its intensity.

Arriving in the UK

This whirlwind period is depicted in Mutiny in Heaven, a film that features rare and unseen archive footage, original artwork, unreleased tracks, live recordings, and studio footage of the band at work. "I wanted to create a world and drop the audience into it," the director Ian White tells BBC Culture. "To try and bottle that essence of the late 70s and early 80s." There's no gushing talking heads from fans; instead the band are placed front and centre. "When the material is that good, do you need someone else telling you it's good">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });