Descent Into The Maelstrom: The Radio Birdman Story

The overall importance of iconic Sydney band Radio Birdman - who cut a swathe through the Aussie scene during their initial tenure in 1974-1978 - has never been in question, nor has the calibre of their incendiary music (which has stood up wonderfully to the ravages of time). Now, however, new documentary Descent Into The Maelstrom lifts the veil and allows us rare insight into the band's inter-personal chemistry and relationships, with results that are often brutal but requisitely fascinating.

The band's genesis revolved around the arrival in Sydney of guitarist and songwriter Deniz Tek from the United States, who in a sliding doors moment moved into a Kensington sharehouse occupied by future Birdman drummer Ron Keeley (who at the time was playing in a band called The Rats fronted by eventual Birdman vocalist Rob Younger). A young aspiring medical student from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tek brought with him a love of the Detroit sound - The Stooges, MC5 et al, a fascination already shared by Younger - which, when applied to the Radio Birdman aesthetic, found the band suddenly facing a scene not used to music being so ferocious and uncompromising. Rather than disillusioning the Birdman crew, this lack of acceptance galvanised them into a band united by an ethereal ethos and group integrity, and one who approached everything with maximum intensity, a "take no prisoners" attitude that enthralled as many as it enraged.

There's great footage of the band in these early stages playing on long-defunct TV show The Real Thing so they obviously had some level of industry traction, but after being kicked out of and banned from a rising number of Sydney live music venues, the crux of the story arrives when they set up headquarters at The Oxford Hotel in Darlinghurst (which they soon rechristened 'Oxford Funhouse'). Here, in Tek's words, they could continue "their fight against the music establishment" and consolidate their own scene, which grew rapidly as people became increasingly attracted to the band's music, iconography and relentless zeal.

Sadly it seems that Birdman was not a band designed to stay the course, and soon massive internal fissures were becoming more and more apparent. As is so often the case, songwriting royalties were a major part of this - band members recount their disappointment at not only not receiving writing credits but also not finding this out until they had physical copies of the band's first album in their hands - and soon players like Keeley and bassist Warwick Gilbert found themselves feeling more and more marginalised from the creative process (in practice the almost sole domain of Tek and Younger).

There was also the elephant in the room that was the medical careers of Tek and keyboardist Pip Hoyle, who were both on the verge of graduating and becoming doctors, meaning that even during the good times, the Birdman juggernaut had an uncertain future. To compound the issue the band had a massive internal communication problem and such problems were never addressed, instead being left to fester, and the cracks in the band's once impregnable camaraderie grew wider and wider until it became impossible to go on just as their hard work seemed set to earn them a payoff.

Seemingly on the verge of international stardom after being discovered by US bigwig Seymour Stein at the Funhouse and offered a record deal, we witness the band's triumphant 1977 farewell show at Paddington Town Hall prior to them embarking on a massive UK tour. But even once in England Radio Birdman soon became fish out of water in a different sense, as all and sundry tried to shoehorn them into a punk scene they clearly didn't belong to - and which by this stage had devolved into a pastiche of the original movement, more concerned with following fashion than celebrating individuality - after which a sad conflagration of factors (largely outside the band's control) led to their sad-but-inevitable demise. The band were basically abandoned by their industry connections and left in Europe to tough it out alone as they struggled to piece together their second album in Wales, a sad end to an incredible four-year journey.

We get to experience the band's second career phase in the '90s and beyond - they're still touring to this day - which was prompted by a re-formation offer by Big Day Out in 1996 and which culminated in their 2007 induction into the ARIA Hall Of Fame, but even this renaissance eventually dissolved into more acrimonious infighting as Gilbert left the band and Kelley and guitarist Chris Masuak were summarily dismissed. A lot of people have been emotionally scarred by the experience, which wasn't so much rampant egos clashing as it was the inherent lack of communication magnifying solvable problems into massive dilemmas. The interviews towards the end display a lot of residual acrimony from the members who feel that their contributions were marginalised or unacknowledged, fissures that sadly seem unlikely to ever be resolved.

But rock bands have always been complicated beasts, and while the Birdman extended family may have proved to be a slightly dysfunctional one, none of this negativity - which is approached here honestly and not swept aside, with each member (as well as other pivotal figures such as former managers) given equal time to tell their side of the story - ultimately detracts from this tale of one of our country's most important bands. Radio Birdman paved the way for the incredibly fertile Australian music scene of the '80s and beyond, even if they never in any way would have possessed such far-reaching aspirations. Yet as Hoyle says at the documentary's conclusion, "I don't think there's an Australian sound to Radio Birdman, I think there's a Radio Birdman sound to Australia": truer words have never been spoken.