That they seem to have functioned and malfunctioned without the influence of hard drugs in that era further confounds the tale. If not the madness that came with drugs, what kind of madness did them in?

The film offers us enough clues to work out some of it, but avoids entirely the question of how the songs were written and by whom. Since this becomes one of the main reasons for the chasms that opened up between some members, you have to wonder why director Jonathan Sequeira skirts the issue.

Was this the compromise that had to be made to get all of them to speak? I suspect not, since bassist and graphics artist Warwick Gilbert speaks of his dismay at seeing Deniz Tek's name alone on most of the composition credits.

And since none of them seems to hold back in the interviews, I kept wondering when that question would come back to the charismatic and artistically driven Tek, an American who came to Australia in the early 1970s to study medicine and put some distance between himself and family.

It never does, although Tek's dominance of the band, along with singer Rob Younger, appears to be the issue that drove the break-ups – of which there have been several.