“I went to Graceland once,” Nick Cave said. “The rest of the band went in, but I stayed out on the curb, smoking cigarettes and feeling sorry for myself. Those last Elvis performances — the ones for television, when he was already sick — I must have watched those clips a hundred times. They’re like crucifixions.” He paused for a moment. “I couldn’t bring myself to go inside.”
“我去过一次格雷斯兰（Graceland，埃尔维斯·普莱斯利在孟菲斯的故居，现已成为博物馆——译注），”尼克·凯夫(Nick Cave)说，“乐队其他人都进去了，但我留在外面，在路边抽烟，觉得很难过。埃尔维斯的最后几场演出录像我看过一百多遍，就是他在电视台的演出，当时他已经病了。它们就像是十字架上的受难。”他停顿了一下。“我真是没法走进去。”
It was a bright afternoon in early February, and Cave was in a boutique in Berlin’s trendy Friedrichshain district, buying souvenirs for his sons. “Do you have these in kids’ sizes?” he asked, holding up a belt with the word “kleptomaniac” engraved across its buckle. The saleswoman was making a serious effort not to seem star-struck, but Cave’s attention was elsewhere. “These might work,” he said in his travel-worn Australian accent, as he squinted fiercely at a pair of fuzzy white abominable snowmen. “My kids are at that lovely age where they’re just figuring out what’s good in music,” he said. “They’re just grabbing stuff, on Spotify and all that, and occasionally they’ll find something that’s really mind-blowing. But sometimes I hear what they’re playing, and I just want to cut my wrists.”
这是二月初一个阳光明媚的上午，凯夫在柏林时尚的弗里德里希海因区一家精品店里给儿子们买纪念品。“这个有儿童型号的吗？”他举着一条搭扣上刻着“偷窃癖”字样的腰带问道。女店员尽力让自己看起来不是追星族的样子，但凯夫的注意力已经转移了。“这个可能还行，”他斜眼瞪着一对丑陋的白色毛绒雪人，澳大利亚口音里带着旅途劳顿的疲惫。“我的孩子们正在可爱的年纪，开始从音乐中发现美好，”他说，“他们什么都听，从Spotify（一种数码音乐服务——译注）之类的地方，有时候还能找到非常惊人的东西。但有时候我听着他们放的音乐简直想割腕。”
Cave, perhaps best known as the frontman for the seminal postpunk groups Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was in Germany to promote “20,000 Days on Earth,” a film about his life, which was showing at the Berlin film festival. At 56, Cave can claim at least half a dozen vocations: songwriter and performer with the Bad Seeds and their garage-rock offshoot, Grinderman; screenwriter of the acclaimed (and extremely gory) movies “Proposition” and “Lawless”; novelist; film-score composer; lecturer; script doctor; and on certain (perhaps thankfully) rare occasions, even actor. His books are best sellers; his film scores have won prizes; musicians as far-flung as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and St. Vincent cite him as an influence; and the Bad Seeds’ most recent album, “Push the Sky Away,” has proved to be one of the most commercially successful of the band’s career, reaching No. 1 on the UK Independent album chart.
凯夫以影响深远的后朋克乐队“生日派对”(Birthday Party)和“尼克·凯夫与坏种子”(Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)的主唱而为人们所知，他来到德国是为了宣传关于他生平的电影《地球两万日》(20000 Days on Earth)，当时该片正在柏林电影节上放映。尼克今年56岁，可以说同时身兼好几种角色：“坏种子”和其车库摇滚风格的衍生乐队“研磨者”(Grinderman)的词曲作者及主唱；极度血腥、备受好评的电影《关键协议》(Proposition)和《无法无天》(Lawless)的编剧；小说家；电影配乐作曲家；演讲者；剧本“医生”；偶尔（或许幸亏是偶尔）甚至还客串演员。他的书是畅销书；他的电影配乐得过奖；从“红辣椒”(Red Hot Chili Peppers)到圣文森特(St. BVincent)，各种各样的乐手都声称受他影响；“坏种子”最近的专辑《推开天空》(Push the Sky Away)被证明是乐队商业上最大的成功之一，在英国独立唱片排行榜位居榜首。
“As far as work goes, I’m something of a megalomaniac,” Cave told me later that day. “But a megalomaniac with extremely low self-esteem.” We were sitting in the restaurant of his hotel in Berlin Mitte, trying to have a conversation in the face of frequent interruptions from festival staff, acquaintances and a seemingly never-ending stream of admirers. Tall, gaunt and slightly ungainly, in his snakeskin shoes, chunky rings and rakishly well-tailored suits, Cave resembles nothing so much as a postmillennial hybrid of bookie and peer of the realm. His long, backswept hair, dyed black since the age of 16, frames a face that has been described both as “angelic” and “hideous to the eye,” the latter by Cave himself, in song. It’s the kind of look only a rock star could get away with, especially at his age, but on Cave it seems as dignified — as inexplicably appropriate — as those rhinestone-studded jumpsuits did on Elvis in his later years. Cave’s public persona has been called “theatrical,” but a more precise term might be cinematic. Like many self-mythologizers, charismatics and plain old eccentrics, he has always appeared to be performing in a movie only he himself could see.
“在工作方面，我是个自大狂，”当天晚些时候，凯夫对我说。“但也是一个自尊心很低的自大狂。”他的酒店位于柏林米特区，我们坐在酒店的餐厅里勉强交谈，不时有电影节的工作人员、熟人和没完没了的崇拜者来打扰。凯夫高大瘦削，稍显不利索，穿着蛇皮鞋，戴着粗大的戒指，穿着精心裁剪、潇洒帅气的西装，看上去不折不扣是千禧年后登记赌注者与贵族的混合体。他的长发向后梳去，自从他16岁后就总是染成黑色，衬托他那张既可以描述为“天使一般”，也可以描述为“看上去很丑”的面孔——后一个是凯夫自己在一首歌里唱的。这样的相貌只有长在摇滚明星脸上才能让人受得了，尤其是到了他这样的年纪，但是凯夫穿着这样的衣服显得很庄严，有一种无法言喻的恰如其分，就像埃尔维斯晚年穿着镶满水钻的连身衣裤那样。凯夫的公众形象可以被称为“有戏剧性”，但其实“有电影感”才是更合适的字眼。就像很多缔造自我神话的人、拥有领袖魅力的人与所谓怪人们一样，他仿佛总在出演一部只有他自己能看到的电影。
The closest the rest of us may come to seeing that movie may well be “20,000 Days on Earth.” Cave co-wrote the film with its directors, the artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, with whom he has collaborated on a number of smaller projects — music videos and short films. It’s unorthodox, to put it mildly, for the subject of a documentary to be given a screenwriting credit, but very little about “20,000 Days” could be described as orthodox. As its title suggests, the film is an investigation into the passage of time, into memory and aging and artistic survival, as dramatized by a single imaginary day in the life of its subject, the musician Nick Cave. While working on a song, Cave began to play with the idea of measuring his life in days instead of years, and Forsyth and Pollard, who were documenting the band as they recorded “Push the Sky Away,” saw potential for a film. When I asked Cave what drew him to the notion of Day 20,000, he regarded me dryly. “ ‘Fifty-four Years and Nine Months on Earth’ didn’t have quite the same ring to it, somehow.”
关于这部电影，我们其他人所能看到的最接近的版本可能就是这部《地球两万日》，凯夫与该片导演伊埃恩·弗希斯(Iain Forsyth)、简·波兰德(Jane Polland)合写了剧本，之前他曾经和这两位艺术家合作过若干音乐录像和电影短篇之类的小项目。委婉点说，一部纪录片还要有编剧，这种做法不算正统，不过《地球两万日》里几乎根本没有什么正统的东西。正如片名所示，影片是在探索时间的流逝、记忆、老去，以及艺术的生存，通过呈现本片主角，音乐家尼克·凯夫生活中虚构的一天来将这种探索戏剧化。凯夫在写歌的时候，开始思考以天数为单位，而不是以年为单位来计算自己的生命，弗希斯和波兰德在拍摄乐队录制《推开天空》时，觉得素材有可能拍一部电影。我问凯夫是怎样得到“两万天”这个概念的，他面无表情地回答：“《地球45年零9个月》可没这么顺口。”
A number of recent documentaries have explored the nebulous boundary between reportage and fiction, but in “20,000 Days,” Pollard and Forsyth try to dispense with that boundary altogether. From the first frame to the last, the film was plotted and set-dressed and professionally lit and has all the glitter of a big-budget feature; but, while a series of voice-overs by Cave were scripted, every on-screen interaction — from a visit to a therapist to a ride in his Jaguar with Kylie Minogue — was spontaneous and unrehearsed. In the case of figures from Cave’s past with whom he had fallen out of contact (like the founding Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld, who left the group abruptly more than 10 years ago), the co-directors went even further: No conversation about the scene was allowed until the camera was rolling.
最近，有很多纪录片都在探索事实报道与虚构之间的朦胧边界，但在《地球两万日》中，波兰德和弗希斯试着干脆甩掉这个边界。从第一个镜头到最后一个镜头，影片情节和场景都是设计好的，有专业照明，还有各种花费不菲的大制作；但是，片中凯夫的画外音（有字幕）都是自发的、未经排练的——先是去看治疗师，然后又和凯莉·米洛(Kylie Minogue)一起开着捷豹车兜风。在处理那些和凯夫的过去有关，但已经失去联系的人们时（比如“坏种子”最早的吉他手布里克萨·巴格尔德[Blixa Bargeld]，十几年前突然离开了乐队），合作导演们甚至走得更远：在拍摄之前，不许谈论相关场景。
“Nick would have never gone for a straightforward rock-doc,” Forsyth told me in Berlin. “We decided to go in a direction that combined reality with fantasy as seamlessly as possible — which, if you think about it, isn’t too far from the transaction between a rock star and his fans. People want desperately to enter the world Nick creates in his songs. You can look around when the Bad Seeds are playing and see precisely which version of Nick — the junkie, the outlaw, the lover — each person in the crowd wants to be.”
“尼克从来没拍过那种平铺直叙的摇滚纪录片，” 弗希斯在柏林接受采访时说。“我们决定尽可能地把现实和幻想天衣无缝地结合起来——如果你仔细想想，这就和摇滚明星与歌迷之间的互动差不多。人们迫切渴望着走入尼克在歌曲中创造的世界。当‘坏种子’演奏的时候，你四下张望，就看到尼克的形象，他是瘾君子、不法之徒、爱人，是那种人群里所有人都想成为的人。”
The film had its premiere at Sundance in January (it won the world documentary awards for best directing and best editing) and will be released nationally in September, following preview screenings this summer that coincide with Cave’s North American tour. That such an idiosyncratic movie would capture not just the imagination of the festival crowd but also of a U.S. distributor is testament, contrary to what even the most ardent fan in his gutter-punk glory days could have foreseen, to the remarkably broad appeal that his elegant, lecherous, literate, unapologetically romantic persona has come to have in recent decades.
影片于1月在圣丹斯电影节首映，赢得了最佳导演和最佳剪辑两项国际纪录片大奖，9月将在全美公映，今年夏天将有配合凯夫北美巡演的试映。这样一部奇异的影片不仅能迷住电影节的观众，也能抓住美国电影分销商的心，这也确实证明几十年来，他这种优雅、好色、文艺、固执的浪漫人格有着广泛的魅力，在他“流浪汉朋克”的全盛时期，即便最忠诚的歌迷也无法预见这一点。
Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries — many of whom have gradually faded from view (Bauhaus, the Pop Group) or been relegated to the purgatory of back-catalog tours (the Sisters of Mercy, the Cure) — Cave has managed to invent a self-contained, coherent fictional world that both he and his followers can enter at will; a kind of exercise in collaborative mythmaking that seems to deepen with each variation on the theme. “If Nick Cave decided to start a cult,” I heard one woman say after the Berlin screening, “I’d be the first to join.”
他的同代人已经有许多渐渐淡出人了人们的视野，比如“包豪斯”(Bauhaus)和“流行组合”(Pop Group)，还有很多人则进入了只靠老歌到处巡演的炼狱，比如“仁慈姊妹”(the Sisters of Mercy)和“治疗”(the Cure)；或许凯夫与他们不同，他创造出一个自给自足、条理分明的虚构世界，他和歌迷们可以随心所欲地进入；这是一种合作创造神话的做法，随着每一次主题的变更而深化。“如果尼克·凯夫决定创造一个邪教，”柏林的上映之后，我听到一个女人说，“我肯定第一个加入。”
“Nothing happened in my childhood — no trauma or anything,” Cave said, when I asked after the origins of his sensibility. “I just had a genetic disposition toward things that were horrible.”
“在我的童年里什么事都没发生——没有创伤之类东西，”当我问到他何以如此敏感的时候，凯夫回答，“我只是对可怖的东西有一种遗传的特殊感觉。”
Nicholas Edward Cave was born on Sept. 22, 1957, in Warracknabeal, Victoria (population now 2,745), northwest of Melbourne. His mother and father, Dawn and Colin Cave — the librarian and English teacher of the high school he would eventually attend — instilled a reverence for the arts in their children from an early age. “My father read me the first chapter of ‘Lolita’ when I turned 12,” Cave told me. “Something happened to him when he read it aloud. He became a different man. He became elevated. I felt like I was being initiated into this secret world: the world of sex and adulthood and art. At the same time, though, I was only a kid, and I couldn’t always meet his expectations. He’d catch me reading some nasty little thriller, and he’d rip it out of my hands and tell me: ‘You want a bleeding body count? Read “Titus Andronicus”!’ ”
尼古拉斯·爱德华·凯夫(Nicholas Edward Cave)于1957年9月22日生于墨尔本西北部维多利亚的瓦拉克纳比尔（现在这里的人口是2745人）。母亲多恩(Dawn)和父亲柯林·凯夫(Colin Cave)是同一所中学的图书管理员和英语教师，尼克后来也上了这个学校。父母很早就把对艺术的崇敬注入了孩子们心田。“12岁的时候，爸爸就给我读《洛丽塔》(Lolita)的第一章，”凯夫说，“在他高声朗读的时候，有些事情发生了，他成了一个完全不同的人，他得到了升华。我觉得自己被引入了这个秘密世界，这个由性爱、成人与艺术构成的世界。但是，与此同时，我还是个孩子，我总是达不到他的期望。他看见我在读低劣的惊悚小说，就把它从我手里抢走，说：‘你想看流血的身体？去看《泰特斯·安德洛尼克斯》（Titus Andronicus，莎士比亚作品——译注）吧。’”
In spite of (or perhaps because of) his parents’ presence both at home and at school, Cave lasted barely a year at Wangaratta High before being expelled (“for general disruption,” as he described it to me.) His mother maintains that he was pulled out before he could be kicked out, but either way, his departure was of little consequence to him. He had decided that he was going to be a painter. “I had huge artistic ambitions as a kid,” he told me. “I liked a lot of the tortured, gothic, religious stuff — Matthias Grünewald and Stefan Lochner and the Spaniards — and I wanted to make paintings with that kind of power. There was something about just being in a room by yourself and making art that excited me. It’s exciting to me still, this weird medium of applying paint to a canvas and the restrictions of a square, two-dimensional frame.” He paused. “It’s not unlike the restrictions of a song, in a way.”
尽管（或者说是因为）父母既出现在家里，也出现在学校，凯夫在万格拉塔中学只呆了一年就被除名，他对我说是因为“经常搞破坏”。他的母亲则说被开除之前他就已经退学了，但不管怎样，离开学校对他来说不算什么，他已经下决心要当画家。“我小时候很有艺术抱负，”他对我说。“我喜欢酷刑、哥特和信仰方面的主题——马蒂亚斯·格吕内瓦尔德(Matthias Grünewald)、斯特凡·洛赫纳(Stefan Lochner)和西班牙画家——我也想用那种力量去画画。独自呆在一个房间里进行艺术创作，这种行为令我兴奋。现在仍然令我兴奋，把颜料涂在帆布上，在正方形的两维框架限制内进行创作，这让我兴奋。”他停顿片刻，“这在某种程度上和创作一首歌的限制并没有什么不一样。”
Cave ended up at a boarding school in Melbourne, where he fell in with a crew of degenerates in training who had more or less taken over the school’s art department, and they soon founded a band, the Boys Next Door. The songs that Cave wrote with Mick Harvey, the band’s stoic, clean-cut guitarist, formed the beginning of a collaboration that would last from 1974 to well past the end of the millennium. The Boys Next Door soon won a small but rabid following, in part by carrying audience confrontation to extremes that not even their primary points of reference — the Stooges and the New York Dolls — saw fit to explore. “The only places that would have us were beer barns and [military] league clubs,” Cave told me, smiling nostalgically. A typical show might include brawls with the audience, instruments being played in incompatible time signatures and passed-out band members, to say nothing of the lyrics themselves, which one critic described as “a mixture of paranoia, demented self-parody and neurotic, inebriated passion.” By the time the band rechristened itself the Birthday Party, in 1978, the number of clubs they were banned from outnumbered those that would have them, and their cult status in Australia was assured.
凯夫后来去了墨尔本的一所寄宿学校，和一伙坏孩子们混在一起，他们多少控制了学校的艺术系，很快就组了一支名叫“邻家男孩”(the Boys Next Door)的乐队。歌是凯夫和米克·哈维(Mick Harvey)合写的，哈维是乐队的吉他手，性格坚韧克己、鲜明清晰。两人的合作就这样从1974年一直延续下来，直至度过20世纪的终点。“邻家男孩”很快赢得了一批拥趸，人数虽少却很狂热，他们让观众去面对极端的事物，这些东西就连“傀儡”(Stooges)和“纽约妞儿”(New York Dolls)等他们组乐队时最重要的参照者们也不曾去探索。“让我们去演出的只有啤酒大酒吧和（军队的）社团俱乐部，”想起往事，凯夫面带微笑。演出的时候他们总会和观众打架，乐器的拍子都互相合不上，乐队成员们喝得烂醉，更别说他们自己写的歌词，有个评论家说它们是“混合了妄想狂、精神错乱的自我戏仿，以及神经质与醉酒的热情”。1978年，乐队改名为“生日派对”，禁止他们入内的酒吧比允许他们演出的酒吧还多，他们在澳大利亚被视为怪人。
Cave’s life had begun to embody the degradation and excess that the Birthday Party celebrated in its songs. His casual use of heroin and speed grew into a full-blown dependency, and he was acquiring an estimable record of arrests. On Oct. 11, 1978, when Cave was being held in a Melbourne police station on charges of vandalism and theft, the police informed Cave and his mother, who came to post bail, that his father had just been killed in a car accident. This conjunction of events is one he still has difficulty discussing. One of the most revealing scenes in “20,000 Days” comes during Cave’s morning therapy session, in which the therapist, Dr. Darian Leader, tries to explore the subject of Colin Cave’s death. “I was 19,” Cave begins, speaking with obvious effort, “and that really just came out of the blue. That was something that kind of rocked the whole family.” He then reverts to a tense and stony silence. Leader finally says, “Shall we stop there?”
凯夫的人生开始像“生日派对”的歌中所唱的那样，变得堕落放荡。他以前只是偶尔才使用海洛因和“极速”安非他命，到这时却开始上瘾，还被逮捕了很多次。1978年10月11日，凯夫被墨尔本警察局以破坏他人财产和盗窃罪名拘留，警方通知他和来保释他的母亲，他的父亲刚才在车祸中去世了。这个巧合他到现在都不太愿意谈起。在《地球两万日》中，凯夫接受晨间治疗，这是片中最为真情流露的一刻，治疗师达利安·里德博士(Dr. Darian Leader)想深入探讨柯林·凯夫去世这个话题。“我当时19岁，”凯夫一副尽力去表达的样子，“这确实来得太突然。震撼了全家人。”然后他开始变得紧张，像石头一样沉默。最后里德说：“我们要不就到这儿吧？”
In the winter of 1980, the Birthday Party moved to London, where it released two brilliant albums, “Prayers on Fire” and “Junkyard.” Cave, who at first didn’t care much for London — perhaps because he spent much of his time there in a Maida Vale squat, going through periodic heroin withdrawal — felt himself drawn to Berlin, where rent was cheap, amphetamines were plentiful and the band had played some memorable shows. “We found a genuine artistic community in Berlin,” Cave told me. “Filmmakers, musicians, painters. . . . There was a level of inclusion that we never had in London.”
1980年冬，“生日派对”迁往伦敦，在那里发行了两张精彩的专辑《火焰上的祈祷》(Prayers on Fire)和《垃圾场》(Junkyard)。凯夫一开始不怎么喜欢伦敦，或许是因为在伦敦期间他大部分时间都在梅达谷的一处住所里，忍受海洛因的戒毒反应；后来他觉得柏林很有吸引力，那里房租便宜，有大量安非他命，乐队曾在那里有过几场令人难忘的演出。“我们发现柏林是一个真正的艺术家社区，”凯夫对我说，“有拍电影的、音乐家、画家……那里有一种我们在伦敦找不到的包容性。”
In Berlin, Cave became a regular at a Kreuzberg bar called Risiko, whose sometime bartender, Blixa Bargeld, fronted the industrial-music pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings), whose militant anti-commercialism Cave admired. Bargeld contributed his radical sensibility to the final Birthday Party recording sessions (“He’s always approached the guitar with reticence and loathing,” Cave told me appreciatively) and stuck with Cave in the wake of the band’s dissolution, as did Mick Harvey.
在柏林，凯夫经常去克罗伊茨贝格的一家名叫利希科的酒吧，那里的兼职酒保布里克萨·巴格尔德是工业音乐先驱“倒塌的新建筑”(Einstürzende Neubauten)乐队的主唱，凯夫敬佩他激进的反商业精神。巴格尔德把自己激进的情绪带入了“生日快乐”的最后几次录音之中（“他弹吉总是带着含蓄和厌恶，”凯夫带着赞赏的口吻说），也让凯夫和米克·哈维产生了解散乐队的念头。
In September 1983, Cave traveled to Garden Studios in London to record for the first time under his own name. The album that resulted, “From Her to Eternity,” was even less classifiable than the music Cave made with the Birthday Party or the Boys Next Door: an echoing, loose-limbed collection of seven ominous, stomping, meandering dirges that managed to transmit all of punk’s anger and abhorrence while avoiding most of the clichés of an already stultifying genre. The album established Cave and the Bad Seeds, as his crew of collaborators was now called, virtually overnight. The New Musical Express, probably Britain’s most influential music magazine, began its review with: “Nick Cave’s ‘From Her to Eternity’ is one of the greatest rock albums ever made.”
1983年9月，凯夫去伦敦的花园录音室录制第一张以他个人名义发行的专辑。最后的成果名为《从她到永恒》(From Her to Eternity)，它比凯夫与“生日派对”和“邻家男孩”一起做的音乐更加难以分类：是一张充满回响，结构松弛的专辑，收入七首充满不祥预兆、沉重婉转的哀歌，朋克当时已经变得沉闷乏味，这张专辑却在传达出朋克的愤怒与厌恶的同时，又避免了其中的大部分陈词滥调。凯夫的合作者们如今自称为“坏种子”，这张专辑几乎令他们一夜成名。《新音乐快报》(New Musical Express)或许是英国最有影响力的音乐杂志，它给这张专辑的评论是这样开头的：“尼克·凯夫的《从她到永恒》是迄今为止最伟大的摇滚专辑之一。”
Cave now lives in Brighton, England, with his wife and twin 14-year-old sons, in a residence that would have seemed, for a number of reasons, inconceivable to the scarecrow-haired punk he was back in Berlin. When I met him this winter, he was renting a modest office a short walk from his house, keeping regular office hours like a bona fide salaryman. (“I used to go six days a week, till I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Cave said with a grin. “Now I go Sundays as well.”)
凯夫如今和妻子以及14岁的双胞胎儿子住在英国的布莱顿，他的住宅看上去怎么都不像是柏林的那个乱发朋克住的。今年冬天我见到他的时候，他在家附近租了一个朴素的办公室，像真正的工薪族那样去固定办公（“我曾经每周上班六天，后来受不了，”凯夫笑着说，“现在我连星期日都去上班。”）。
Apart from a small upright piano off to one side, a microphone stand and a haphazard-looking collection of photos and pages torn from magazines pinned to the wall, the room itself could have passed for the office of a determinedly anachronistic clerk: a good-size desk, a manual typewriter and a well-used bottle of whiteout. His work ethic has long been legendary. While writing one of his best-known songs, “Red Right Hand,” from the 1994 album “Let Love In,” Cave filled an entire notebook with descriptions of the imaginary town the song was set in, including maps and sketches of prominent buildings, virtually none of which made it into the lyrics. “It’s good to have a place to go and just write,” Cave told me in Brighton. “I haven’t always had that luxury.”
办公室一侧放着一架小小的直立钢琴，一个麦克风架，墙上用大头针随意订着一些照片，以及从杂志上撕下来的页面，除此之外，这个房间可能被误认为是一个搞错了时代的职员的办公室——一个大大的办公桌、手动打字机和一瓶看来是时常使用的涂改液。凯夫的敬业精神早已成为传奇。在写他最著名的一首歌，收录于1994年的专辑《让爱进来》(Let Love In)中的《红色右手》(Red Right Hand)时，凯夫用了一整个笔记本描写这首歌中想象的小镇，还画了地图和镇上著名建筑的草图，最后这些东西都没有出现在歌词中。“能有个地方可去，在那儿写作，这感觉很好，”凯夫在布莱顿对我说。“我并不是总能有这样的奢侈。”
It was in Berlin that Cave undertook the first of the extramusical forays that would eventually come to define him as the renaissance man of the “postpunk” generation: a grotesque, blood-spattered, Faulkner-saturated novel titled “And the Ass Saw the Angel.” Set in the imaginary valley of Ukulore in some fever-dream iteration of the American South, the novel chronicles the nightmarish sufferings and stomach-churning appetites of Euchrid Eucrow, an inbred and mentally ill mute, whose fixation on the local prostitute, Cosey Mo, and Beth, her saintly, otherworldly daughter, does not, to put it mildly, turn out well. The novel obsessed Cave completely, often at the expense of more lucrative work, and took him three years of almost daily effort to finish.
在柏林，凯夫初次开始了音乐之外的冒险，最终令他成为“后朋克”一代中的文艺复兴式全才：一本怪异、血腥的，带有福克纳色彩的小说，题为《而蠢人看见天使》(And the Ass Saw the Angel)。故事发生在一个想象中的山谷尤库洛尔，以美国南方式的狂热梦呓，按时间顺序记载了近亲结婚生下的精神病哑巴尤奇里德·尤克鲁(Euchrid Eucrow)噩梦般的痛苦与令人恶心的嗜好，他对本地妓女柯西·莫(Cosey Mo)与她圣洁超脱的女儿贝丝(Beth)的迷恋，婉转点说吧，结果不怎么好。这本小说让凯夫彻底沉迷其中，经常放弃更加有利可图的工作，花了三年时间，几乎每天都在写作，最后才告完成。
“It definitely had something to do with my father, that book,” Cave told me in Berlin. “He was an aspiring writer himself as a young man, and literature was a matter of life or death to him. My mother recently showed me a letter he wrote her, about this theater piece he was directing, and it’s written with such intensity — his frustrations with the actors and with the budget and so on. There’s this mania and enthusiasm for the work that’s very beautiful to me. Then, at the end, you find out he’s talking about a school play. So, yeah, the book may have felt on some level like unfinished business. But it took over my life in a way that wasn’t healthy, for me or the people around me. And as soon as I’d finished it, I left Berlin.”
“这本书绝对和我父亲有关，”凯夫在柏林告诉我，“他年轻时是个很有抱负的作家，文学对他来说是生死攸关的大事。我的母亲最近给我看了一封他给她写的信，内容是他当时在导演的舞台剧，这封信感情非常强烈，写了关于演员和预算之类东西带来的挫折感。我觉得这种对工作的狂热与激情非常美。到最后，你才发现他说的是一出学校话剧。是的，这本书在某种程度上像是个未完成的东西。但它占据了我的生活，在某种程度上，对于我和我周围的人是不健康的。一写完它我就离开了柏林。”
Cave spent the next three years in São Paulo, Brazil, where he moved after meeting the fashion stylist Viviane Carneiro. Shortly after the birth of their son, Luke, Cave returned to London with his family and began to work on a new album, comprising songs about violent death. The album — titled, appropriately enough, “Murder Ballads” — would prove a pivotal one in Cave’s career, furnishing him with his first mainstream radio hit (“Where the Wild Roses Grow,” featuring Kylie Minogue), and propelling him, by way of a duet with the British alt-rock star P. J. Harvey, into a relationship with which he is associated to this day, not least because it resulted, in 1997, in what many regard as his masterpiece: “The Boatman’s Call.”
后来凯夫遇到了时尚造型师薇薇安·卡耐罗(Viviane Carneiro)，接下来的三年，两人在巴西的圣保罗度过。两人的儿子卢克出生后，凯夫带全家回到伦敦，开始创作新专辑，写一些关于暴力死亡的歌曲。专辑的名字名为《谋杀的歌谣》(Murder Ballads)，真是恰如其分。它成了凯夫的关键作品之一，其中与凯莉·米洛合唱的《野玫瑰在哪里生长》(Where the Wild Roses Grow)成了他第一首打入主流电台的金曲。这张专辑中，他也和英国另类摇滚歌星P·J·哈维(P. J. Harvey)唱了二重唱，两人有了一段恋情，他至今还会提起，特别是因为这段关系导致了他在1997年做出了专辑《船夫的呼唤》(The Boatman’s Call)，很多人都认为这是他的代表作。
“People often compare ‘Boatman’s Call’ with ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ ” Cave told me during one of our conversations in Brighton, referring to Bob Dylan’s breakup-themed magnum opus. “Too much for my liking, I have to say. I’ve got no idea what led Dylan to make that album, but in my case, there was a coming together of a particular bunch of unfortunate events — brokenhearted moments but epiphanies, as well — that hit me all at once and became what the record was about.” He smiled. “Not a happy time, particularly. At least I got some songs out of it.”
“人们经常把《船夫的呼唤》和《歌中的血迹》(Blood on the Tracks)相提并论，”我们在布莱顿谈话时，凯夫说起鲍勃·迪伦(Bob Dylan)那张以分手为主题的代表作。“我得说，这对我来说太过了。我不知道迪伦是怎么写下那张专辑的，但是对于我来说，当时有很多不幸的事赶在一起——既有痛苦的时刻，也有顿悟的时刻——这些感觉一下子同时击中我，就成了这张专辑，”他微笑着说。“那不是一段特别快乐的时光。至少我为它写了些歌。”
The 12 tracks on “The Boatman’s Call” chronicle both the dissolution of Cave’s relationship with Carneiro and the arc of his brief but passionate love affair with Harvey, which played out very much in public: The couple’s first kiss took place on camera, during the filming of their “Murder Ballads” duet, “Henry Lee.” The album’s spare, candid songs allowed a listener, perhaps for the first time, to guess at the human being behind Cave’s outsize persona and freed him from the restrictions of the “Old Testament by way of Southern gothic” genre that he, with a good deal of help from Mick Harvey, Bargeld and the rest of the Bad Seeds, had invented.
《船夫的呼唤》中的12首歌既有凯夫与卡耐罗的分手，也有他和哈维那段短暂但充满激情的情事，这段关系相当公开——两人第一次接吻就发生在镜头前，为《谋杀的歌谣》中的二重唱《亨利·李》(Henry Lee)录像的时候。或许《船夫的呼唤》中简单、坦白的歌曲令听众第一次去猜测凯夫那特大号的自我背后的人性，让他从那种“《旧约》式的美国南方哥特”类型中摆脱出来，那种形象是他和米克·哈维、巴格尔德以及“坏种子”的其他成员们共同营造出来的。
Since that high-water mark, Cave has released seven studio albums, appeared in three films, written two produced screenplays and published a second novel, “The Death of Bunny Munro”; but possibly the two most pivotal events in that time stand apart from his creative life. Shortly after the release of “The Boatman’s Call,” Cave met the British model Susie Bick, to whom he has now been married for a decade and a half, and he soon kicked heroin for good after more than 20 years of addiction. As Cave himself puts it, in a recording featured near the end of “20,000 Days”: “The first time I saw Susie was at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. And when she came walking in, all the things that I have obsessed over for all the years, pictures of movie stars, Jenny Agutter in the billabong, Anita Ekberg in the fountain . . . Miss World competitions, Marilyn Monroe and Jennifer Jones and Bo Derek . . . Bolshoi ballerinas and Russian gymnasts . . . the young girls at the Wangaratta pool lying on the hot concrete, all the stuff I had heard and seen and read . . . all the continuing never-ending drip-feed of erotic data . . . came together at that moment, in one great big crash bang, and I was lost to her. And that was that.”
在这次高峰之后，凯夫又发行了七张录音室专辑，在三部电影中露面，写了两个已被搬上银幕的电影剧本，出版了第二部小说《巴尼·芒罗之死》(The Death of Bunny Munro)；但或许那段时间里他生活中最重要的两件事不是关于创作。《船夫的呼唤》发行不久之后，凯夫遇到了英国模特苏西·比克(Susie Bick)，两人结婚至今已有15年；之后他很快戒掉了成瘾已有20年之久的海洛因。正如凯夫自己在《地球两万日》快到片尾的地方中说的，“我第一次见到苏西是在伦敦的维多利亚与阿尔伯特博物馆。她一走进来，我多年来迷恋的那些东西，电影明星的照片，珍妮·艾加特(Jenny Agutter)在死水里、安妮塔·艾克伯格(Anita Ekberg)在喷泉边……世界小姐竞赛，玛丽莲·梦露(Marilyn Monroe)，詹妮弗·琼斯(Jennifer Jones)和波·德里克(Bo Derek)……莫斯科大剧院的芭蕾舞女演员和俄罗斯体操运动员……旺加拉塔泳池边躺在炎热的水泥地上的姑娘们，我听过、看过与阅读过的一切……所有这些色情的点点滴滴……全都在这一刻汇聚起来，成了巨大的冲击，我迷上了她。就是这样。”
Cave’s life in Brighton is that of a conventional family man, with certain noteworthy exceptions. On a recent afternoon, we were having lunch in a pub called the Ginger Dog with Warren Ellis — the Bad Seeds’ wild-bearded multi-instrumentalist and Cave’s closest collaborator for more than a decade — when a tweedy-looking man in his 60s approached us. “Excuse me, but are you Nick Cave?” he asked bashfully. “I’ve just moved to Brighton, you see, and I do bronze heads.”
凯夫在布莱顿过着传统居家男人的生活，当然也有值得一提的例外。不久前的一个下午，当我们在一家名叫黄狗的酒吧和沃伦·埃里斯(Warren Ellis)共进午餐，埃里斯是“坏种子”的多乐器演奏者，留着狂野的大胡子，是凯夫十几年来最亲密的合作者。这时一个60多岁、乡绅模样的男人走近我们：“对不起，请问你是尼克·凯夫吗？”他羞怯地问道，“我刚搬来布莱顿，我是做青铜头像的。”
“Heads?” Cave said matter of factly, as though this sort of thing happened on a regular basis. “I’ve been looking to get a life-size portrait done, on horseback. You couldn’t do that?”
“头像？”凯夫见怪不怪地说，好像这种事经常发生。“我一直都在找一尊真人大小的雕像，骑在马背上的。你有吗？”
The man stammered a bit, but eventually responded in the positive.
男人迟疑了一下，但最后还是给了肯定的答复。
“In gold, wasn’t it?” Ellis added.
“金的吗？”埃里斯说。
“That’s right,” Cave said, taking the man’s card politely. “A mounted equestrian portrait, in gold. Would that be in your line?”
“对，”凯夫礼貌地收下了男人的名片，“一尊骑在马上的塑像，金的，你有吗？”
After assuring the artist, who looked pleased, but bewildered, that he would visit his website, Cave took up the conversation where we left off. I had asked why he thought his music, which can be as graphic as the most brutal death metal or gangsta rap, has always found, in marked contrast to, say, death metal, such a wide and passionate following among women.
凯夫向那个看上去既高兴又迷惑的艺术家保证自己会去看他的网站，之后接着进行我们被打断的谈话。之前我问他对自己的音乐怎么看，他的音乐和最残酷的死亡金属与匪帮说唱一样有画面感，但却和死亡金属之类音乐不同，在女人当中拥有大量热情的拥趸。
“I have a female audience in my mind when I write,” he said. “That being said” — he smiled wryly at Ellis — “I’m often flabbergasted by what some women find sexy in my music.”
“在写歌时，我心里会想象一个女性听众，”他说，“虽说如此”——他对埃里斯苦笑——“有些女人说我的音乐性感，还是让我挺惊讶的。”
“In a lot of what Nick writes, there’s a woman’s voice in there,” Ellis said. “Nick’s a writer, you know? He takes things like voice and point of view seriously.”
“尼克写的很多东西里都有女性的声音，”埃里斯说。“尼克是个作家，你知道。他很严肃地对待声音和观点。”
“Not all women like it,” Cave added. “I’ve been called all sorts of things. But even the material that’s the most. . . . ” He cast about for the word. “The most forceful sexually, it’s always riddled with anxiety. If my songs came off as just a male thing, I wouldn’t have any interest in that whatsoever.”
“不是所有女人都喜欢，”凯夫补充。“人们用各种东西形容我。但就连最……”他谨慎挑选着词句。“就连在性方面最有力量的东西也总是掺杂着焦虑。如果我的歌让人感觉只是男性化的东西，那我也不会对它感兴趣的。”
Cave and Ellis had been up until the wee hours in a nearby studio, trying out ideas for the Bad Seeds’ next album, and the talk turned to a new songwriting method that the band developed over the course of their most recent recordings, a topic that made them both seem, in that instant, like two boys who had just started their first band.
之前凯夫和埃里斯在附近的录音室里一直呆到凌晨，为“坏种子”的下一张专辑想点子，我们的对话转到了乐队在最近的录音中新发展出来的写歌方式，这个话题让两人在那一刻变得好像两个刚开始组乐队的孩子。
“What we do is we record nonstop,” said Cave, with a sudden animation that surprised me. “We go in in the morning, and we just sit there for seven or eight hours with headphones on and just play anything, no matter how awful. The songs are completely abstract when we start; no one even knows what key we’re in — ”
“我们就是不停地录音，”凯夫突然活跃起来，把我吓了一跳。“我们早上一进棚就坐下来，七八个小时戴着耳机，什么都弹，不管有多糟糕。刚开始歌曲都是完全抽象的，甚至没人知道我们在弹什么调——”
“Well, I know,” Ellis said amiably.
“啊，我知道，”埃里斯开心地说。
“ — and there’s something going on between the musicians, about discovering something, that can be impossible to repeat. It couldn’t be more different from the way I wrote for some of my earlier albums, like ‘The Boatman’s Call’ or ‘No More Shall We Part.’ It’s more the way we did it back at the beginning, making the first Bad Seeds record with Blixa and Barry” — Adamson, bassist for the group — “and Mick.”
“——然后就有些东西在乐手们之间发生了，我们发现了什么，这是无法重复的。这和我之前做《船夫的呼唤》和《我们不再分离》(No More Shall We Part)的时候太不一样了。更像我们当初一开始时候的样子，和布里克萨还有巴里一起做‘坏种子’第一张专辑时的样子”——巴里是指巴里·亚当森(Barry Adamson)，乐队的贝斯手——“还有米克。”
“ ‘Push the Sky Away’ feels like a first record, in a way,” Ellis said. “It felt that way to make it.”
“某种程度上，《推开天空》有点像第一张专辑，”埃里斯说。“方法有点像。”
“Now comes the dreaded follow-up,” Cave added, not looking as though he was dreading it at all.
“现在是让人担心的续作，”凯夫补充，不过他看上去可一点不担心。
Exactly 24 hours after our lunch at the Ginger Dog, Cave was reclining in a swivel chair in the gleaming, walnut-paneled control room of AIR Studios in the discreetly upscale Hampstead neighborhood, listening to the ever-voluble Ellis joking and cajoling an 18-piece orchestra into playing the score the two of them wrote for the film “Loin des Hommes” (a French production starring Viggo Mortensen) with just an iota more bite. “I love what the celli are doing!” Ellis said at one point, which caused Cave to arch an eyebrow. “Is that how you say it?” he murmured. “I’d always thought it was cellos.” This was practically all he said for the next hour.
在“黄狗”吃过午饭的整整24小时之后，凯夫来到AIR录音室，它坐落在汉普斯蒂德隐蔽的高尚住宅区。凯夫坐在一把转椅上，听着总是喋喋不休的埃里斯开玩笑，哄劝一个18人组成的管弦乐队演几段他和凯夫为电影《远离人迹》(Loin des Hommes)写的配乐，这是一部法国电影，由维果·莫腾森(Viggo Mortensen)主演。“我喜欢这段大提琴(celli)！”埃里斯说，凯夫听了扬起眉毛。“你们是这么说的吗？”他小声说，“我还以为应该叫‘cellos’呢。”接下来的一个小时里他都没有开口。
Over and over, on two large flat-screen monitors suspended from the mixing-room ceiling, Mortensen and his co-star, the French-Algerian actor Reda Kateb, walked to the crest of a hill, exchanged a few words, then made their way down a winding stone path, to the fervent accompaniment of the musicians on the far side of the glass. While Ellis talked a blue streak, Cave maintained his remove. He’d brought a heavily annotated paperback with him: a copy of a novel he was considering adapting into a screenplay for Forsyth and Pollard. Beside it on the table, in no discernible order, lay an oversize copy of the score (“Loin des Hommes, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis”), a CD of “The Boatman’s Call” and a page of mysterious notes that I allowed myself to sneak a glance at. They were attenuated and cryptic and either had to do with the film adaptation, ideas for the next album, a screenplay he was currently script-doctoring or an exegesis of Dante’s “Inferno.” Based on what I knew of Cave, it might easily have been all of the above.
两个平板监控器从混音室的天花板垂挂下来，里面一遍又一遍地播放着莫腾森和阿尔及利亚裔法国演员希达·卡特(Reda Kateb)的镜头，他们走上山顶，说了几句话，然后又走上一条蜿蜒的石头路，玻璃另一侧的乐手们热情地为他们伴奏。埃里斯继续滔滔不绝，凯夫也仍然一言不发。他带了一本厚厚的平装书，里面写满批注。他想为弗希斯和波兰德把这本小说改编成剧本。此刻它就放在桌上，旁边随意放着其他物品：一份特大号的乐谱，上面写着“《远离人际》，尼克·凯夫与沃伦·埃里斯”、《船夫的呼唤》的CD唱片，还有一页纸，我偷看了一眼，只见上面写着神秘的句子。字体细小，如同密码，可能和电影改编、下一张专辑的创意、帮别人修改的剧本或者但丁《神曲》的注释有关。根据我对凯夫的了解，说不定以上这些都有。
As “20,000 Days On Earth” nears its end, Cave slouches happily on the couch in front of the TV, his sons on either side of him, watching a movie. The viewer can’t see what the Cave clan is watching —— judging by the dialogue, it could be Brian De Palma’s “Scarface,” but it isn’t hard to imagine Cave screening “The Proposition” or “Lawless” for his boys. (“We used to have something called inappropriate-film night,” Cave told me earlier. “I’d sit my boys down and show them something no sane father would ever show his young sons — ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ something that scared the hell out of them — and it was a wonderful bonding moment. Now there’s no other kind of film night at all.”) It’s an oddly affecting scene, and watching it, I couldn’t help thinking back to something Cave said at our first meeting, describing his emotions when his own father read to him from “Lolita”: “I was 12 years old at the time, so I didn’t understand half of what I was hearing. ‘Fire of my loins’? What on earth did that mean? And some of it made me very uneasy. But more than anything else, the words he was reading excited me. I knew nothing would ever be the same.”
在《地球两万日》即将结束时，凯夫兴高采烈却又懒洋洋地坐在电视机前的沙发里上，儿子们坐在他身边，一起看电影。镜头中看不出凯夫一家在看什么，听对白可能是布莱恩·德·帕尔马(Brian De Palma)的《疤面煞星》(Scarface)，不过不难想象凯夫给儿子们放《关键协议》或《无法无天》时的情景（“我们有‘不适合儿童电影之夜’这样的活动”，早些时候凯夫告诉我，“我让儿子们坐下，给他们看些明智的父亲们绝不会给小儿子们看的电影，比如《活死人黎明》[Dawn of the Dead]之类的，把他们吓得半死，这可真是美妙的亲密时刻。现在我们晚上根本不放别的电影了”）这是异常动人的一幕，看着它，我忍不住回想凯夫在我们第一次见面时描述父亲给他读《洛丽塔》时的心情：“我那时12岁，有一半东西我根本听不懂。‘我的欲念之火？’这到底是什么意思？有些东西让我觉得很不安。但是不管怎样，他读的东西让我兴奋。我知道一切都将有所不同。”