尼克·凱夫在地球上的兩萬天

“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.”

“我去過一次格雷斯蘭（Graceland，埃爾維斯·普萊斯利在孟菲斯的故居，現已成爲博物館——譯註），”尼克·凱夫(Nick Cave)說，“樂隊其他人都進去了，但我留在外面，在路邊抽菸，覺得很難過。埃爾維斯的最後幾場演出錄像我看過一百多遍，就是他在電視臺的演出，當時他已經病了。它們就像是十字架上的受難。”他停頓了一下。“我真是沒法走進去。”

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.”

這是二月初一個陽光明媚的上午，凱夫在柏林時尚的弗里德里希海因區一家精品店裏給兒子們買紀念品。“這個有兒童型號的嗎？”他舉着一條搭扣上刻着“偷竊癖”字樣的腰帶問道。女店員盡力讓自己看起來不是追星族的樣子，但凱夫的注意力已經轉移了。“這個可能還行，”他斜眼瞪着一對醜陋的白色毛絨雪人，澳大利亞口音裏帶着旅途勞頓的疲憊。“我的孩子們正在可愛的年紀，開始從音樂中發現美好，”他說，“他們什麼都聽，從Spotify（一種數碼音樂服務——譯註）之類的地方，有時候還能找到非常驚人的東西。但有時候我聽着他們放的音樂簡直想割腕。”

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.

凱夫以影響深遠的後朋克樂隊“生日派對”(Birthday Party)和“尼克·凱夫與壞種子”(Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)的主唱而爲人們所知，他來到德國是爲了宣傳關於他生平的電影《地球兩萬日》(20000 Days on Earth)，當時該片正在柏林電影節上放映。尼克今年56歲，可以說同時身兼好幾種角色：“壞種子”和其車庫搖滾風格的衍生樂隊“研磨者”(Grinderman)的詞曲作者及主唱；極度血腥、備受好評的電影《關鍵協議》(Proposition)和《無法無天》(Lawless)的編劇；小說家；電影配樂作曲家；演講者；劇本“醫生”；偶爾（或許幸虧是偶爾）甚至還客串演員。他的書是暢銷書；他的電影配樂得過獎；從“紅辣椒”(Red Hot Chili Peppers)到聖文森特(St. BVincent)，各種各樣的樂手都聲稱受他影響；“壞種子”最近的專輯《推開天空》(Push the Sky Away)被證明是樂隊商業上最大的成功之一，在英國獨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，我是個自大狂，”當天晚些時候，凱夫對我說。“但也是一個自尊心很低的自大狂。”他的酒店位於柏林米特區，我們坐在酒店的餐廳裏勉強交談，不時有電影節的工作人員、熟人和沒完沒了的崇拜者來打擾。凱夫高大瘦削，稍顯不利索，穿着蛇皮鞋，戴着粗大的戒指，穿着精心裁剪、瀟灑帥氣的西裝，看上去不折不扣是千禧年後登記賭注者與貴族的混合體。他的長髮向後梳去，自從他16歲後就總是染成黑色，襯托他那張既可以描述爲“天使一般”，也可以描述爲“看上去很醜”的面孔——後一個是凱夫自己在一首歌裏唱的。這樣的相貌只有長在搖滾明星臉上才能讓人受得了，尤其是到了他這樣的年紀，但是凱夫穿着這樣的衣服顯得很莊嚴，有一種無法言喻的恰如其分，就像埃爾維斯晚年穿着鑲滿水鑽的連身衣褲那樣。凱夫的公衆形象可以被稱爲“有戲劇性”，但其實“有電影感”纔是更合適的字眼。就像很多締造自我神話的人、擁有領袖魅力的人與所謂怪人們一樣，他彷彿總在出演一部只有他自己能看到的電影。

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.”

關於這部電影，我們其他人所能看到的最接近的版本可能就是這部《地球兩萬日》，凱夫與該片導演伊埃恩·弗希斯(Iain Forsyth)、簡·波蘭德(Jane Polland)合寫了劇本，之前他曾經和這兩位藝術家合作過若干音樂錄像和電影短篇之類的小項目。委婉點說，一部紀錄片還要有編劇，這種做法不算正統，不過《地球兩萬日》裏幾乎根本沒有什麼正統的東西。正如片名所示，影片是在探索時間的流逝、記憶、老去，以及藝術的生存，通過呈現本片主角，音樂家尼克·凱夫生活中虛構的一天來將這種探索戲劇化。凱夫在寫歌的時候，開始思考以天數爲單位，而不是以年爲單位來計算自己的生命，弗希斯和波蘭德在拍攝樂隊錄製《推開天空》時，覺得素材有可能拍一部電影。我問凱夫是怎樣得到“兩萬天”這個概念的，他面無表情地回答：“《地球45年零9個月》可沒這麼順口。”

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，有很多紀錄片都在探索事實報道與虛構之間的朦朧邊界，但在《地球兩萬日》中，波蘭德和弗希斯試着乾脆甩掉這個邊界。從第一個鏡頭到最後一個鏡頭，影片情節和場景都是設計好的，有專業照明，還有各種花費不菲的大製作；但是，片中凱夫的畫外音（有字幕）都是自發的、未經排練的——先是去看治療師，然後又和凱莉·米洛(Kylie Minogue)一起開着捷豹車兜風。在處理那些和凱夫的過去有關，但已經失去聯繫的人們時（比如“壞種子”最早的吉他手布里克薩·巴格爾德[Blixa Bargeld]，十幾年前突然離開了樂隊），合作導演們甚至走得更遠：在拍攝之前，不許談論相關場景。

“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.”

“尼克從來沒拍過那種平鋪直敘的搖滾紀錄片，” 弗希斯在柏林接受採訪時說。“我們決定儘可能地把現實和幻想天衣無縫地結合起來——如果你仔細想想，這就和搖滾明星與歌迷之間的互動差不多。人們迫切渴望着走入尼克在歌曲中創造的世界。當‘壞種子’演奏的時候，你四下張望，就看到尼克的形象，他是癮君子、不法之徒、愛人，是那種人羣裏所有人都想成爲的人。”

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.

影片於1月在聖丹斯電影節首映，贏得了最佳導演和最佳剪輯兩項國際紀錄片大獎，9月將在全美公映，今年夏天將有配合凱夫北美巡演的試映。這樣一部奇異的影片不僅能迷住電影節的觀衆，也能抓住美國電影分銷商的心，這也確實證明幾十年來，他這種優雅、好色、文藝、固執的浪漫人格有着廣泛的魅力，在他“流浪漢朋克”的全盛時期，即便最忠誠的歌迷也無法預見這一點。

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.”

他的同代人已經有許多漸漸淡出人了人們的視野，比如“包豪斯”(Bauhaus)和“流行組合”(Pop Group)，還有很多人則進入了只靠老歌到處巡演的煉獄，比如“仁慈姊妹”(the Sisters of Mercy)和“治療”(the Cure)；或許凱夫與他們不同，他創造出一個自給自足、條理分明的虛構世界，他和歌迷們可以隨心所欲地進入；這是一種合作創造神話的做法，隨着每一次主題的變更而深化。“如果尼克·凱夫決定創造一個邪教，”柏林的上映之後，我聽到一個女人說，“我肯定第一個加入。”

“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.”

“在我的童年裏什麼事都沒發生——沒有創傷之類東西，”當我問到他何以如此敏感的時候，凱夫回答，“我只是對可怖的東西有一種遺傳的特殊感覺。”

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·愛德華·凱夫(Nicholas Edward Cave)於1957年9月22日生於墨爾本西北部維多利亞的瓦拉克納比爾（現在這裏的人口是2745人）。母親多恩(Dawn)和父親柯林·凱夫(Colin Cave)是同一所中學的圖書管理員和英語教師，尼克後來也上了這個學校。父母很早就把對藝術的崇敬注入了孩子們心田。“12歲的時候，爸爸就給我讀《洛麗塔》(Lolita)的第一章，”凱夫說，“在他高聲朗讀的時候，有些事情發生了，他成了一個完全不同的人，他得到了昇華。我覺得自己被引入了這個祕密世界，這個由性愛、成人與藝術構成的世界。但是，與此同時，我還是個孩子，我總是達不到他的期望。他看見我在讀低劣的驚悚小說，就把它從我手裏搶走，說：‘你想看流血的身體？去看《泰特斯·安德洛尼克斯》（Titus Andronicus，莎士比亞作品——譯註）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.”

儘管（或者說是因爲）父母既出現在家裏，也出現在學校，凱夫在萬格拉塔中學只呆了一年就被除名，他對我說是因爲“經常搞破壞”。他的母親則說被開除之前他就已經退學了，但不管怎樣，離開學校對他來說不算什麼，他已經下決心要當畫家。“我小時候很有藝術抱負，”他對我說。“我喜歡酷刑、哥特和信仰方面的主題——馬蒂亞斯·格呂內瓦爾德(Matthias Grünewald)、斯特凡·洛赫納(Stefan Lochner)和西班牙畫家——我也想用那種力量去畫畫。獨自呆在一個房間裏進行藝術創作，這種行爲令我興奮。現在仍然令我興奮，把顏料塗在帆布上，在正方形的兩維框架限制內進行創作，這讓我興奮。”他停頓片刻，“這在某種程度上和創作一首歌的限制並沒有什麼不一樣。”

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.

凱夫後來去了墨爾本的一所寄宿學校，和一夥壞孩子們混在一起，他們多少控制了學校的藝術系，很快就組了一支名叫“鄰家男孩”(the Boys Next Door)的樂隊。歌是凱夫和米克·哈維(Mick Harvey)合寫的，哈維是樂隊的吉他手，性格堅韌克己、鮮明清晰。兩人的合作就這樣從1974年一直延續下來，直至度過20世紀的終點。“鄰家男孩”很快贏得了一批擁躉，人數雖少卻很狂熱，他們讓觀衆去面對極端的事物，這些東西就連“傀儡”(Stooges)和“紐約妞兒”(New York Dolls)等他們組樂隊時最重要的參照者們也不曾去探索。“讓我們去演出的只有啤酒大酒吧和（軍隊的）社團俱樂部，”想起往事，凱夫面帶微笑。演出的時候他們總會和觀衆打架，樂器的拍子都互相合不上，樂隊成員們喝得爛醉，更別說他們自己寫的歌詞，有個評論家說它們是“混合了妄想狂、精神錯亂的自我戲仿，以及神經質與醉酒的熱情”。1978年，樂隊改名爲“生日派對”，禁止他們入內的酒吧比允許他們演出的酒吧還多，他們在澳大利亞被視爲怪人。

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?”

凱夫的人生開始像“生日派對”的歌中所唱的那樣，變得墮落放蕩。他以前只是偶爾才使用海洛因和“極速”安非他命，到這時卻開始上癮，還被逮捕了很多次。1978年10月11日，凱夫被墨爾本警察局以破壞他人財產和盜竊罪名拘留，警方通知他和來保釋他的母親，他的父親剛纔在車禍中去世了。這個巧合他到現在都不太願意談起。在《地球兩萬日》中，凱夫接受晨間治療，這是片中最爲真情流露的一刻，治療師達利安·裏德博士(Dr. Darian Leader)想深入探討柯林·凱夫去世這個話題。“我當時19歲，”凱夫一副盡力去表達的樣子，“這確實來得太突然。震撼了全家人。”然後他開始變得緊張，像石頭一樣沉默。最後裏德說：“我們要不就到這兒吧？”

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，“生日派對”遷往倫敦，在那裏發行了兩張精彩的專輯《火焰上的祈禱》(Prayers on Fire)和《垃圾場》(Junkyard)。凱夫一開始不怎麼喜歡倫敦，或許是因爲在倫敦期間他大部分時間都在梅達谷的一處住所裏，忍受海洛因的戒毒反應；後來他覺得柏林很有吸引力，那裏房租便宜，有大量安非他命，樂隊曾在那裏有過幾場令人難忘的演出。“我們發現柏林是一個真正的藝術家社區，”凱夫對我說，“有拍電影的、音樂家、畫家……那裏有一種我們在倫敦找不到的包容性。”

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，凱夫經常去克羅伊茨貝格的一家名叫利希科的酒吧，那裏的兼職酒保布里克薩·巴格爾德是工業音樂先驅“倒塌的新建築”(Einstürzende Neubauten)樂隊的主唱，凱夫敬佩他激進的反商業精神。巴格爾德把自己激進的情緒帶入了“生日快樂”的最後幾次錄音之中（“他彈吉總是帶着含蓄和厭惡，”凱夫帶着讚賞的口吻說），也讓凱夫和米克·哈維產生了解散樂隊的念頭。

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，凱夫去倫敦的花園錄音室錄製第一張以他個人名義發行的專輯。最後的成果名爲《從她到永恆》(From Her to Eternity)，它比凱夫與“生日派對”和“鄰家男孩”一起做的音樂更加難以分類：是一張充滿迴響，結構鬆弛的專輯，收入七首充滿不祥預兆、沉重婉轉的哀歌，朋克當時已經變得沉悶乏味，這張專輯卻在傳達出朋克的憤怒與厭惡的同時，又避免了其中的大部分陳詞濫調。凱夫的合作者們如今自稱爲“壞種子”，這張專輯幾乎令他們一夜成名。《新音樂快報》(New Musical Express)或許是英國最有影響力的音樂雜誌，它給這張專輯的評論是這樣開頭的：“尼克·凱夫的《從她到永恆》是迄今爲止最偉大的搖滾專輯之一。”

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.”)

凱夫如今和妻子以及14歲的雙胞胎兒子住在英國的布萊頓，他的住宅看上去怎麼都不像是柏林的那個亂髮朋克住的。今年冬天我見到他的時候，他在家附近租了一個樸素的辦公室，像真正的工薪族那樣去固定辦公（“我曾經每週上班六天，後來受不了，”凱夫笑着說，“現在我連星期日都去上班。”）。

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.”

辦公室一側放着一架小小的直立鋼琴，一個麥克風架，牆上用大頭針隨意訂着一些照片，以及從雜誌上撕下來的頁面，除此之外，這個房間可能被誤認爲是一個搞錯了時代的職員的辦公室——一個大大的辦公桌、手動打字機和一瓶看來是時常使用的塗改液。凱夫的敬業精神早已成爲傳奇。在寫他最著名的一首歌，收錄於1994年的專輯《讓愛進來》(Let Love In)中的《紅色右手》(Red Right Hand)時，凱夫用了一整個筆記本描寫這首歌中想象的小鎮，還畫了地圖和鎮上著名建築的草圖，最後這些東西都沒有出現在歌詞中。“能有個地方可去，在那兒寫作，這感覺很好，”凱夫在布萊頓對我說。“我並不是總能有這樣的奢侈。”

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，凱夫初次開始了音樂之外的冒險，最終令他成爲“後朋克”一代中的文藝復興式全才：一本怪異、血腥的，帶有福克納色彩的小說，題爲《而蠢人看見天使》(And the Ass Saw the Angel)。故事發生在一個想象中的山谷尤庫洛爾，以美國南方式的狂熱夢囈，按時間順序記載了近親結婚生下的精神病啞巴尤奇裏德·尤克魯(Euchrid Eucrow)噩夢般的痛苦與令人噁心的嗜好，他對本地妓女柯西·莫(Cosey Mo)與她聖潔超脫的女兒貝絲(Beth)的迷戀，婉轉點說吧，結果不怎麼好。這本小說讓凱夫徹底沉迷其中，經常放棄更加有利可圖的工作，花了三年時間，幾乎每天都在寫作，最後才告完成。

“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.”

“這本書絕對和我父親有關，”凱夫在柏林告訴我，“他年輕時是個很有抱負的作家，文學對他來說是生死攸關的大事。我的母親最近給我看了一封他給她寫的信，內容是他當時在導演的舞臺劇，這封信感情非常強烈，寫了關於演員和預算之類東西帶來的挫折感。我覺得這種對工作的狂熱與激情非常美。到最後，你才發現他說的是一出學校話劇。是的，這本書在某種程度上像是個未完成的東西。但它佔據了我的生活，在某種程度上，對於我和我周圍的人是不健康的。一寫完它我就離開了柏林。”

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.”

後來凱夫遇到了時尚造型師薇薇安·卡耐羅(Viviane Carneiro)，接下來的三年，兩人在巴西的聖保羅度過。兩人的兒子盧克出生後，凱夫帶全家回到倫敦，開始創作新專輯，寫一些關於暴力死亡的歌曲。專輯的名字名爲《謀殺的歌謠》(Murder Ballads)，真是恰如其分。它成了凱夫的關鍵作品之一，其中與凱莉·米洛合唱的《野玫瑰在哪裏生長》(Where the Wild Roses Grow)成了他第一首打入主流電臺的金曲。這張專輯中，他也和英國另類搖滾歌星P·J·哈維(P. J. Harvey)唱了二重唱，兩人有了一段戀情，他至今還會提起，特別是因爲這段關係導致了他在1997年做出了專輯《船伕的呼喚》(The Boatman’s Call)，很多人都認爲這是他的代表作。

“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.”

“人們經常把《船伕的呼喚》和《歌中的血跡》(Blood on the Tracks)相提並論，”我們在布萊頓談話時，凱夫說起鮑勃·迪倫(Bob Dylan)那張以分手爲主題的代表作。“我得說，這對我來說太過了。我不知道迪倫是怎麼寫下那張專輯的，但是對於我來說，當時有很多不幸的事趕在一起——既有痛苦的時刻，也有頓悟的時刻——這些感覺一下子同時擊中我，就成了這張專輯，”他微笑着說。“那不是一段特別快樂的時光。至少我爲它寫了些歌。”

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.

《船伕的呼喚》中的12首歌既有凱夫與卡耐羅的分手，也有他和哈維那段短暫但充滿激情的情事，這段關係相當公開——兩人第一次接吻就發生在鏡頭前，爲《謀殺的歌謠》中的二重唱《亨利·李》(Henry Lee)錄像的時候。或許《船伕的呼喚》中簡單、坦白的歌曲令聽衆第一次去猜測凱夫那特大號的自我背後的人性，讓他從那種“《舊約》式的美國南方哥特”類型中擺脫出來，那種形象是他和米克·哈維、巴格爾德以及“壞種子”的其他成員們共同營造出來的。

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.”

在這次高峯之後，凱夫又發行了七張錄音室專輯，在三部電影中露面，寫了兩個已被搬上銀幕的電影劇本，出版了第二部小說《巴尼·芒羅之死》(The Death of Bunny Munro)；但或許那段時間裏他生活中最重要的兩件事不是關於創作。《船伕的呼喚》發行不久之後，凱夫遇到了英國模特蘇西·比克(Susie Bick)，兩人結婚至今已有15年；之後他很快戒掉了成癮已有20年之久的海洛因。正如凱夫自己在《地球兩萬日》快到片尾的地方中說的，“我第一次見到蘇西是在倫敦的維多利亞與阿爾伯特博物館。她一走進來，我多年來迷戀的那些東西，電影明星的照片，珍妮·艾加特(Jenny Agutter)在死水裏、安妮塔·艾克伯格(Anita Ekberg)在噴泉邊……世界小姐競賽，瑪麗蓮·夢露(Marilyn Monroe)，詹妮弗·瓊斯(Jennifer Jones)和波·德里克(Bo Derek)……莫斯科大劇院的芭蕾舞女演員和俄羅斯體操運動員……旺加拉塔泳池邊躺在炎熱的水泥地上的姑娘們，我聽過、看過與閱讀過的一切……所有這些色情的點點滴滴……全都在這一刻匯聚起來，成了巨大的衝擊，我迷上了她。就是這樣。”

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.”

凱夫在布萊頓過着傳統居家男人的生活，當然也有值得一提的例外。不久前的一個下午，當我們在一家名叫黃狗的酒吧和沃倫·埃里斯(Warren Ellis)共進午餐，埃里斯是“壞種子”的多樂器演奏者，留着狂野的大鬍子，是凱夫十幾年來最親密的合作者。這時一個60多歲、鄉紳模樣的男人走近我們：“對不起，請問你是尼克·凱夫嗎？”他羞怯地問道，“我剛搬來布萊頓，我是做青銅頭像的。”

“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?”

“頭像？”凱夫見怪不怪地說，好像這種事經常發生。“我一直都在找一尊真人大小的雕像，騎在馬背上的。你有嗎？”

The man stammered a bit, but eventually responded in the positive.

男人遲疑了一下，但最後還是給了肯定的答覆。

“In gold, wasn’t it?” Ellis added.

“金的嗎？”埃里斯說。

“That’s right,” Cave said, taking the man’s card politely. “A mounted equestrian portrait, in gold. Would that be in your line?”

“對，”凱夫禮貌地收下了男人的名片，“一尊騎在馬上的塑像，金的，你有嗎？”

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.

凱夫向那個看上去既高興又迷惑的藝術家保證自己會去看他的網站，之後接着進行我們被打斷的談話。之前我問他對自己的音樂怎麼看，他的音樂和最殘酷的死亡金屬與匪幫說唱一樣有畫面感，但卻和死亡金屬之類音樂不同，在女人當中擁有大量熱情的擁躉。

“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.”

“在寫歌時，我心裏會想象一個女性聽衆，”他說，“雖說如此”——他對埃里斯苦笑——“有些女人說我的音樂性感，還是讓我挺驚訝的。”

“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.”

“尼克寫的很多東西里都有女性的聲音，”埃里斯說。“尼克是個作家，你知道。他很嚴肅地對待聲音和觀點。”

“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.”

“不是所有女人都喜歡，”凱夫補充。“人們用各種東西形容我。但就連最……”他謹慎挑選着詞句。“就連在性方面最有力量的東西也總是摻雜着焦慮。如果我的歌讓人感覺只是男性化的東西，那我也不會對它感興趣的。”

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.

之前凱夫和埃里斯在附近的錄音室裏一直呆到凌晨，爲“壞種子”的下一張專輯想點子，我們的對話轉到了樂隊在最近的錄音中新發展出來的寫歌方式，這個話題讓兩人在那一刻變得好像兩個剛開始組樂隊的孩子。

“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 — ”

“我們就是不停地錄音，”凱夫突然活躍起來，把我嚇了一跳。“我們早上一進棚就坐下來，七八個小時戴着耳機，什麼都彈，不管有多糟糕。剛開始歌曲都是完全抽象的，甚至沒人知道我們在彈什麼調——”

“Well, I know,” Ellis said amiably.

“啊，我知道，”埃里斯開心地說。

“ — 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.”

“——然後就有些東西在樂手們之間發生了，我們發現了什麼，這是無法重複的。這和我之前做《船伕的呼喚》和《我們不再分離》(No More Shall We Part)的時候太不一樣了。更像我們當初一開始時候的樣子，和布里克薩還有巴里一起做‘壞種子’第一張專輯時的樣子”——巴里是指巴里·亞當森(Barry Adamson)，樂隊的貝斯手——“還有米克。”

“ ‘Push the Sky Away’ feels like a first record, in a way,” Ellis said. “It felt that way to make it.”

“某種程度上，《推開天空》有點像第一張專輯，”埃里斯說。“方法有點像。”

“Now comes the dreaded follow-up,” Cave added, not looking as though he was dreading it at all.

“現在是讓人擔心的續作，”凱夫補充，不過他看上去可一點不擔心。

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“黃狗”吃過午飯的整整24小時之後，凱夫來到AIR錄音室，它坐落在漢普斯蒂德隱蔽的高尚住宅區。凱夫坐在一把轉椅上，聽着總是喋喋不休的埃里斯開玩笑，哄勸一個18人組成的管絃樂隊演幾段他和凱夫爲電影《遠離人跡》(Loin des Hommes)寫的配樂，這是一部法國電影，由維果·莫騰森(Viggo Mortensen)主演。“我喜歡這段大提琴(celli)！”埃里斯說，凱夫聽了揚起眉毛。“你們是這麼說的嗎？”他小聲說，“我還以爲應該叫‘cellos’呢。”接下來的一個小時裏他都沒有開口。

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.

兩個平板監控器從混音室的天花板垂掛下來，裏面一遍又一遍地播放着莫騰森和阿爾及利亞裔法國演員希達·卡特(Reda Kateb)的鏡頭，他們走上山頂，說了幾句話，然後又走上一條蜿蜒的石頭路，玻璃另一側的樂手們熱情地爲他們伴奏。埃里斯繼續滔滔不絕，凱夫也仍然一言不發。他帶了一本厚厚的平裝書，裏面寫滿批註。他想爲弗希斯和波蘭德把這本小說改編成劇本。此刻它就放在桌上，旁邊隨意放着其他物品：一份特大號的樂譜，上面寫着“《遠離人際》，尼克·凱夫與沃倫·埃里斯”、《船伕的呼喚》的CD唱片，還有一頁紙，我偷看了一眼，只見上面寫着神祕的句子。字體細小，如同密碼，可能和電影改編、下一張專輯的創意、幫別人修改的劇本或者但丁《神曲》的註釋有關。根據我對凱夫的瞭解，說不定以上這些都有。

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《地球兩萬日》即將結束時，凱夫興高采烈卻又懶洋洋地坐在電視機前的沙發裏上，兒子們坐在他身邊，一起看電影。鏡頭中看不出凱夫一家在看什麼，聽對白可能是布萊恩·德·帕爾馬(Brian De Palma)的《疤面煞星》(Scarface)，不過不難想象凱夫給兒子們放《關鍵協議》或《無法無天》時的情景（“我們有‘不適合兒童電影之夜’這樣的活動”，早些時候凱夫告訴我，“我讓兒子們坐下，給他們看些明智的父親們絕不會給小兒子們看的電影，比如《活死人黎明》[Dawn of the Dead]之類的，把他們嚇得半死，這可真是美妙的親密時刻。現在我們晚上根本不放別的電影了”）這是異常動人的一幕，看着它，我忍不住回想凱夫在我們第一次見面時描述父親給他讀《洛麗塔》時的心情：“我那時12歲，有一半東西我根本聽不懂。‘我的慾念之火？’這到底是什麼意思？有些東西讓我覺得很不安。但是不管怎樣，他讀的東西讓我興奮。我知道一切都將有所不同。”