Nick Cave: the man next to Yuri Gagarin IN what other country, North Korea excepted, could an entire generation, give or take, have the same story to tell about hearing for the first time a musician's name? The musician comes from a place far away, his foreign-sounding name is mercifully short, the black-and-white photo of him flashes on a cinema screen for a moment, but we won't forget it, we are filing the name away. Nik Kayv. Sergey Solovyov's Assa - the most musically saturated, anarchic, witty, dizzyingly inventive film of its time - came out in 1987. Within four years the Soviet Union would cease and desist, but 1987 felt like a beginning of something, not the end. Assa was the first time rock music - essentially underground till then; first fully banned, then semi-banned and arguably about to reach its cultural zenith - was out in the open. Some of our best rock musicians were on the Assa soundtrack. They were the soundtrack.