A piece of chewing gum snatched from the side of Nina Simone’s Steinway piano more than 20 years ago has become the subject of a new book by musician Warren Ellis. Best known for his work with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Ellis was compelled to swipe the gum after watching Simone perform her last ever London show at the Meltdown Festival in 1999.
The gum spent the next 16-odd years wrapped in a stage towel and hidden away as if a holy relic, until Ellis was asked if he wanted to contribute anything to Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition.
From there the gum has grown into something bigger than he ever thought - signifying how something seemingly disposable can connect people and stir one’s imagination.
Warren Ellis talking about his book Nina Simone's Gum at the Crossing Border Festival in the Netherlands. Photo: AFP
Ellis tells Kim Hill that Nina Simone was one of several people that meant a lot to him and the gum was a sort of holy relic for him.
“I was told there was a God when I was very young and I went to church and I was told the Bible stories and I didn’t really know what any of it meant and I couldn’t really visualise what any of it was. They just seemed like incredible stories to me but somehow this sense of spirituality was imbued within me and I think, somehow, I transferred that into vibration and musicians and performers spoke to me.
“The first time I heard John Coltrane, I believed, and I still believe, that I was listening to the voice of God. I put so much stock in vibration and this transmittance of what I felt was coming from music when I listen to it and I think writing the book helped me realise that any spiritual belief I have, I put it all toward vibration.”
Ellis says his father played music and, when he was around six years old, he asked his dad how he did it and his father said it was easy and took a book of poetry, started playing a few chords, and sung it to him.
“It was like the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t believe it. He gave me this key to this world and it’s that thing of taking on the dream of your parents, which definitely seemed to be the case for me.”
He first met Nick Cave in the mid-80s when he was living with a drug dealer.
“Everyone used to come around like Nico and Johnny Thunders whenever they were in town and Nick turned up and I met him, but literally from down the corridor.”
Photo: Faber
They met again in the early 1990s when Cave and the Bad Seeds were writing Let Love In and when into to play some strings for them.
“I remember it was a terrifying experience because Mick Harvey had written this string arrangement and I’d forgotten how to read and it was all really high and I can only play about 10 notes on the violin. To Mick’s credit, he spent the whole day with me and I had to play it over and over again.”
They met again a few years later through a mutual friend who told Cave that Ellis played in Dirty Three and Cave invited Ellis into the studio.
“I went in there and at the end of the day he said, do you want to come in for the rest of the week, and I’ve sort of been with him ever since… you don’t really know at the start of something when it’s going to end and what’s going to happen. I’ve been really lucky with Nick that we’ve been able to maintain a friendship over the last 25 years and also maintain a creative relationship. It’s a very special relationship.”
1999 was an important landmark year for Ellis apart from swiping Nina Simone’s gum. He also made the permanent move to Paris and got clean and sober.
“I could see that the future didn’t look particularly bright for me. I was sort of caught up in the whole drugs and alcohol thing and I had been for a good decade or more. I knew I had to make a decision. I knew I had to decide one way or another what I was doing.
“It wasn’t health for me but it was also what I was doing with music, which is what I really cared about, I was probably getting to the point where I would be unemployable soon because I was difficult to work with and unreliable.”
Ellis says he would manage to get through shows, but the rest of day would be more than one black out or even an overdose.
“I never wanted to be defined, at the time, as an addict and all that stuff because that didn’t seem to me to be my story. The work was what was important. I could just see though, with the people I was working with, that I was wearing everybody’s patience down.
“All I’d say is that ever since I stopped, that’s when the door opened for me. Things got better. I wouldn’t have had the creative life I’ve had for the last 20 years if I’d made a different decision. I wouldn’t have had the last 20 years the way I was going.”
Nina Simone's Gum Photo: Supplied
In the book, Ellis describes making Nick Cave’s 2019 album Ghosteen as the best two weeks of his life and thought it was so good he considered ending his career there.
“I’ve always been driven by this idea that I have to be engaged in the project that I’m working on. It has to feel like the best thing I’ve ever done and I’ll only let it out when it’s met certain requirements in the way that I feel about it. I’ve never put something out just thinking it’s OK. I don’t really care what anybody else thinks apart from those who are in the immediate circle working on it.
“With Ghosteen, when we made it I just remember thinking at the time wondering if Nick and I could collaborate again after that.”
The album is suffused with grief over the death of Cave’s son in 2015. Ellis says only a parent who’s lost a child can understand the grief that Cave went through.
“You can’t talk about a broken heart unless you’ve had one and the death of a child, you just don’t have any reference for. Making the record didn’t seem about that actually, that was his thing going on there, but it just seemed like something else going on in the room and making that record on a daily basis was like a revelation.
“Things just seemingly appeared on that record, like the way things came together. I remember we did the playback and Nick just looked at me said, we did it. That was all we ever said about it. I got superstitious about it and thought, how can we ever top that.”
Ellis recently scored a documentary about snow leopards and has since become very involved in wildlife protection, even helping set up the Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary in Sumatra with Femke den Haas where animals that can’t be released back into the wild can go.
“Treatment of animals is pretty brutal over there in Sumatra and there’s a lot of trafficking that goes on. When I met Femke, she had a monkey that had its arms amputated because it had been handcuffed and had eaten through the bone. When they found it, the guy had poured petrol on the wounds, nobody cared.
“They took this monkey and then they had another monkey who’d been beaten senseless and has brain damage. They had bears with no teeth. They’ve stopped trafficking over there, they’ve stopped dancing monkeys. Femke is extraordinary. She’s tirelessly worked for animal rights for 20 years.”
They describe the park as a place for animals with special needs to live peacefully.
“I guess we’re building Noah’s Ark for the broken ones. We’ve got an eagle with one leg, we’ve got two albino monkeys that were inbred because somebody wanted white monkeys. These are things that go on there. A baby orangutan, they’ll kill the mum and rip the baby off with a machete because it won’t let go so quite often they’re missing fingers or a limb.”
Ellis is planning on spending time there between tours with Nick Cave and wants to get a large sculpture of Nina Simone’s gum made for the monkeys and other animals to play on.
As for the location of the real gum, it’s locked in a safe at the Royal Danish Library and Ellis doesn’t want it back.
“I don’t want it back, its outgrown me and I have the same problem if I get it back. At the moment, it’s in a specially built box kept at a certain temperature so that it doesn’t get damaged… I want it to be kept somewhere, ultimately, where people can take care of it because its importance has grown with the publication of the book. I find that really beautiful.”
Ellis’ book Nina Simone’s Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found is out now. You can donate to the Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary here.
