Book review: Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis, musician and Nick Cave collaborator
For Australian musician Warren Ellis, seeing one of Nina Simone’s final concerts was a defining moment of his life – which is why he decided to steal her chewing gum after the show.
The central, titular thrust of this unusual book is as follows: in 1999, Ballarat-born musician Warren Ellis watched the American singer-songwriter Nina Simone perform a scintillating live set at Meltdown Festival in London.
There, with her voice, piano and band, Simone held an audience in the palm of her hand, after having requested – and received – a curious backstage rider consisting of “some champagne, some cocaine, and some sausages”.
It would be one of her final concerts before she died in 2003, aged 70. For Ellis, who was a few years into his tenure with the globetrotting Australian rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, it was a defining moment of his life.
“The lights came up and the room seemed suddenly normal,” he writes of that concert. “People were in shock. Faces wet with tears, not knowing where to look or how to speak. We had witnessed something monumental, a miracle. This communion that had taken place, between her and us. This concert that would inform our lives for ever; to have been in her presence. To watch her transformation was a religious experience. Spiritual.”
In the aftermath, something possessed Ellis to hoist himself onto the stage to retrieve the chewing gum he had seen her stick to a towel sat on the Steinway. He stuffed the gum and towel into a Tower Records bag, and later placed it inside his briefcase, where it stayed for two decades.
The way Ellis chooses to tell this story is compelling and unique. By blending prose, text message conversations, phone photographs, interview transcripts and journal entries, he adopts – and perhaps pioneers – a mixed-media narrative that keeps the reader guessing where he might turn next.
There’s a curious warmth to the notion of tracing the arc of a banal object made sublime as a result of Ellis’s zeal for it. The chewing gum in question now resides in a library in Copenhagen, as part of Nick Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition.
“Several people had said to me that they found it incredible that I had actually thought to take it,” Ellis writes. “I had never questioned my actions. For me, it had always been about the gum.”
Paging through this book, though, my sense of frustration grew as the end drew nearer, fuelled largely by a sense of omission, and a feeling of what could have been.
To my eyes and ears, Ellis has lived one of the most remarkable lives in Australian rock ’n’ roll, and it’s a shame that within Nina Simone’s Gum, we learn about that big life only in the form of snatches, snippets and vignettes.
Almost 30 years ago, Ellis began his career as a fringe figure performing in the corner of a Melbourne pub while playing utterly non-commercial instrumental music – violin, drums and guitar – with his two bandmates under the name Dirty Three.
How he leapt from dingy pubs to bowing his violin on some of the world’s biggest stages and festivals as Nick Cave’s most trusted accomplice, collaborator and confidante is a fascinating and singular story.
It’s not told here, though, or at least not with any true sense of narrative drive. It is only near the end of this relatively slim volume that we learn the reason why.
“I couldn’t think of anything more tedious than a memoir,” he writes on page 166, while discussing the origin of this book. This decision is to be respected, as not everyone has an autobiography in them, let alone every rock star.
Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant is one who shares Ellis’s disdain for the form. “Where the f..k does this memoir shit come from?” he said in 2017.
“Once upon a time we were social deviants, pushed out to the corners of society, quite often body-searched in the street by cops. We were representing a challenge to the order.
“So, do we want to chum up and cuddle up on the whole idea of going to a publisher and telling stories?” said Plant.
“I mean, what – who – for? Those stories are locked nicely between my two ever-growing ear holes. So f..k it. There’s a lot in there, and that’s where it’s staying.”
Ellis is a little more forthcoming than Plant, at least, but the frustration remains much the same. What the Australian musician has produced here is akin to building a mansion but locking all the internal doors, so that we can only catch glimpses of rooms and their contents through keyholes.
It’s a fallacy of literary criticism to review a book based on one’s desires for what it should have been, rather than what it is. But having closely watched and listened to Ellis’s extraordinary public output across the years, I felt the need to be truthful about the dissatisfaction that lingered after reading the final pages.
For Ellis devotees – and there are thousands of them, scattered across Australia and the wider world – this book will satiate, but I can’t shake the notion that Nina Simone’s Gum feels more like an entree than the main course.
Nina Simone’s Gum
Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s national music writer and author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs
