Nina Simone's Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found

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As Ellis notes, the entire experience of the show grows all the more wonderful when you consider that “its witnessing wasn’t a twenty-first-century phenomenon, loaded with iPhones and furious texting while the performance was taking place. Nina Simone‘s Gum - and the way Warren collects, cares for and curates it - as a metaphor for the devotion that fanatics feel for the “divine relic”, provides a centre point to the story of Ellis’s life and connection with music and “things”. From award-winning musician and composer Warren Ellis comes the unexpected and inspiring story of a piece of chewing gum.

He recently announced the opening of Ellis Park, a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra for bears and monkeys that cannot be released into the wild owing to the injuries they have suffered from abuse by humans. Nick Cave, Ellis’s close friend and the curator of that year’s Meltdown, was still trying to take in what he had just witnessed, when he noticed a familiar figure “crawling up on to the stage, looking possessed and heading for the Steinway”. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. At the gig’s end, Ellis mounted the stage, and souvenired the gum, placing it and its towel into a yellow-and-red Tower Records bag.I want to build this big stone replica of the gum and place it in the middle of a water feature so that the bears and monkeys can play on it. Warren Ellis is an Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer, most famous for his work as collaborator and bandmate of Nick Cave, in both the Bad Seeds and Grinderman.

About twenty years later the gum which Warren has kept in various locations (he really treasured it! Marvel as Ellis’ collection of eccentric personal mementos morphs into a celebration of the intangible wonder of music. In a way which perhaps allows everyone to experience a little bit of the wonder which it brought the guy who had guarded it for two decades.The universe will guide you and these objects of intense meaning into your life and sometimes they are for you, and sometimes they are for the world. Probably if you read the book you'll think that's not that weird either, it's just that kind of book. The larger, more general thing that Nina Simone's Gum explores is creativity, friendship, and the outsized emotional value we often place on physical objects. Warren tracks the journey of the purloined gum since he folded it in the towel and carried it backstage [. I walked into English reading this and my teacher said 'oh cool, I love Nina Simone' and I replied that it's not really about Nina Simone it's more about hero worship, this guy from Nick Cave's band stole her used gum off her piano and got it cast in silver and put in a museum.

After the show, in a state of awe, Warren Ellis crept onto the stage, took Dr Simone's piece of chewed gum from the piano, wrapped it in her stage towel and put it in a Tower Records bag. By the time I finished reading, I felt as though I could say the same about him — the astonishing care he has for music, for the belief we place in other people and have placed upon us, for “[p]eople following their best intentions,” and for the way “[o]ur actions have repercussions whether immediate or years later.As she played, you could see she was becoming energised by the music,” he says, “It was one of those rare events after which nobody was going to leave the same as they walked in.