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

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Sometimes even writing it, I’d sort of pinch myself and go, ‘I’m writing about a piece of chewing gum,’” he says. “Then I realized what I was writing about, these exchanges with people, and things like that. What emerges is something not fetishistic but belonging to the stream of time, which casts ashore the artifacts of the lives it inescapably washes away, just like it will wash away yours and mine and Ellis’s, like it washed away Nina Simone’s. This flotsam of objects — the stories they carry, the past selves they carry — becomes the only time travel available to us, mortal creatures made of dead stars in an entropy-governed universe whose fundamental laws aim the arrow of time at one destination only. These artifacts shimmer for us with meaning beyond their materiality, because somewhere in the core of our being, we recognize them as our only “bright spark of resurrection.” Warren Ellis and his first violin A GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, THE TIMES, IRISH TIMES, ROUGH TRADE, MOJO, CLASH, ROLLING STONE, UNCUT BOOK OF THE YEAR A beautifully written book about the power of music and objects. I powered through it in two days.’

Nina Simone’s Gum is about how something so small can form beautiful connections between people. It is a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality. It is a celebration of artistic process, friendship, understanding and love. In 2019, as Cave began collecting artifacts for Stranger Than Kindness, a museum exhibit in Copenhagen, he asked Ellis if he had anything that might work. His narrative is punctuated with occasional lists of cherished objects. A marble made of marble gifted him by Greek singer Arleta, a small model Eiffel Tower (“of which I own more than twenty”), a particular brand of Samsonite briefcase, busts of Beethoven.Ellis’s dedication for the book reads “For Our Teachers.” He spares no praise for the mentors who have encouraged him along his way, from his aspiring musician father in Ballarat, Australia, to a guy in Scotland named Charlie who helped him level up his violin busking game in Inverness in the late 1980s, cluing him into playing folk tunes to please pedestrians and giving him “one of the first real, communal experiences that I’d had playing music.” I went to the drawer in my attic and took out the Tower Records bag and removed the towel. I opened it. The gum was in there. It looked as I remembered, the sacred heart, a Buddha. That cute rabbit in the moon bashing rice to make omochi お餅 with a wooden hammer that the Japanese see when the moon is full. Africa. The Welcome Nugget. Sometimes I saw Christ on a cross, his knees bent to the side. Her tooth print was still visible. I was both surprised and relieved to see it was there. I had often turned my imagination towards its direction, seeking counsel. Alone in my reveries. Imagining it beating in the towel. Fountaining blood. And actually, what we’re talking about is a thing that’s so kind of amazing and beautiful,” Ellis says.

Ellis: That sums it up, yeah. When I opened up this briefcase, it was like looking at my life. If I would have written a memoir, that list would have been a few chapters. ( Laughs) But I didn't want to do that, I couldn't think of anything more tedious than a memoir. I enjoyed Bob Dylan's Chronicles, though. It was a great way to get some things out, because it was incredibly generous with information that's not really at all about anything Dylan fans wanted to know. These things that sparked his interest, when he was unable to create and broke through that.

Twenty-one years have passed. The piece of chewing gum belonging to Nina Simone, which Warren retrieved from the piano at the Meltdown festival and rolled up in her hand towel, is being placed on a marble pedestal in a velvet-lined, temperature-controlled viewing box. We are in the Hallway of Gratitude, part of the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at the Royal Danish library. As the chief conservator places the little piece of grey gum on the plinth like a hallowed relic, we are all silent, awed. Warren has turned this memento, snatched from his idol’s piano in a moment of rapture, into a genuine religious artefact.’

Nervous not to “let the gum down as custodian” if anything went awry in the casting process, Ellis set out to find a collaborator he could entrust with this improbable miniature mausoleum. Even this becomes a meta-meditation on a fundament of art and the creative process, consonant with my own credo that so much of life is a matter of finding the people who magnify your spirit. He writes: The metaphysical made physical… The gum was the relic laid in the foundations of a monument being built through love and care, with Nina Simone as the goddess over all. There were periods where I never looked at the gum. Years. A decade or more barely looking at it. But I knew that it was there. Stories like this take time to happen, to develop. It’s a metaphor for ideas. It’s like a song or a film or a book. If you don’t get the idea out, it’s a crime to the idea. You need to get it out into the world and see if it has a life. The gum represents that to me. To me, it’s the essence of spirituality. And I knew that taking it out of my case and taking it to [the master jeweler] Hannah Upritchard in London to be made into jewelry and then putting the actual gum itself on exhibit at the Royal Danish Library where Hans Christian Anderson’s manuscripts are kept was what needed to be done. Finding the right people to work with. That’s the thing, isn’t it? How does that happen? What draws us to people? Or them to us? This trust that is needed for collaborations to exist. This beautiful fragile moment each creation has to pass. Warren Ellis: People ask me all the time, but there was no thinking about it. It's not something I had ever done, or have ever done since. The concert was so powerful, it was a dream to see her play. I guess I just wanted something that connected me to her, and to that moment.This book is Ellis' exploration of magic in found object, such as his first Accordion, a thing he found in the garbage; or the magic his first violin held, and continues to hold inside it and how that magic took him to a place where he could preserve a strange little bit of the Almighty Nina Simone's magic. Ellis: No, I feel relieved. The gum is kept in a safe, in a specially designed box that keeps it at the right temperature, so that the colour and the structure don't change. Actually, they don't know what to do with it, and I don't know what to do with it. But it's so beautiful. Of course I was worried about losing my mojo. But letting it go was like making a record and putting it out into the world. It got a life.

That eerie enchantment comes aglow in Nina Simone’s Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found ( public library) by Australian musician and composer Warren Ellis— a strange and shimmering book, alive with the deepest questions of what makes us who we are and why we make the life-stuff we call art, using the chewing gum Ellis once pried from under Nina Simone’s piano as a lens on memory, mortality, and our search for meaning.But suddenly “something happened. The shift happened. The room transformed. I could see flames … we watched her rise above everything and just give one of [those] life-changing performances.” I did what she asked and introduced her to the crowd, and then stood in the wings and watched her negotiate the stairs to the stage – it was clear that Nina Simone was not well. It has, I say, served him well. “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” he says, smiling. “Here I am, a guy who basically plays the violin rather badly, but has somehow managed to inspire a lot of out-of-tune violin players along the way.” Starting with 2013’s “Push The Sky Away,” Cave and Ellis have been credited as the sole composers of music for Bad Seeds albums. (“Carnage” might have been a Bad Seeds album, too, Ellis says, but for the difficulties of getting the entire band together during the pandemic.)