Nina Simone's Gum - Warren Ellis

 NINA SIMONE'S GUM - WARREN ELLIS

Warren Ellis is most commonly known as the musical collaborator of Nick Cave in the groups the Bad Seeds and Grinderman as well as on various film soundtracks. In his own right he has also composed solo film soundtracks and has had eight albums released of his own band, Dirty Three. In 1999 Nick Cave curated the Meltdown Festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London and Warren Ellis was obviously there too. It was an eclectic line-up of artists but the biggest scoop was to have Nina Simone perform.

In 2014 the Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days On Earth was released and in it was a short scene of Cave talking to Ellis about the Nina Simone performance where Cave mentions Simone taking some chewing gum out of her mouth and sticking it under the piano. To Cave's surprise, Ellis tells him he has that chewing gum, that after the show he had gone up onto the stage and taken it, wrapped up in a towel she had used to wipe her forehead with. 'Oh, fuck. I'm really jealous,' Cave says.

On the surface this is what Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum is all about. How a piece of discarded chewing gum gets elevated to a near religious status and the whole process of how this came about. The real story, however, is below the surface and is about ideas and how they're born and how they take on their own life once released into the world. It's about synchronicity and how one thing leads to another. It's about the magical and why not to be afraid of it. It's about the magic of life.

For good reason the book doesn't begin with Nina Simone at the Royal Festival Hall but with a story of when Ellis was five-years old and is woken up one night by the giggling of his slightly older brother sat on his bed peering out of his window.

'What is it?' Warren asks. 'Come and have a look,' his brother replies. So Warren joins him on the bed and when he looks out the window he sees the backyard is full of clowns. Bathed in light, eating hamburgers, climbing, doing somersaults, smiling, contorting, hanging upside down in the trees. The boys laughter wakes their father who calls out and asks if everything is OK? 'There's clowns in the backyard!' Warren yells to which his father replies sleepily: 'They'll be gone in the morning. And if they aren't, your mother will scare them away when she hangs out the washing on the clothes line.'

The boys grow tired and fall back to sleep and when they wake up in the morning and look out the window, all the clowns have gone. Such a scenario, of course, could easily be a nightmarish one for such a little boy but Ellis writes that he's been looking for those clowns/spirits ever since. Waiting for them to return.

Whether or not there really were clowns out in the backyard that night or was it dreamed or imagined isn't the question. Everything can be real yet unreal at the same time and that juxtaposition can often birth something other. Like a stone can be dropped into a pool of water and the ripples edge out forever. What we do in life echoes in eternity and likewise for a dream or a thought, or an idea once hatched.

Did the scene in 20,000 Days On Earth where Cave and Ellis first discuss the chewing gum really take place? Probably not or if it did then the scene in the film is just a reenactment but again that isn't the question. The important thing is the idea.

Nina Simone's Gum is a very wonderful book and Warren Ellis is certainly an interesting character. For all that, nothing can eclipse or be compared to the presence of Nina Simone who is there throughout like the sun in the sky even when reflected by the moon. The anecdote regarding her request for some champagne, cocaine and sausages backstage at the Royal Festival Hall when asked if there's anything she needs thirty minutes before going on stage is even worth the entrance fee alone.

John Serpico