Episode 25: Warren Ellis On His First Book Nina Simone’s Gum

Musician Warren Ellis’ first book, Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber & Faber, 2021), is a magical journal mixing memoir, cultural history, reportage, and travelogue. The memorable title comes from the Meltdown Festival, a concert series his regular collaborator, Nick Cave, curated in London in 1999 that featured a rare live performance by Nina Simone herself. After her set, Ellis rushed the stage—not for a coveted set list, but for a piece of chewing gum Simone had discarded atop her piano, which he then preserved in a rolled-up hand towel. Ellis’ memento lived in a crumpled Tower Records bag for the next 20 years. Two decades later, when Cave curated “Stranger than Kindness,” an exhibition at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, he included Simone’s gum as a piece of sculpture cast in silver. Cave called it a “religious artifact.” In Nina Simone’s Gum, Ellis brings you along as he tracks the artifact for posterity. The book is a meditation on life, musicianship, and the importance of bestowing meaning to objects and experiences; it is also a tome about friendship, the artistic process, and human connection. To mix things up—and because Ellis was on tour—Dermot McPartland, our man in London, took over interviewing duties.