At one point during the casting of the gum into a limited series of metal pendants, Ellis notes that he feels “overwhelmed by Hannah’s care. View image in fullscreen Warren Ellis with his wife Delphine and Nick Cave with his wife Susie Bick in 2017. A unique study of a fan's devotion, of transcendence and of the artistic vocation - it's got depth and great warmth.

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. Finding an accordion in a refuse dump, he learned to play it before moving on to other instruments, all the while collecting trivia with some personal meaning. He is one of those people who makes special things happen and, as a result, to whom special things happen! Both are delightful examples of humanity in what’s been a blasted couple of years, and we could all use a bit more of that kind of thing.It’s an incredible privilege to work with Warren,” Cave tells me when I get in touch to ask him about their relationship. Ellis marshals [ Nina Simone's Gum ] approach with intelligence and charm : you feel as if you've spent time in the company of a particularly perceptive raconteur. Warren tracks the journey of the purloined gum since he folded it in the towel and carried it backstage [. That curiosity in that absurd book lead to one of my all time favorite book discoveries, a book about MAGIC, ART, and things having a life of their own. For a few decades now, I’ve been a fan, catching Dirty Three shows whenever I’m able – they’re much less common now, but just as essential – and part of the joy of those gigs is the fact that a bunch of their runtime is spent listening to Ellis introduce tunes in a rambling manner that involves drugs, God, soap, Elliott Gould and being real fuckin’ bummed about death.

I guess a lot of people must have noticed that she was chewing gum, because it was just the coolest thing,” says Ellis, “a small act of defiance that said so much about her whole fuck-you attitude.

It's a small story, but with far reaching and dare I say it, for me anyway, life changing consequences. Those charged with the gum’s care as it makes its way through the world are all affected, and it becomes a chewed baton, a sort of dental torch relay. A captivating, often moving memoir - a tribute to the power of great art wrapped in an exploration of the minutiae gathered in the itinerant life of the nomadic musician.

Some of those things, other than the gum, are shared here in a beautiful, simple, yet profound manner. Ellis includes seven of them, one after another, each powerful on its own but gaining in poignancy as they accumulate. It is a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality. Enthusiasm, obsession and veneration combine to provide a warmly human picture of both the object of worship and the author himself.Simone, towards the end of her life and in poor health, went from an apparently shaky start to a barnstorming, blinding finish. In a world where it's so easy to be apathetic and defeatist about things, I found it heartening that Warren Ellis still cares (and genuinely believes in) the magic and significance between different people, connections, emotions, moments, memories and objects. The gum remained with him for twenty years; a sacred totem, his creative muse, a conduit that would eventually take Ellis back to his childhood and his relationship with found objects, growing in significance with every passing year. 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.