What makes an artefact?: How Warren Ellis transformed chewed gum into an idol
Nina Simone had just levelled the Royal Festival Hall.
She had swaggered on stage a few hours earlier, with a scowl that suggested she was there to box the esteemed concert venue rather than perform at it. As she sat down at her Steinway piano, she removed a piece of gum from her mouth and stuck it on a towel provided for her. She took a breath, composed herself, and then the doctor was emphatically in. Raging through a performance of true power, taking in every aspect of her career from the classical prodigy, to the jazz iconoclast, the American civil rights firebrand and the smooth torch singer.
It was a total revelation. One that more than earned the rapturous response it got. I don’t use that word lightly either. It was more than applause she received, as after she left the stage, a bearded figure with a wild look in his eyes darted onstage from the stalls, nabbed the towel from atop her piano and disappeared back into the crowd. Now, this may sound like a fan seizing an opportunity to own a part of history, principally because that’s exactly what it is. What it’s not, however, is a failure of security.
This is because the bearded, wild-eyed figure in question was Warren Ellis, famed lieutenant of Nick Cave, who had curated the Meltdown festival this performance was a part of. Thus, he was meant to be there (kind of) and had every right to nip on stage (sort of). What we weren’t to know was what came next, principally because Warren Ellis himself didn’t really know what he was going to do with Nina Simone’s gum, he just knew he had to have it.
What did Warren Ellis do with Nina Simone’s gum?
As Ellis said in an interview with The Guardian, “I didn’t show it to anyone or mention it… I didn’t think anyone would be interested, to be honest.” It merely just stayed in the recording studio that Ellis and Cave worked in, and over the years, it became something of a totem to both of them. A source of constant inspiration. In a separate interview with The Manchester Review, Ellis talked about how that piece of gum grew in significance for both of them.
Adding, “Seeing the gum all the time was like a sign that the smallest thing could become epic. Things get out of control in your head, and you just kind of build them up into something beautiful.” Despite this feeling, when Cave himself contacted Ellis for things to exhibit in his exhibition Stranger Than Kindness, over 20 years after that fateful night at the Royal Festival Hall, Ellis knew there was only one thing to give.
After all, in the two decades they’d spent together, Warren Ellis had grown to understand that what he got out of Dr Simone’s gum was a feeling that he’d got from several other things in his life. He was a serial collector, and not of anything like records or books, but paraphernalia associated with people he loved. Whether that was a packet of sweets his son chucked on the floor in a tantrum as an infant, a postcard from an ex-bandmate who passed away in 1999, or, yes, the discarded gum of one of the premier jazz vocalists of all time.
However, the more he began speaking about this compulsion, the more he realised he was not alone in this. That all of us have items that we imbue with meaning, so much so that they become a part of our identity. Or our very soul. When Warren Ellis completed a memoir about this collecting habit and why we imbue these objects with so much meaning, there was only one option for the title. Nina Simone’s Gum.