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

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On Thursday 1 July, 1999, Dr Nina Simone gave a rare performance as part of Nick Cave's Meltdown Festival. I didn’t want to get into it too deeply, but something exploded in the house when we were teenagers, and it was just irretrievable. The larger, more general thing that Nina Simone's Gum explores is creativity, friendship, and the outsized emotional value we often place on physical objects.

About twenty years later the gum which Warren has kept in various locations (he really treasured it! There are aspects of my behaviour that I assumed I shared with everyone else – the superstitions, the impulses and maybe the obsessions – but then I realised there is something a bit crazy about what I do. It has been exhibited behind reinforced glass in a display case as part of Stranger Than Kindness, an exhibition in Copenhagen earlier this year, which traced Nick Cave’s career.I want to build this big stone replica of the gum and place it in the middle of a water feature so that the bears and monkeys can play on it. It’s not a bad book, or story—it can actually be quite beautiful—but it just wasn’t for me, a random 21-year old with no knowledge of the people in it beside Simone.

I love the perversity of it, that it has become something almost sacred and spiritual, but, at the end of the day, it’s just this piece of chewing gum. The most disconcerting part was not the stealing of used gum but the pictures of texts between Warren and Nick Cave, for some reason I can't picture them using phones.She then began a performance that Ellis describes as “transformative” – both for her and the audience. And that love and care has carried the most humble thing imaginable and elevated it to the status of a holy relic. When Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, for instance, encountered the gum, "it made her stomach tie itself in knots.

And while these items and enthusiasms come and go in physical terms, the reader is never left without the sense that these ephemeral things have lightning-bolt importance. Through writing about the gum, I also found a way of reconnecting with people who meant a lot to me and trying to close a few narratives that had remained open-ended and unfinished somehow. Having picked up the titular piece of gum from the aftermath of a Nina Simone concert, the book is by turns poetic and blunt, revealing and mystifying, the book moves from Warren Ellis' childhood to the present day, touching upon his creative processes, and revealing more about the central drivers in his life. you are in the company of a person with immense joie de vivre , combined with great intelligence and vitality, who wants to pass some of it on to you . Some of those things, other than the gum, are shared here in a beautiful, simple, yet profound manner.Not from sadness --at least not the sadness that brings you down, but one that finds its origin in an uplifting, longing feeling of. Of course he would lend it – but that was when he realised how hard it would be to allow somebody else to have the care of it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The story of the gum's journey from soft palate to marble plinth is tracked, but this is also a delightful diary of Ellis's musical life and friendships, as well as a consideration of how objects become meaningful when connected to memory.