Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. In conversation, Ellis is, to say, the least, discursive, given to long tangential riffs on all manner of subjects that interest him, from the celestial music of Alice Coltrane, his all-time hero, to the similarity between making music and meditation.

The absurd yet perfect story of the gum reaching back into his life and then involving dozens of people who got the power in that little clump of stuff. As she played, you could see she was becoming energised by the music,” he says, “It was one of those rare events after which nobody was going to leave the same as they walked in. He turned up to his first recording session “wearing a purple jumbo-cord bomber jacket and a pair of shorts that my girlfriend, who was a speed freak, had made for me out of old flour bags. Although by that late date Simone was unwell and in considerable physical and mental pain, Ellis documents the way she was buoyed by the audience’s “screams and adulation,” and how she began “tapping into the genius that had defined her all her life,” ultimately “[s]ummoning herself to her own rescue.In a way which perhaps allows everyone to experience a little bit of the wonder which it brought the guy who had guarded it for two decades. 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. Nina Simone'un sakızı üzerinden eşyalara, yaratıcılığa, tutkuya, takıntılara ve hayata dair çok şey anlatıyor. The latter comes up during a project he embarks on in advance of donating the original gum to the museum: having it cast in metal, the better to retain a permanent monument lest something befall the thing itself. Warren Ellis'i (Bad Seeds'ten dolayı) çok severim ama ne yalan söyleyeyim bu kitaba başlarken çok büyük beklentilerim yoktu.

View image in fullscreen Warren Ellis with his wife Delphine and Nick Cave with his wife Susie Bick in 2017. There are many more in this delightful book - as there are in life when one stops to think about it. I walked into English reading this and my teacher said 'oh cool, I love Nina Simone' and I replied that it's not really about Nina Simone it's more about hero worship, this guy from Nick Cave's band stole her used gum off her piano and got it cast in silver and put in a museum. At first Ellis found it hard to find a place for his violin in the Bad Seeds’ established lineup – “There really wasn’t a lot of room.As the audience rose to its feet as one, cheering and applauding, she stood for a few moments at the front of the stage, one clenched fist raised, and glared out into the sea of adoring faces as if ready to do battle with them. From the eponymous gum, Ellis radiates backward and forward in time, including saturated detail from his imaginative childhood, charting the development of his superstitious nature and somewhat mystical way of looking at the world, which persists to this day. I know people who would go, I probably would too (maybe not if it were just the gum but you get the idea).

In the summer of 2017, my spouse and I were visiting friends in Japan when we spotted the Australian musician Warren Ellis — best known for his work with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, but also with the Dirty Three and Grinderman, not to mention as a composer of film scores — from afar on a quiet street in Kyoto. 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. Warren Ellis is one of the most distinguished musicians in today's music and his colab with Nick Cave is just amazing.Photograph: Cyril Zannettacci / Agence Vu/The Observer View image in fullscreen Warren Ellis photographed at home in Ivry-sur-Seine, Paris this month. He recently announced the opening of Ellis Park, a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra for bears and monkeys that cannot be released into the wild owing to the injuries they have suffered from abuse by humans. What the gum symbolises and the meaning behind what great performers and artists give to people - the transcendence of music in our lives - is what this wonderful book is all about. Simone left it atop a folded towel at the side of her piano during a gig in London in 1999 for the iteration of the Meltdown festival that Nick Cave was curating. 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.

A] beautiful, strikingly idiosyncratic book - part memoir, part essay, part conceptual art project, all testament to humans at their strangest and best . With his blessing, the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester produced an intricately carved silver ring in its image and, in September, her sculpture of the gum will be exhibited in Waterstones, Piccadilly, to mark the book’s publication. About twenty years later the gum which Warren has kept in various locations (he really treasured it! Ne tik dėl milžiniško tikėjimo žmonijos gerumu užtaiso, bet ir dėl to, kad istorija neeilinė, o ir apie ją dar išgirsime.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. After that show, Ellis snuck onto the stage and grabbed Simone’s blob of used gum from her Steinway.