Warren Ellis - Nina Simones Gum

It was 1 July 1999 and I was hanging around backstage at the Meltdown Festival in London. I was the director of the festival that year. It was the Nina Simone evening. Germaine Greer had just come off stage after reading Sappho in the original Greek to a genuinely perplexed audience. Nina Simone was locked in her room and was not seeing anyone. People were running around screaming stuff at me. It was a typical Meltdown evening of genius and barely contained chaos.

Nina Simone was a god to me and to my friends. The great Nina Simone. The legendary Nina Simone. The troublemaker and risk taker who taught us everything we needed to know about the nature of artistic disobedience. She was the real deal, the baddest of them all, and someone was tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that Nina Simone wanted to see me in her dressing-room.

Nina sat in the middle of the dressing-room dressed in a white billowing gown. She wore bizarre metallic gold Cleopatra eye make-up. Pressed against the wall of the room sat several attractive, worried men. She sat, imperious and belligerent, in a wheelchair, drinking champagne. She looked at me with open disdain.

I want you to introduce me! she roared.

Yes, I said.

I am Doctor Nina Simone!

OK, I said.

I knew that I stood within the presence of true greatness, and was happy that, for a small second, I existed within her orbit and that my life would be marked by this moment. I loved her.

I did what she asked and introduced her to the crowd, and then stood in the wings and watched her negotiate the stairs to the stage it was clear that Nina Simone was not well. I watched as she walked slowly, painfully, to the front ofthe stage. She stood ferocious and majestic before her audience, arms at her sides and fists clenched, staring down the crowd. In the audience, five rows back, I could see Warrens face, awestruck and glowing as if from a dream.

Nina Simone sat down at the Steinway. She took a piece of chewing gum from her mouth and stuck it on the piano. She raised her arms above her head and, into the stunned silence, began what was to be the greatest show of my life of our lives savage and transcendent, and the last performance of Ninas in London.

The show ended in mutual rapture and Nina Simone left the stage a different person restored, awakened, transfigured and we too were changed and would never be the same. Not ever. As I turned to leave, Warren was crawling up onto the stage, looking possessed and heading for the Steinway.

Twenty-one years have passed. The piece of chewing gum belonging to Nina Simone, which Warren retrieved from the piano at the Meltdown Festival and rolled up in her hand towel, is being placed on a marble pedestal in a velvet-lined, temperature-controlled viewing box. We are in the Hallway of Gratitude, part of the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at the Royal Danish Library. As the chief conservator places the little piece of grey gum on the plinth like a hallowed relic, we are all silent, awed.

Warren has kindly released the gum into the world. He has turned this memento, snatched from his idols piano in a moment of rapture, into a genuine religious artefact. It will sit there on its plinth in Copenhagen as thousands of visitors stand before it in wonder. They will marvel at the significance of this most ordinary and disposable of things this humble chewing gum how it could transform, through an infusion of love and attention, into an object of devotion, consecrated by Warrens unrestrained worship, not just of the great Nina Simone, but of the transcendent power of music itself.

The chief conservator of the Royal Danish Library adjusts a small yellow light that shines directly onto the piece of gum, and we all stand back a little, and with held breath, watch it glow.

Nick Cave
1 July 2020