A GUARDIAN, TELEGRAPH, THE TIMES, IRISH TIMES, ROUGH TRADE, MOJO, CLASH, ROLLING STONE, UNCUT BOOK OF THE YEAR And actually, what we’re talking about is a thing that’s so kind of amazing and beautiful,” Ellis says.

You have all these great people up there, Nina Simone, Picasso, John and Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, Tarkovksy, Parajanov. And there's a lot of us down there in the murk. I'm like a bottom feeder, I'm in the mud somewhere.

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My girlfriend thinks I'm a hoarder, but I collect and keep things that have this magical kind of powers about them and this book... I felt like Ellis was a kindred spirit. We both get and understand the power that can be left in objects. I have so many silly little things from silly little important days in my life that litter my home and cover our bookshelves. Things that matter to me and make me smile when I look at them. This book was a beautiful reminder of why we collect these items and of the magic they can hold within them. Ellis is not – and this is the saving grace of his book, already into its third reprint – a professional writer. He’s better than that. Those three words, “I get it.” It’s that moment when other people give you the confidence to trust and let go. Permission to let go. Often it is unspoken. It is understood telepathically. In the studio I’ve experienced this throughout my whole creative life, those moments when people reassured you with the confidence that allowed you to work to your greatest potential. Everyone getting it. To this day I haven’t touched the gum. I haven’t seen it physically since, except in the photo updates of its transformation. The beauty of others taking the baton. The last person to touch it was Nina Simone, her saliva and fingerprints unsullied. The idea that it was still in her towel was something I had drawn strength from. Like the last breath of Thomas Edison contained in a sealed test tube, kept in the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. I'm not sure what counts as a spoiler as there's not a whole load of plot but I talk about stuff from the end of the book, so spoilers)

A beautifully written book about the power of music and objects. I powered through it in two days.’ Viewed from some distance, the miniature pedestal rises in its warm-lit case like a votive on the altar of some alien temple. You could feel this real sense in the audience that she probably wasn’t going to be able to perform,” Ellis told the hundreds of participants who logged on to the event. “The first song, she was really railing against everything that was working against her.” In time, he and Cave came to be close collaborators, first as composers of scores for films such as “The Road” and “Hell or High Water,” but eventually on albums with the Bad Seeds, too.

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Such a mad, happy book about art and music and obsession. I’m so glad I got to read it. It made the world feel lighter.’ The gum ended up on display at Cave’s Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at Copenhagen, Denmark in 2019. It also brought him to the attention of Nina Simone’s daughter, Lisa. But suddenly “something happened. The shift happened. The room transformed. I could see flames … we watched her rise above everything and just give one of [those] life-changing performances.” To Ellis, the gum was a talisman, a holy relic, in which the spirit of Simone lingered. Others – a jewelry maker, a music curator, the staff at his publisher – felt a similar power in its presence, he writes. The day I handed the draft in and they said, ‘That’s it, you’re done,’ I went to clean out my mother-in-law’s apartment because she can’t come to Paris anymore,” Ellis says.

Even after he finished the book, the serendipity of the gum and its influence on the imagination continues.

The Sydney Morning Herald

If all this wasn’t enough, Ellis has just published his first book, Nina Simone’s Gum (Faber & Faber), a beautiful, haunting quasi-memoir about the 57-year-old’s early life growing up in southeastern Australia and his years spent busking across Europe in the 1980s, as well as one particular, transcendent night that changed the course of his life.