Cities, Suburbs, Towns and Islands with Warren Ellis
I was sitting in my bedroom in Newport, Melbourne reading Warren Ellis’ book, Nina Simone’s Gum, when I read the words ‘I was playing the flute in my bedroom in Newport, Melbourne, with my eyes closed’.
Newport? I was shocked. Why did he live in Newport? No one lives in Newport. It’s a random sleepy suburb in Melbourne’s west. People who have lived in Melbourne their whole lives don’t even know where it is. I had never read about it in any book, nor did I ever think I ever would. Yet here I was reading about it through the voice of Warren Ellis, in complete awe.
Warren went on to speak about an experience he had with Beethoven’s ghost in that Newport house, it was one of many experiences he has had with the supernatural. Sat in the dark using my phone torch to see the page, I felt as if I had just experienced the supernatural in a sense. The author of this book, the esteemed musician Warren Ellis, lived down the road from me and I’m reading about him at my age doing something that is so similar to what I was doing at that moment. Just 35 years before me.
Since then, I wanted to know more about Warren’s time in the suburb. The suburb that I grew up in, the suburb my father has lived his entire life in, the suburb I hardly know anyone from despite living there for 23 years. I finally got the chance to talk to Warren about it and I thought it would be a perfect time to talk to him about his relationship with a few other places that mean something special to him.
Before we get into the interview, I want to say that Nina Simone’s Gum is an incredible book that I would highly recommend reading and if you’d like to hear more about the book Warren speaks about it in depth in the great interview he did with Jesse Pearson for the Apology Podcast, you can listen to that here.
I grew up in Newport, the suburb in Melbourne’s west. You wrote in your book, Nina Simone’s Gum, that you spent some time living in the suburb. What was your time living in Newport like?
Newport, over the Westgate Bridge! I did spend some time there, about twelve months. I was a student in those days, I was doing a Bachelor of Education at Melbourne State College. I think it was my final year, so I was living. I was going out to see lots of bands and driving out in this green Datsun car that I had over the Westgate Bridge every day. I love that drive over the Westgate Bridge, it is still one of my favourite drives. I wasn’t heavily involved with the community in Newport, I don’t even think I went out into Newport at all.
I was living in this house with a friend of mine, her grandmother died, and she inherited the house. I moved into her grandmother’s room and basically all I did was put fresh sheets on top of the bed and the rest of the room was still like her grandmother was still there [laughs]. It was kind of weird and funny. It was an old weatherboard house; it was falling down. We didn’t have hot water, I remember that. This woman lived like that with no hot water. If you wanted to have a warm bath you had to boil water and tip it over your head. It was quite complex to have a shower. I remember I used to shower a lot at friend’s places or not at all. It was quite rudimentary; it was hard in winter. It was a bit like touring with the Dirty Three in the nineties.
Just rouge and rough.
[Laughs] exactly, it was rouge. There was a record player in the living room, and it was the year that The Firstborn is Dead came out, because I remember listening to the record a lot. It would’ve been 1985.
I didn’t spend much time in Newport though.
Well, no one does.
Don’t they? I thought it kind of changed.
I spend most of my time doing the drive over the Westgate bridge everyday too.
Okay, okay. I thought Newport was more cosmopolitan and gentrified these days.
It is, but there’s still not a lot going on here.
The last time I remember driving through there it seemed like a really lovely little sleepy town with an old pub on the water.
In those days it felt very apart from Melbourne. In the early eighties it seemed just as far as Ballarat even though it is so much closer to the city.
“It’s where I was born. It’s where I’m from. It’s the place that formed me.”
It is funny you say that because I feel quite similar. All my friends live on the other side of the city, and I spend most of my time there, so I feel detached to an extent living in Newport.
I couldn’t have lived there without a car, that’s for sure.
Oh, definitely. It helps so much having the car. You grew up in Ballarat and you spent a bit of time there over the last summer. What does the town mean to you now?
It’s where I was born. It’s where I’m from. It’s the place that formed me. It’s only been recently where I have come to understand that it took me a lot of time to be able to embrace the place again, because I felt like a lot of my life was aimed at not going back there or getting out of there. I guess that is youth, right? You want to move and evolve. When I went back and played with The Bad Seeds, I saw it through other people’s eyes, and it made me realise it is a really beautiful town. Something for me that has come with age is compassion and understanding of things and I am able to feel that to Ballarat now. I spent quite a bit of time there with my dad when he was ill, and I found that I really like the place. It has shifted and I have become very fond of the place. I even have an ‘I love Ballarat’ sticker on my suitcase now, I would’ve never thought I’d have that.
It's funny, it is a place where I don’t even know the names of streets, but I just know it on autopilot. It is where some of my deepest memories are, good and bad. These days I have a lot more fondness for the place. Really, I think my issue with the place was that when I was young, I wanted to be anywhere but where I was. It made me realise that being born there made me want to get out and see the world, particularly, as I was away from the city. If I grew up in a big city, I think I would’ve had a different relationship with cities than I have from growing up in Ballarat. I always thought being born in a place like that was good because it made me hungry, and it made me want to explore things, there was plenty of room for that and it was very wild back then. I didn’t have to go very far, and I was out in the country. It took a while but now I can appreciate where I was born.
Yeah, definitely. It is quite a nice town, too.
Well, it seems gentrified these days, who would’ve thought [laughs].
I know and now people are moving to the country from the city.
Yeah, I think that’s just the way it goes because sometimes you need more space in life and these days you can work from anywhere, so you don’t have to be in the city to work there.
That is true. I have a few cities I’d like to ask you about, the first one is Edinburgh. What is your relationship with the city?
In the late eighties I went on a doomed trip there. I went over there to meet this person I had fallen in love with, but it never happened. So, I found myself in Scotland with my violin busking in the streets for about a month. It was in the middle of winter, and it was rather raw. My memory of it is actually pretty fond. It was at a point of time in my life, which looking back now I can see that I had quite a major breakdown. I got severely depressed, and I didn’t realise it. I was broken hearted. I had my violin and playing music was this sort of tonic that helped me navigate this thing that I was too proud to acknowledge happened. I didn’t really know what was going on with me, so I just barrelled through. It was definitely a place where the penny popped with me and I realised that music had this healing force within me and I knew that from listening to music, but I didn’t know that it was from playing music, it was in my early twenties. I realised that it had this healing force, and it wasn’t so much at the time I realised that, but it was later on looking back. It was this pivotal moment for me in my life in Edinburgh.
The next city is London, what is your relationship with the city?
Half my life is associated with London, I have been going there since the early nineties and lived there off and on. For me it’s a place of work, I work with Nick a lot there, I do a lot of my scores there. I love the city and the look of it. My life became kind of split between Paris and London in the late nineties. Paris was more my domestic and family life, London was work. There is an excitement when going to London because it means I am working. I am very lucky that I do something that I love as my profession. I still feel an excitement getting on the train, travelling to London. And they’ve got fish and chips
Are you missing fish and chips while you’re in Paris?
Well no. It depends on who you talk to, but I think that in Australia the fish and chips are superior, but I do like to have the fish and chips when I’m in London.
[Laughs] What’s your relationship with Paris?
This is where I have lived most of my life, I have been here 29 years and I am 59, so that is about half my life. It is home. The thing about Paris is it doesn’t matter how long I’ve lived here it always looks beautiful and always the right amount of beautiful. I really like French people; it’s taken me a while [laughs]. In terms of learning the language especially, to have those connections with people. It took me a while to get used to living here but I do really love living here.
What drew you to Paris originally?
I was touring America and I met my future wife in New York. She is French and was moving back, so I moved with her. Then that kicked off that part of my life.
The last place I wanted to ask about was Sumatra and your wildlife sanctuary you have there?
If you ask me what I think about, interestingly I think of peace and calmness. I went there last year, and I had the most extraordinary experience there. I was living in the jungle. It was a bit like being in lockdown, in the sense of when lockdown happened and suddenly you couldn’t do anything, and you had to look at things in a different way. I had that feeling when I went there because when you get there you have just committed yourself to the environment.
How did you get involved with the sanctuary?
During the lockdown I wanted to put back in. I would donate to charities when I could, but I got to a point where I wanted to put something back in. I feel very lucky with the career part of my life, you know, for a lot of my life I have done the thing that I love, and I just felt this desire to put back into the system beyond what I do with music. I was introduced to Femke by a friend of mine who used to book bands in the nineties. I realised after talking to Femke that I could help enable them to do better work. To realise things, they could do beyond what they thought they could. I was amazed by these people who were trying to make right something that they had no part in the wrongness of it. They were taking responsibility for other people’s wrongs. Also, I have always felt that animals get such a hard time and that if we don’t stand up nobody will.
I decided to get involved and I bought some land then bought some more so we could build this sanctuary for animals with special needs so they could die there with dignity. The primary aim is to release any animals that are able to be released back into nature. A lot of the animals can be released back into nature. A lot of them can’t though because they aren’t actually local animals because they’ve been raised into captivity and they’re meerkats or exotic birds and species from Africa. So, they either get euthanised or put back in a zoo. The sanctuary is also to be able to offer a place for animals who have been abused and for them to be looked after by this amazing group of people.
It is amazing what you guys do there.
It’s a place of joy and great hope. We also get told so often what a terrible species we are as humans, but we can do great things and the park is one of many examples of that. It is a beautiful place, a beautiful idea and a beautiful community.
I have one last thing I’d love to ask you. If you had any advice that you would give to yourself in your early twenties during that month you were in Edinburgh, what would it be?
It’s going to be alright little guy.
Catch Warren in The Dirty Three, live:
Friday, 14th June
RISING @ Hamer Hall, Melbourne
Saturday, 15th June
RISING @ Hamer Hall, Melbourne
Tuesday, 18th June
Canberra Theatre, Canberra
Wednesday, 19th June
Anita's Theatre, Thirroul*
Thursday, 20th June
Enmore Theatre, Sydney*
Saturday, 22nd June
Fremantle Passenger Terminal, Fremantle^
Monday, 24th June
Hindley St, Adelaide^
Wednesday, 26th June
Odeon Theatre, Hobart^
Friday, 28th June
Tivoli, Brisbane^
Saturday, 29th June
The Green Room, Byron Bay^
*Support by Laura Jean
^ Support by Eleanor Jawurlngali
‘Love Changes Everything’ arrives Friday, 14th June and digitally on Friday, 28th June.