Warren Ellis: Harmony in the Maelstrom

As Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds prepare for their Wild God tour, the Australian musician and composer reflects on a year of musical highs, personal losses, and quiet triumphs.

by Khagan Aslanov

Photo by Colin Greenwood

Published on October 10, 2024

When Warren Ellis tunes in to our interview on Zoom, my speakers burst to life in a cacophony of noise and chatter. He strides from one room to the next, with his phone aloft, muttering apologies, and looking for a quiet corner to sit and speak with me. There’s a piano recital happening in one room, and John Lee Hooker blaring from another. Ellis is in London, prepping for rehearsals for the Bad Seeds’ upcoming tour.

That chaos has become an intermittently normal aspect of his life. Still, this year feels particularly swarming for the composer and multi-instrumentalist. He has two new albums out, one with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and one with his own trio, The Dirty Three. He also has a documentary premiering at the London Film Festival about the animal sanctuary that he had opened in Sumatra in 2020.

Adding to this is the score he and Cave have composed for the Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, as well as his solo score for I’m Still Here, the newest film by Brazilian director Walter Salles. Ellis sums up his bustling professional life as humbly and succinctly as he fields the rest of my questions: “I’ve been busy for two decades.”

Throughout our chat, Ellis’s radiance is on full display. He smiles easily, and admits feeling nervous about making the doc, knowing, much like with the book he wrote in 2021, he has ventured into a land whose layout he knows little about. Evidently, these expeditions that seem like such casual and constant triumphs to his fans and consumers come fraught with doubt and a long chiselling. Yet there is a strange serenity to Ellis, as he speaks about finishing any given project. He adopts a hermeneutical approach to making art of any sort – as soon as it leaves the pen, the string or the studio, it stops being his and becomes the world’s.

Now, on top of all of it, there is the looming tour with the Bad Seeds, during which, for Ellis, the songs that comprise the band’s new album Wild God, will find new forms and life, and truly become what they are meant to be. “You’ve protected these ideas for so long, and now it’s time to let it all go. These songs will live or die on stage. I’ve felt that way about music that I’ve loved. It’s a privilege to have that feeling returned,” he says.

It should be a freeing moment for Ellis and Cave, to court these open-ended, personal meanings. The last few years of Cave’s life have been so racked with tragedy, that at times it seems like the purpose of the Bad Seeds’ music has had essence and connotation forcefully imposed on it. The loss of his sons, Ellis’ father and, most recently, Anita Lane, a collaborator and close friend, all in close sequence, have cloaked the band’s output in projected grief, and fruitless pursuit of closure through music, depending on which listener or publication you ask. For Ellis, it is all much simpler and more graceful. He seems a person whose relationship with death and loss is one of quiet introspection and respect. The very sanctuary that he has worked so hard to keep open, is itself built to give ailing animals bred in foreign captivity a chance to die with dignity. There’s grief there, yes, but with a healthy dose of joy and an enraptured acknowledgement that all things will invariably pass. Even as he speaks about the death of an inspiring musical figure, he does so with a philosophical glint in his eye.

“I remember getting a text from Nick that Leonard Cohen had died, before it was announced publicly, and I knew that the world would not be the same,” Ellis recalls. “For that night, I wanted to hold off this impact a little longer. But it had to come.”

That composed slant translates to the way Ellis writes and records, both as part of the Bad Seeds and with the Dirty Three. He speaks at length about letting the songs, even in their nascent stages, dictate what add-ons or reductions are needed, and that after the initial point of conception, musicians become more vessels than active shapers, of both form and intention. “Our band is thoughtful enough to know that if what we’re doing isn’t working, the songs will tell us as much.”

All of this poise is not to say that Warren Ellis is a placid monk, passively content with the world moving around him. And sometimes, something primal and urgent is exactly what he needs. When, closing our talk, I ask him what sort of music he listens to regularly, he laughs heartily, and tells me that for some reason, he feels that it’s healthy for him to listen to a lot of AC/DC.

As the Bad Seeds embark on their Wild God tour, it’s curious and exciting how these euphoric gospel-tinged death ballads that harken back somewhat to the band’s beginnings, will play into their recent bend of patient ambient and drone music. But to anyone who has been paying attention, there’s little doubt that Cave, Ellis and the rest of the group will curate the moment impeccably. Despite all the modesty on display here, Warren Ellis remains exactly where he belongs – an artist, in the truest sense, out on the open road, plying his singular craft.