RED RIGHT HAND MAN
“SO what happened was I sponsored a couple of snow leopards,” Warren Ellis says, trying to find the beginning of the story of how exactly he found himself starting a wildlife sanctuary in Indonesia. It is a long story, and like all Ellis tales, meanderingly told. It encompasses a palm oil-free beard balm, a Michael Hutchence documentary, a Dutch vet and a monkey with no arms. But the long and the short of it is that Ellis Park, in Sumatra, will soon offer a home for animals abused by humans and unable to be released back into the wild. “So,” Ellis concludes, “I guess I thought, ‘Why wouldn’t I try and feed some bloody monkeys and bears that have had the wrong thing done by them?’”
It has been a strange year for Ellis. Difficult, as for all of us, but also unexpectedly enriching – the sudden gift of Carnage, the album he created with Nick Cave during the pandemic, and She Walks In Beauty, recorded with Marianne Faithfull as the singer recovered from Covid, and also his first book, soon to be published by Faber.
“The lockdown afforded me this creative moment that I hadn’t anticipated,” he says. “Things started coming towards me and I ended up doing things that I would never have done. The record with Marianne wouldn’t have happened. Carnage wouldn’t have happened. The animal park. The book.”
“HE SEES IN A CLUSTER OF NOTES THE POTENTIAL OF THE UNIVERSE”
NICK CAVE
The book, , is not exactly a memoir, but it nonetheless gave Ellis cause to reflect on a 30-year music career that has carried him from Ballarat, Australia, to his current home in Paris, and encompassed time with Dirty Three, the Bad Seeds, Grinderman, film scores, work with Cat Power, Tinariwen and
