S7. E23: Warren Ellis: Ellis Park
“It's funny because with art, with literature, with music, we are all connected. It's emotion. You know, like if I say, ‘have you read this or that,’ or… ‘do you know Alice Coltrane? Do you know John Coltrane?’ Whatever it is you've got a language and there's a connection going on. And, we should have that with the world. We should have that feeling of like an artistic sensibility to the world. We do have that with other things. People can talk about movies and they feel connected in a way. Religions connect people… we should be all connected by the Earth.”
– Warren Ellis
Musician and composer, Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds had an extremely productive pandemic. Not only did he release two albums, two film scores and a book, but he also opened a wildlife sanctuary in Indonesia.
Last spring, Warren co-founded Ellis Park, a forever home for disabled wildlife in South Sumatra. It’s a haven for animals who have been rescued from wildlife trafficking who are either too traumatized or too handicapped to be returned to the wild.
Ellis Park will also be used as a hub to educate the public, locals, and visitors to the park about the negative impacts on wildlife used in the tourism industry and those saved from the illegal pet trade and wildlife smuggling.
Last fall, Warren published his first book, Nina Simone's Gum. It’s about a piece of gum that Nina Simone was chewing during her final concert in London. As she left the stage, she placed the chewed gum on her piano. Warren noticed and quickly snatched the gum. He kept it for over two decades… until a few years ago, when the gum took on a life of its own. The book is about meaning and connection and trusting intuition when it calls on you to follow a thread, and it’s about the love and the magic that we humans are capable of. In many ways Ellis Park has a very similar story.
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
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Transcript:
Warren: [00:00:15] It's funny because with art, with literature, with music, we are all connected. It's emotion. You know, like if I say, have you read that? Or if you listen to this, you know, do you know John Coltrane? Whatever it is, you know, you've got a language and there's a connection going on and we should have that with the world. We should have that feeling of, you know, like an artistic sensibility to the world. We do have that with other things. People can talk about movies and they feel connected in a way. Religions connect people. We should be all connected by the Earth.
Elizabeth: [00:00:58] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with musician and composer Warren Ellis. Warren is a member of The Dirty Three and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He and Nick have also composed dozens of film scores. Last spring, in March 2021, Warren founded Ellis Park, a forever home for disabled wildlife in South Sumatra. It's a home for animals who have been rescued from wildlife trafficking who are either too traumatized or too handicap to return to the wild. Warren also recently published his first book. It's called Nina Simone's Gum. It's about a piece of gum that Nina Simone was chewing during her last concert in London. She left the chewed piece of gum on her piano when she got up and left the stage. Warren saw it and snatched it and has kept it for over two decades. Then the gum took on a life of its own. The book is about meaning and connections and love and the magic that we humans are capable of. In many ways, the park that Warren has built has a very similar story. Warren, it's so good to see you and have you here in person. So thank you so much for being here in Brooklyn today.
Warren: [00:02:51] Thanks for inviting me and to speak about something that is incredibly close to my heart and something I've told you since we've established this park, I can't imagine my life without it. It's had such a profound effect on me.
Elizabeth: [00:03:10] Yes. I want to talk about the park and I also want to talk about how you got connected to the park and how this kind of all got planted in you and so quickly became such a massive part of your life, but also has changed so many other lives.
Warren: [00:03:24] I'm a musician and I play in a bunch of bands: Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Dirty Three, and I composed soundtrack scores. That's what I've done for the last 30 years of my life, and I've been very blessed to have a career doing something that I love. When the pandemic happened and we're all in the same position where everything ground down, everything stopped, and I guess we were forced to look at doing other things if we could. In my case, not touring and not working the way that I had been for the last 30 years after the first few months of initially just the shock of it all and what's happening, I just decided that my job was to create. That's why I'm on the earth. It feels to me like it is to create to the best of my abilities. I just threw myself into work and I wrote a book called Nina Simone's Gum. I did a record of poetry with Marianne Faithfull. Nick and I recorded Carnage. I did music for an exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay, and I did music for a documentary on snow leopards called La panthère des neiges, which is about a French photographer called Vincent Munier and a French writer called Sylvain Tesson. It's about a trip that's filmed by Marie Amiguet, who is the director of the documentary. It's called The Velvet Queen in English. They went to photograph a snow leopard. Vincent, when I met him, it changed my life. This guy who when he was seven, his father took him into the forest one day and then took him to some trees and said, Look out there. Through the trees in a clearing, he saw all these deers. From that day on, he knew he wanted to photograph animals. That's all he's done. He builds hideouts. He sits in there and he'll wait 14 hours or 18 hours to take a photograph of an owl or a lynx, a bear, or he goes to the North Pole in -65 degrees and he's traipsing, trying to find a snow wolf. He thinks he's about to die and he wakes up and the snow wolf has got its head in his tent door and he takes his photo. He's this unbelievable kind of character. I met him in February of last year. Up to that point, I you know, I realized that I was a privileged person, that I was able to sort of get through the pandemic and keep a roof over my head and feed my family. With so many people I knew struggled so hard. So I started auctioning off things, broken things that I'd broken when I was playing songs on stage and clothes and whatever, you know, like things to raise money for homeless people. There was an auction group called Trinity Auction Group who are sort of based around the bad seeds, and they would sort of get things and sell it and pick a charity and give the money to it. I was sponsoring orchestras and buying art from people that I didn't even know just to try and do something, you know. So the long story to get to this point is that I was working on the Snow Leopard documentary, which is just the most extraordinary documentary I've ever seen about animals and the wild beauty of them. It's just phenomenal. I was having this real moment doing it, and Vincent was sending me pictures of him sleeping in his tent on the roof of his car and sounds of owls and things like this. I really connected with him straight away and I got an email from an old friend of mine called Lorinda Jane, who used to book Dirty Three in the nineties. She set up this palm oil investigative thing that kind of does studies into palm oil and products without it. I said, Well, I actually like to do something, for a while I wanted to do something of substance with a charity and particularly with animals. So she said, Look, I'll introduce you to this friend of mine I've worked with for the last ten years. Her name is Femke Dina's. We had a Zoom chat and within about 30 seconds, my life changed.
Elizabeth: [00:07:42] How so?
Warren: [00:07:43] Well, to see Femke what she was doing, I knew a bit about her. I knew that she'd gone over to Sumatra, and she'd found an orangutan chained up in the skin had grown around the chain, and she got it freed and then and then stayed with it. Then she devoted her life to animal liberation. She set up a dolphin program to free dolphins from those traveling aquarium things and performing stuff. She set out to try and ban dancing monkeys in Indonesia, which she has done. She gets clothes for children. She set up this sniffer dog program to use old dogs that were used to sniff out drugs, to use them to sniff out animals being trafficked. So they would go out and she had like 40 volunteers and she had this small piece of land that was the Sumatra Wildlife Center, and that's where they would take the animals that they would get from trafficking, rehabilitate them, and then release them back into the wild. That's the aim of her work, is to get them back in there if she can.
Elizabeth: [00:08:48] Is she actually involved in going in and getting the animals out?
Warren: [00:08:51] Oh, yeah. She goes in the canine project. They go in, you know, they get tip offs from the police about things like and they go in there. Yeah. People have been shot at in her team and stuff. I kind of got exposed to all this stuff that she was doing and I was just absolutely blown away by, I mean, such a heroic thing that she's doing. I said, What do you need? She said, Look, we have these animals that we can't put back into nature because they've been so badly mutilated and we don't have anywhere for them to go. We need a forever home where we can let these animals die with dignity.
Elizabeth: [00:09:32] Was this happening in one zoom by the way?
Warren: [00:09:33] Well, there was a little laid up, like basically Lorinda, who's the friend of mine that booked the band and I've known for years she's been there, you know, she's been over there and stayed with Femke and things like that. So there was this wonderful connection between someone I've known for a long time who I just trust and trust her judgment and all that stuff, and that she was introducing me to this person. There were a lot of questions I didn't need to ask, you know, and she'd sent me photos and stories. There was a story about Rina, this monkey who they'd found handcuffed to a table in the back of a trader's tent, and she'd eaten through to the bones trying to get out.
Elizabeth: [00:10:15] Eating her arms?
Warren: [00:10:16] Yeah, her arms were handcuffed and you could see the bones through. The guy had been sort of putting petrol on it to stop it getting infected. They heard her screaming and they went into the back room and the police didn't care because she wasn't a protected species. So they had to talk the police into letting them take her. Then they eventually got her and then they made the decision to amputate both her arms. So I kind of had this story and also this I saw this picture of a dog that they'd found in the street and its jaw was broken. The bottom of its jaw was just hanging and it was just like the saddest thing I'd seen. But also I was incredibly moved that these people were wanting to take on these animals that nobody cared about. It was a combination of this kind of incredible communal sense that I felt with the pandemic, you know, just to bring it all back. I was really moved by people going out and feeding elderly and people that were vulnerable to COVID, you know, people going out and helping out. I kind of really was moved by this sense of community and this felt like this whole thing, too, part of this greater communal kind of feeling, it was all sort of happening at the same time. Then she said to me, look, you know, we'd really love to have a place where we could let these animals die with dignity. My career has been very lucky. I've been able to continue making music that I like and live from this. I've written a bunch of stuff now and it all ticks away. So I called my accountant to see if I could do this by the land and donate it. She said, You can. So I bought the land and donated it to the Jakarta Animal Aid Network, JAAN, and donated it to them. We had this idea for Ellis Park, which was a wildlife sanctuary for animals with special needs, and it's open to any animal. You know, we have bears with no teeth. We have monkeys with no arms. We have two monkeys who have been beaten senselessly and they have brain damage and they need special care. They have a place to live with this. We have an eagle with one leg. We have a tiger coming soon. I think there's a crocodile coming. It's basically any animal that can't go back and live in the wild.
Elizabeth: [00:12:52] Because humans tortured it, basically.
Warren: [00:12:55] Yeah, basically. I mean, we have Trinity, this Gibbon who they found had been in a cage for 28 years. So she's basically like a grandmother. She's lost an arm. They think probably when she was taken from her mother, it was hacked off to get her off and one leg doesn't work because it looks like it was caught in a snare or something. Trinity was in this cage that was slightly bigger than her, just full of rubbish. She'd just been kept as a pet just in the back of a garden. They managed to get her out of there and she was the first animal that we built a reserve for and put in there. So suddenly now she has this place where she can climb trees. She has a pond with goldfish in it and things like that. We have another one codger who was in a in a street, in a tiny cage, again, for about 20 or 25 years, just living on food that people just throw at her in the street and her spine is twisted because she was in such a tiny cage and she's all hunched over and can't extend herself. She's a bit like the soul of the park for me. She also has an enclosure there now. Rena has a little mate called Didi is this tiny little monkey that she looks after. I'm so moved by Rena because she just gets on with it, you know? She's got no arms. She just eats with her feet. She's really hyperactive and Zippy. Famke said to me, it's amazes her that now people know about Rena, you know, like since the park's been established and the word is out about it and before nobody cared about her, you know, I didn't think a lot about it, because I know with my professional life, when I do think about stuff, it generally tends to shut me down. When I did the first film soundtrack I ever did, I had no idea what was entailed. When I wrote my book, if you told me the work that was involved, I would have said, There's no way I can do it. So you need to jump into things blindly and with ignorance. It's just turning up and then like seeing what happens. The park I didn't think much about beyond. I thought, well, okay, we'll get the land and then I don't know what comes next and then yeah, we'll figure it out, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:15:16] And this was not that long.
Warren: [00:15:18] I got the land in March and we launched it in, I think June or July of 2021. I wasn't even going to actually be a visible figure on it because I wanted it to be just something private and let these people get on with their great work that they're doing. Then Femke said to me, It took us three years to get the fence built around the Sumatra Wildlife Center, and I'd been sort of selling t shirts and, you know, doing things and I thought, God, if I can do that, maybe I should be able to feed some monkeys and do some stuff, you know? So then I decided that I would be vocal about it. I made a little video and said, Look, we've got this beautiful idea. We want to build this park for these animals with special needs, just followers or whatever you can do, whatever support you can give. The response was phenomenal. We needed, I think, €80,000 to build the fences and the enclosures, build a school, build a hospital. We were funded in two months, and as soon as the money started coming in, these amazing people just started working and I would be getting pictures. They're down, buying the fencing, buying this, buying that. At this stage at the moment, we have a school that's just been finished, an education center that and the aim of it is to educate local people about animal trafficking and hopefully put some people off at a young age going into that and also adults to go in there, you know, so it's this beautiful sort of jungle building, which is a Javanese traditional building that they bought and then moved. It's really old. It's very, very beautiful and a veterinary center that was much needed that's been built now. Nick and I funded the building of that. Trinity Auction Group, they held these auctions selling my shoes and my shirt, and Nick donated things and Susie's wife and Mark Lanigan drew paintings before he died. Bless him. Mick Harvey put his gold record up to auction. I was so moved to see the way people, you know, on their own of their own volition came in, you know? I think it was interesting for Femke, too, because it was exposing the work that she's doing to a really different audience. So, you know, we've built the hospital. The production team of the Snow Leopard film have paid for the equipment to go in the hospital. You know, there's this beautiful kind of network of connection going on, which I find really moving.
Elizabeth: [00:18:10] And really powerful.
Warren: [00:18:11] Really powerful. Yeah, we've planted fruit trees and that so the animals will be fed, you know, by fruit that's grown there. There's electricity now. There's water. We have four animals, their homes have been built now that they're in there.
Elizabeth: [00:18:25] Including Rena.
Warren: [00:18:26] Rena is in there. Rena and Didi, Trinity is in there. Kodjia is in there and Anna and Elsa who are two albino monkeys who were inbred. Somebody wanted white monkeys, you know, so they were inbred and they were actually a tip off. They stopped going to the airport. Femke and the dogs pulled over this car and they found these two monkeys. They were on their way to, I think, to India. They can't be released because they wouldn't survive. They're just a bit too conspicuous.
Elizabeth: [00:19:07] Are you getting bears?
Warren: [00:19:08] Bears? Yeah, we're getting bears. The bears pull their teeth so that the people can have photos taken with them. So yeah, we're getting bears and they can't go back into the wild. Some have been domesticated for so long that they just can't learn how to survive. So they just have to be taken care of. But there's amazing stuff like, they kind of give them enrichment, things like coconut balls and things to kind of work out. Like they their aim is not to to keep these animals as pets or whatever. You know, it's to live, I guess, as close to being in nature as they can and not bored. But there's not a sense like we have a zoo for disabled animals. There's not that at all going on, you know. I'd like to get that out of the way now, it's really not that. The people there are specialists and they kind of know what these animals need to maintain some degree of their kind of wildness and some that just need people's support or they will die. So yeah, that's the kind of heart of it, of the I guess the project. There was a need for this that seems to be actually quite a unique idea like that. There's places that are just built for like orangutans or tigers or but this is actually for any type of animal that can come and be housed there and and live out, you know, the best life with what they have left.
Elizabeth: [00:20:39] Well, one thing you said was, it's a place for taking responsibility for other people's misdeeds. I would imagine when you first see some of these animals, right. Like monkeys with no arms and gibbons with broken backs and all of it caused by humans, none of this was like a tree fell on them. It's like somebody beat them with a lead pipe. It doesn't feel like there's any anger in this. It just feels like someone else really messed up. We're going to fix it.
Warren: [00:21:07] Well, yeah. I mean, it's definitely a thing I love about these people and the thing that I find so inspiring with Femke is that they are just stepping up to the plate and they are saying, like, we want to do something about this. Beyond the kind of horror of what's going on. The greater thing is the hope that is there with this. I mean, the heart of this thing and the heart of her work is about hope. I find that so important these days. When I was younger, I was really cynical and I still have to keep that in check, you know, I just know that that kind of leads to nothing in a way. It doesn't lead to growth. I have to check myself all the time. But the thing with this park, you know, like I said to Femke, how do you look at people in the same way when you see what happens, what's been done? And she said to me, I couldn't do this if I didn't know at the end we were going to release some of them and that we were getting them back. For me, that's all she is. Like, I can see, you know, 100 birds dead in a cage and it breaks my heart and makes me so sad. But knowing that maybe one in one in that lot or in the next lot or the next lot we're going to find, we're going to release. That's what we live for. She said, I couldn't do that without it, you know, which really takes a certain person to be able to do that.
Elizabeth: [00:22:50] And to look at it from that perspective. Because when you have little monkeys coming in who have been bashed with steel rods, you know, and they're brain damaged and their eyes popping out, and that happens again the next day and the next week there's a worse one.
Warren: [00:23:02] Yeah, it's really confronting. I mean, you know, I think when I saw these pictures and saw the stories and stuff like that, I was so I mean, I was shocked by it but people don't shock me anymore because, you know, you look at the Ukraine, you look at what's going on. People don't shock me in their acts, their monstrous acts, you know? But we also do great things. It's so easy to be cynical, particularly in this day and age. It's really it's the easiest road is to be cynical and just think it's all going to go up in smoke so who cares, you know, like or like, what can I do? It's actually taking the step and saying, like, what can I do? I'm going to do something about it, you know? That's what about these people? They're just absolutely blows my mind that they've stepped up to the plate and they're taking on the responsibility of other people's bad deeds. I find that incredibly moving. It seems like such a kind of a beautiful act and from those acts, only good things can come. Affirmation is so important, like as we know as we grow up, that there the moments in your life that can really alter the path that you choose. Just a simple word like somebody saying, this is really great what you're doing here, you've never heard this before. These little things that can change what you decide to do. It seems more important than ever I think that we need to embrace this sense of community and we need to embrace this the sort of the good of it all, because with without it, we just feel kind of lost, I think.
Elizabeth: [00:24:49] I think you're right. I think, too, with Ellis Park and with what you and Femke are doing, I think when we, the individual animals that are there and I spent like an hour on the Instagram and an hour on the website, and so I'm very new to it. I just learned about it.
Warren: [00:25:03] That is amazing that you just found out about it and it's captured you straight away.
Elizabeth: [00:25:07] And that's what I mean. I already feel like I love Little Julio. But I think also what that does, because I spend a lot of my time like looking at bigger picture and up close, but a lot of bigger picture, like how are we going to stop wildlife trafficking? Then when you but when you see these little guys who have been so damaged by it and so handicapped and so beaten down, it brings you in to what the bigger picture is. I think the bigger picture is so big, most humans don't even go near it.
Warren: [00:25:39] Well, I think COVID was a good example of that. It was so massive you couldn't take it all in like. I think it's why everybody got pushed into a local sort of feeling again, you know, like all you knew was what was around you for for quite a while, or you check in on people. But, you know, when I went back out on tour, I'd be driving through cities in the in the UK and in America. I kept saying to myself, even this was closed down like all this was shut down, you know, like it didn't register like as much as I knew it was going on until I got back out and I was like, Wow, all this was closed down like nothing was flying. I mean, it was kind of such an extraordinary phenomenon.
Elizabeth: [00:26:19] Well, the whole world was going through the exact same thing, at the exact same time.
Warren: [00:26:22] Yeah. I think you had to rein it in. I watched the movie about these two guys that survived the descent of a mountain back in the eighties and this guy, one guy who managed to make it back under the most incredibly difficult conditions. I mean, you can't believe the guy made it back alive. But he said he broke it down like he knew he had kilometers to get back and he had a broken leg and he was crawling and he had no food, he had no water. But he broke it down. He'd say, like, okay, I want to see if I can get 50 meters in 15 minutes. He worked out this method of breaking it down to smaller increments. When he'd done that, then he'd go, okay, I'm going to do I'm going to see if I can get it into 14 minutes and if he didn't, then he'd get angry and go like, I'm going to get it. I think it's what this is about, like you're saying is going and if you go in something smaller, it has an outreach, you know, it spreads from there, you know, and when you think of animal trafficking or animal cruelty, what can I do? You know, what can you do with poverty and homelessness? But you can give a homeless person a cup of coffee or some money to buy something to eat and that transmits something. We can do this stuff if we look around and I think it's most of us are only capable of doing small gestures, but they're as big as the big ones. It's not about how much that you give, it's the gesture that's important. I'm as happy with somebody that just sort of engages in what we're doing because there's a sense of, you know, that complicit with us or something as donations. It's funny because, you know, I've never done anything like this before and we sort of set up this it's like a rogue a rogue charity. You know, we don't have a board to go through. It's me, Lorinda and Femke. Femke is steering the whole thing. She needs this stuff. She does it, you know?
Elizabeth: [00:28:23] And it's quick. Less than a year.
Warren: [00:28:24] It's so quick. It's like these people just go bang, bang, bang, you know, like they just do it. We don't have planning permits and things like that to deal with. They just get on with it. Like, I mean, I couldn't believe that the place was fenced in like a couple of weeks. I just thought it was going to take years, you know, and they just get on and do it, you know? There's a video of the land when she showed it to me back in March and then a video of it now what's already happened, it's really inspiring. We knew that we needed to keep it close so that so that decisions could be made quickly and there wasn't the palaver to go through. I remember when I started it up and I would I'd sort of say they'd say, what have you been doing? I’d say, well, I've kind of, founded this animal sanctuary and I explained it and as soon as you get to the bit about, you know, and you know, you can sponsor a monkey and they go, look, I don't have any money. I'm like, I'm not asking you for money. I'm just telling you about it. Charity is kind of like it's it's a really a punk rock thing or something. There's something incredibly punk about it. You know, like I was I was talking to Rachel, who works at the office in London, and I said, Gee, there's a pandemic going on. It's not really the time to launch a charity, is it? And she's like, There's never a good time Warren.
Elizabeth: [00:29:40] That's true. It's true.
Warren: [00:29:42] There was an elephant, like a kind of elephant ride place that basically, like during the pandemic, no tourists came. So suddenly there was, I think, 15 elephants who were just starving to death. Femke got a call, went up there, and the guy just said, It's God's will. If they die, they die, you know? She could not without a paper from the government go in, she could not go in and feed them or give them water. She was watching them die and sending us pictures and stuff of them just getting skinnier and skinnier. Eventually she just went in and did it and fed them. At the time we didn't have anywhere to put them and they they've now been moved to a place further out. It's it's not ideal, but it's better than where they were. We'd like to, to do further down the line is to build a place for old elephants to live out their life. I guess it's like Noah's Ark for the broken animals is what we're building. I had no idea how to go about this. Like, really no idea. So I went to a few sort of institutions that I knew, you know, museums and things. I'm like, Look, I'm doing this thing, and they're like just really difficult at the moment with COVID. I'm like, I get it. You know, this has been funded basically by our network around the music that I do and in the outreaches that have come from there. I find that an incredibly beautiful thing. I think generally these I could be wrong, but I think these sorts of places have certain targets that they go for and that but again, we're we're kind of like a rogue thing, you know, it's just like basically, you know, like Femke, who knows what she's doing. An old musician, an old promoter, you know, that kind of, you know, just want to kind of realise something. Like I say, I just can't imagine my life without it now. I mean, it's true what they say when you give you get back so much more than what you've given.
Elizabeth: [00:31:45] But also for all these people, especially like the musicians around you and the community around you who's gotten involved in this. Because Ellis Park started literally like a year ago and even like you told me, hey, look at our Instagram in reverse and watch. It's like watching a movie of this incredibly magical place.
Warren: [00:32:01] It's amazing that the account because it shows the building of the park in real time. You know, it's like we've got this, we have this, we're hoping for this. But I think also like like the people who have got involved and more along the way because they see something is happening and they feel a part of it because they are, you know, like they are a part of it. I mean, they've funded it from the bottom up. You're not just putting money into something that you don't really know where it's going. You know, it feels like there's a lot of love being poured into this place. I mean, I haven't been there yet. I've done all this basically on Zoom and telephone. When I spoke to my accountant and and said, you can do it, I had a zoom with Femke and Lorinda and I said, Look. I can do this. I promised that I'll do this because I know that they've just struggled for years, you know, to get any sort of funding and stuff like that. Femke just looked at me and just said, thank you and big tears just rolled down her face. I mean, we often feel powerless, you know, in the Ukraine, you just watching it with disbelief and disgust and you feel powerless to do anything about it. But like we can and it's just the gesture of, you know, putting your hand out whatever way it is supporting or, you know, whatever it is.
Elizabeth: [00:33:34] Feeling powerless makes you feel very like isolated. Not only isolated, but it kind of makes you feel like the world is all about you. The way to break through that is to reach out.
Warren: [00:33:44] It's funny because with art, with literature, with music, we are all connected. Like it's emotion. We're connected. If if I say have you read this or if you listen to this, you know, do you know do you know John Coltrane? You know, do you know whatever it is. You've got a language and there's a connection going on and we should have that with the world. We should have that feeling of like an artistic sensibility to the world. We do have that with other things. People can talk about movies, people can talk about anything and they feel connected in a way. Religions connect people and we should be all connected by the earth.
Elizabeth: [00:34:23] Even more so in a lot of ways.
Warren: [00:34:24] Absolutely more so. Yeah. I had this the idea to do this, I wanted to run it by my family, my kids, my wife. They were so supportive of it. But my son, Roscoe, he's 20. He just looked at me and said, this is the best thing that you could ever do. He just said to me, we don't deserve animals. Which really kind of it really hit me. This has had a it has had a real effect on me. I'll kind of do anything for it, you know, like I took on the responsibility of it, and I decided, like if it didn't work and nobody got under it, that I'd just go out and tour and pay for it, you know? I just thought, I can work and I will do that if if things don't work out with it.
Elizabeth: [00:35:20] Were you surprised by the amount of people that kind of got behind it?
Warren: [00:35:23] I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. I'm so moved by I mean I look at the comments on the account and things like social media, whatever, you know. But I find that community so moving that there's people there rallying under, you know, the animals and things like that and that they feel a connection to them. When Julio got posted up there, he'd been beaten up. I thought that I thought maybe this is really confronting, you know, and it had the opposite effect. People just kind of got underneath him and they wanted to know what was going on and all the daily updates like, you know, he's why he's going down and we're like, I'm with you, little guy. We have this within us, you know?
Elizabeth: [00:36:06] Well, it's such a beautiful metaphor for what we could be doing in such bigger, you know, across the planet.
Warren: [00:36:11] We are a lot of ways. I think we are essentially good inside, you know, I have to believe that.
Elizabeth: [00:36:17] Well, I mean, I think this is a theme like throughout your life, right? We were talking earlier about your book that just came out, Nina Simone's Gum, which is mind blowingly good.
Warren: [00:36:29] Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:36:30] I read it and I woke up with a whole new level of thoughts, ideas, magic because of what this book did to me. So I kind of want to weave it into what we're talking about because I think it's very much like what we're talking about.
Warren: [00:36:43] I have to believe fundamentally people want to do good. I need to believe that, you know, and I don't know if the things that in the book, constantly surprised me, the sort of love and care that people and the lengths people went to to sort of carry this little piece of gum that belonged to Nina Simone. That was sort of a spiritual totem to me to. To kind of, like, carry it and do what I was asking and then get it into the exhibition and all this stuff. It's a sort of metaphor, really, for the connectivity needed for ideas to take flight and the love and care that's needed. The park for me is exactly that. The park for me is just that same thing. Put an idea out there enabling people, enabling Femke and her team to do their great work. They need help to do and shine a light on them. The park feels like that, you know, it's exactly like the gum that I'm talking about in the book that you put something out there and it attracts the right people. The general public who got under the park, it's just blown me away, you. That I'm sitting here now talking to you about it, you know, like I find it just unbelievable.
Elizabeth: [00:38:02] And the community that you've created around this, right?
Warren: [00:38:04] Yeah. Well, the community that they have created because they've come into it. I mean, I guess I, I kind of run it up the flag. Look, I mean, I never put much stock into how famous I am or whatever. It's always been about the work for me. Like I've been so blessed and lucky and fortunate that I came across people who bought out the better things in me, you know, like they saw something in me. People like Dirty Three, Jim and Mick and Nick Cave, you know, Nick. Nick I continue to this day working with him, you know, in an incredibly kind of like close collaboration that keeps giving and evolving. There was a point when I realized how much I love making music and that creative process. It's always been about the next thing for me, the fact that I've made a livelihood out of it continues to astound me, that that's all I've done for 30 years. But when the opportunity, I'd been wanting to do something like this and when it presented itself all I could think of was like, why wouldn't I? You know, like, I don't understand, like, honestly don't understand people who people can have way much more money and not want to do anything. There's only so much money you need, you know? I just don't know why everybody doesn't do it on some level, it would change everything.
Elizabeth: [00:39:39] In the same way with the gum, not only the 22 years ago when you took the gum in the first place and then the whole kind of mythology around the gum. But all the people that have handled the gum and, you know, from the past few years to where it is now and like the magic in each person and kind of it's almost like a spiritual experience, this gum. In the same way when I think about this park the way not only it all happened, but the way you've responded to it in the same way you've responded to the gum you almost cast like this magic spell on it in the sense of it's really good people.
Warren: [00:40:15] I think that I mean, I know that I hear there's inherent problems in any of these charitable setups as well. I don't know, my experience has been that when people gather under things for the right reason, something happens, you know, and I think there's this desire in people to do good like I was saying, you know, I think this draws people to certain things. I guess that's what amazed me in the book. But then, you know, like if you listen to Alice Coltrane or John Coltrane or you listen to the Ramones, whatever you listen to, you're on a bit of a similar page as anybody else that listens to it. We're connected. You know, I think anyone that listens to Alice Coltrane, we all sit and worship in a church that is built out there somewhere, you know, like we enter her church, we enter this kind of church, the spiritual place where where we kind of commune in a way, like what happens at concerts. Concerts are this place where a communion can take place and the audience mirrors what's going on on stage. I think when it's working and it feeds off each other. I guess it's magic what you're talking about. It's something that is also devotional. There's spiritualism going on. I also came to this conclusion like, you can make your own gods. You can just elevate them and look up to them whatever they are, you know, whether it's a piece of gum or whether it's Buddha or whether it's like Jesus Christ. I think for me, that's about the imagination that unlocks it. It's like the clowns that I talk about in the book. It's about unlocking the imagination and believing it that I will believe until they roll me into the ground and put coconut trees on me at the park once I've fed monkeys to bananas in my hopefully kind of not too twisted and hopefully golden years. I mean, I think that sort of stuff is the imagination, you know, and nobody can tell you that it's not real. I mean, they can explain it to you, but I don't want to be explained the science of emotions.
Elizabeth: [00:42:49] Well, no one can explain the gum. I'm sorry. Like you can't explain that. You can't explain what happened with this.
Warren: [00:42:55] I mean, no, you can't.
Elizabeth: [00:42:59] At the end of the book, you talk about how this is actually the beginning for the guy.
Warren: [00:43:03] Yeah, it is.
Elizabeth: [00:43:04] It's kind of the beginning. Even though the park is now built and going, it's kind of the magic's just beginning. It feels like a lot of ways.
Warren: [00:43:10] The park has just started. Like people, you know, like yourself who've become aware of it. People are coming on just all the time now. We launched it in a very kind of modest way, and put it on social media. I did a book signing last night, you know, a book launch and stuff like that. I sort of had stickers and people knew about those. I gave people stickers, you know, from the park. I had some made up, but people knew about it, some people knew about it. I was meeting people who'd done tapestry work and I said, Oh, you know, I'm part of this and we sold these. Here's one of the things that we made that we auctioned off. It's amazing, you know, like a woman turned up in Dallas and she did the most beautiful drawing that I've had in my dressing room every night. It's like a picture of me playing the violin to all the animals in the park. You can see the bear, you can see Rena, you can see I mean, I can't tell you how moved I was. It's this beautiful painting that she did. I had that in my dressing room every night with a statue of Ganesh playing a flute and a little Buddha. I would sort of have that as my little shrine in my room, you know, like before each show, before I'd get ready and things like that. But it's just amazing this stuff to meet these people who have come into the park's orbit and they, I guess primarily, were fans of the band. I've had also people come up and say, like, I'm aware of the park, but I didn't know that you played music and da da da da da like that. You know, I had to go the other way too. So I guess that and since I wrote the book, it's a sort of another public coming in as well. I mean, you know, after what I've written I mean, I'm going to go to the park and build a big piece of gum.
Elizabeth: [00:45:06] You're doing seven, right?
Warren: [00:45:08] Well, yeah. I mean, they were ideas I put out there while it was all flying around and we were just, like, riffing on stuff of what we could do. But I think part of the thing is the book that is about getting the idea out in, you get an idea out, you don't really know what shape it's going to take, but it's getting it out there. That's the kind of key. It's the crime is not getting it out there. So you put the idea out there and now by the end of it, it's like when you make a record, when you start, what comes at the end, it's moved around a lot, but it's getting the initial ideas out. So at the moment, you know, I'd wanted to put a piece like the Statue of Liberty, you know, on Ellis.
Elizabeth: [00:45:54] Like a big statue of the gum.
Warren: [00:45:56] I wanted to put it as a heart. I wanted to see, you know, like just the stuff we were talking about. Okay, it probably won't happen, but it's a beautiful idea. Maybe someone might read the book and go like, Fuck it, I'm speaking to the people. We're going to do this, it's throwing things out there and engaging the imagination. That for me is what the book is about. Anne has built the sculpture. I've seen it. I held in my hands. It's beautiful. We are trying to find a place to put that. This stuff takes time. But what I am doing is having built where it's being built, a sort of, I don't know, six foot version of it that will be in the park that I want the animals to play on. For me, that feels like an idea that I was writing the book before the park was even kind of there. But it feels like somehow I've put this idea out there like let's build sculptures, let's do this, let's do that. Then the park has happened and I'm like, of course this is where that idea is going. So I love ideas that kind of attach themselves to something, you know, like and I think that's what the book is saying.
Elizabeth: [00:47:10] I think that's why so many people want to get around it too, though, because that's the energy around the park, right?
Warren: [00:47:17] Yeah. All I can say is anything that you read about it is true. I remember there was a point. I just thought. Wow. Like, this could really kind of go wrong. But then I sort of just went through it and just knew that people were involved in it, you know, I could see what family had done. I guess I have to keep my sort of suspicions and cynicism in check. You know, this is it goes back to that. Like, it's good to be careful. Of course, you have to weigh things up and that. But sometimes with me, you know, cynicism, this is poison and this is poison to the creative, creative process. Those things can cut you off. I mean, I've functioned earlier on with a lot of that when I was younger and anger and things. I don't know these days. I feel like I've got so much out of what I've done. It's just basically I want to put something back into it because I realized that. I mean, I just know that it's not often the case with people. I mean, I come from a real working class background, like I know what it's like to not have something. I know what it's like to have $0.45 in your bank account. I've worked basically all my life, you know, like whether it was delivering newspapers or working in McDonalds or I cleaned nightclubs and toilets, sold drugs, I've done all this sort of stuff. I’ve been a schoolteacher briefly and now doing this. So I know where I can go back to. I am incredibly grateful because I know that a lot of people struggle. We just see it everywhere. I don't know, like, I just really just want to put something back. I mean, I do the music and know people get something from that.
Elizabeth: [00:49:35] Yeah you put a lot back.
Warren: [00:49:36] Look, I have to say too, like I'm still and always will make mistakes. I'm not some, like, awesome guy or something. I'm really not like that, I'm just trying to do what I can.
Elizabeth: [00:49:50] You're pretty awesome Warren.
Warren: [00:49:52] Well, I don't think about it like that.
Elizabeth: [00:49:54] One thing I love since I've met you earlier this week is how excited you get when you get a text about two new givens. That is like, that's everything.
Warren: [00:50:05] Yeah. I mean, I just literally, I remember on tour Nick could be just sitting there and I'm like, check out this crocodile, and he'd just be like, All right. I think I put him through, he couldn't stop laughing. But yeah, to watch it grow. To watch anything grow is such a great feeling. To watch this, though. I mean, when we put Trinity into the first thing, it was such a big day.
Elizabeth: [00:50:36] Which one's Trinity?
Warren: [00:50:37] Trinity is the gibbon that has missing an arm and a foot was caught in a snare. So she's about 28 and spent all her life locked in just a hellhole of a cage. The first time I met Trinity was a video and she was just so violent and angry and like she was, she sort of missing this much of an arm. She's really powerful and she's just swinging. She was like, kind of hitting the thing, the cage and stuff like that. We had to get money to get her from the place and then travel like 15 kilometers. I got to tell you, when I got this video of this little van turning up and the kind of all the carers turning out, they're like, Man, I tell you what, they kind of took her out of the thing in a cage and it's like, It's alright, Trinity, you're here now. It was so incredible. Then she was the first person that they put in the park. Then I got this video the next day and the thing was, I wonder if she'll ever sing again, you know, because Gibbons sing, they have the most amazing song and they're like I wonder if she'll ever sing again because she hasn't for ages. Then literally, like a couple of days later, there was this video of her just hanging off this branch, singing, looking out over the horizon.
Elizabeth: [00:51:57] Okay, that's everything.
Warren: [00:51:59] Yeah, it is. I get just almost daily updates, you know? I don't know where Femke finds the time to do anything. I mean, Lorinda is all over. I feel really honored to work with these two women who just function at such a dedicated level.
Elizabeth: [00:52:18] You are an incredible trio, though. What you've pulled off in a year is astonishing.
Warren: [00:52:23] I think it's like the collaborations are based on people having different strengths. I know my collaboration with Nick. I can see now that he does something and I can do something. Together we do another thing and it's based on trust and it's based on being able to take risks. It's a bit you know what you're all about, Species Unite.
Elizabeth: [00:52:47] That's why we're here.
Warren: [00:52:48] Yeah, exactly. I mean, we keep animals in this different place and have no concern for them. I mean, taking time to sort of get some connection with yourself feels incredibly, increasingly more important to me. I did TM for a while and for me, playing on stage is a form of meditation. Like it's time that doesn't happen in my life. I go into somewhere that for that period of time, my brain, it's like when you're driving a car and you realize you've been driving a car for 2 hours, but you don't know who's been driving it. I get like that with concerts, you know, I really kind of, I feed off that stuff. I really need that moment and I often will take time out of the day to sit down and try and kind of just stop the chatter. I do think there's something about prayer in a really large way. Rumination where you can push everything about the self out. I find that increasingly more important for myself to get ready for a show, I need to go through a certain ritual. Ever since I cleaned up in the late nineties and I remember this moment, like I had a past of alcohol and drug abuse and all that stuff. When I cleaned up, the thought of going back and playing was terrifying because I thought I did what I did because of the way that I was and I needed to be like that, you know? I remember the first show like that, and I was absolutely terrified. I just thought, God, how am I going to do this? I literally fell to my knees in the hotel room and started praying and I've done that ever since. It was just like an instinctive reaction. So I will now, like, if I can get on the stage, I can find a spot. I need to kind of give thanks for what we're about to do. Again, I think it's what my book is about. It's like you do what you need to. Everybody does their own thing that can bring this stuff alive. It's the imagination, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:55:33] But the power in what the imagination actually does on the external. Right? Why do we have to keep learning that instead of just trusting that?
Warren: [00:55:43] Yeah. Well we moved away from those instincts and that hasn't we. We kind of, rightly so in a way, because so many people just have to concentrate on working to keep alive. In America, if you fall through the system there's no safety net for you. You just like if you're out of the system, you're out. If you don't have a job, you're gone. It's a quick road, one way road in a way, you've got to be really lucky. If you get fired, you have to be really lucky in the next couple of months. If you don't have any infrastructure like money or family money or whatever or savings.
Elizabeth: [00:56:24] Yeah. There's no support.
Warren: [00:56:24] There's just no support. So I get that a lot of people don't have time to think about stuff like that, you know? For me, writing the book at that particular point in time, it was important, like to just look at the good stuff because there was so much kind of confusion and hysteria and worry and genuine worry about what was happening with COVID. I knew I didn't want the book to be some trawl through, you know, whatever, like aspects of my life. I didn't even want it to be a memoir, but I did want it to be about the good stuff. The stuff that can unite us, you know? I guess it will hopefully make us find our better selves.
Elizabeth: [00:57:24] I think that's what the park is, right?
Warren: [00:57:26] Well, I think so. I think the park, if I look at it like this, I mean, I write about it in the afterword, you know, because it's so integral to the story.
Elizabeth: [00:57:35] What is this afterword because this isn't in the book?
Warren: [00:57:37] Well, no, it's like I've written 3000 words afterword now for the paperback that comes out in September. I kind of wanted to sort of expand on the story because things happened like where it ends as soon as I handed it in, things started happening. The day I handed in, I signed off, sent it off. I'm like, that's it, you know? Then like an hour later, I had to go and clean out my mother-in laws flat in Paris because she's elderly and she lives in Japan, she can't come back anymore. So I was cleaning out this and in the back of a cupboard in the thing, I find an old suitcase of mine I didn't know existed. It just must have been thrown in there. I opened it up and it was just full of stuff, you know, like letters from Dave, letters from MacGuire, a script from Oren, all this paraphernalia from this particular point in time and the tickets to the concert.
Elizabeth: [00:58:46] Oh my god.
Warren: [00:58:47] And the tickets are the same color as the bloody cover of the book. There's all these letters from David and MacGuire who were really prominent in my life back then.
Elizabeth: [00:59:00] And in the book.
Warren: [00:59:01] Yeah, they're in the book and they're instrumental kind of teachers to me.
Elizabeth: [00:59:09] Tickets to the concert.
Warren: [00:59:10] Yeah, the ticket.
Elizabeth: [00:59:12] Where you also talk about the book there's very few photos there's very little actual tangible evidence that this thing ever even happened. Right. Except for this piece of gum and a few photos.
Warren: [00:59:23] Yeah. To actually find that ticket that day. I mean, yeah, it blew my mind. It blew my mind, right? So I kind of wanted to sort of include some of this in the afterward, you know, these things that have happened like and then the park just naturally seemed to be like because, you know, and I want to build a piece there and put it there. It's this symbolic thing of Nina Simone protecting the beaten, you know, like she did all her life, that she stood up for. I love the idea that somewhere in the world there will be a kind of replica of a piece of her gum. It symbolizes this kind of continuation, like our arms around everything.
Elizabeth: [01:00:09] It will be in Ellis Park.
Warren: [01:00:13] Yeah. There'll be, you know, some toothless bears probably scratching against it. I don't know if Rena can climb. She can jump around a lot. She's very hyperactive, you know, she has no arms. But, you know, I don't know my I don't know if many of them will be able to climb, but they'll definitely be there. They can gather around it.
Elizabeth: [01:00:36] They can all gather around the gum. I hope, after thinking about all this all week, one hope I have is, yes, I think this whole thing is such a symbol of hope and it is hope. Right. It's hope defined. But I also hope that more and more people start connecting to these individuals. It also becomes a symbol of wildlife trafficking and what we are doing.
Warren: [01:00:57] Yeah.
Elizabeth: [01:00:58] You know and one of the things that really wakes people up a little bit.
Warren: [01:01:03] Yeah, I mean, hopefully it will raise awareness to these things. I think even just raising awareness to the cruelty that goes on and that's going on everywhere. From what I can gather, it is particularly kind of when you wade into there like you've got to be prepared, I mean, you know this part of the world, don't you?
Elizabeth: [01:01:27] Yeah, it’s bad. But you know what? At the end of the day, if you look hard enough, you can't really throw a rock without finding some pretty bad stuff.
Warren: [01:01:35] No, no. It's like, crimes, things committed against people. The human race. I mean, you can't point a finger very far without it turning back on your own. I guess it's just like they say, there's good and bad and everyone. That's what manifests and what comes out. But we need to counterbalance this stuff. I think it's why in times of, you know, people create in times of need, in times of struggle, and that people create, because it's then more than ever that we need it. We need to feel the good stuff. Yeah, I guess it's like to counterbalance what's going on, like I'm the first person that became aware of it. Once I discovered it, I mean, I'd heard about it.
Elizabeth: [01:02:35] Yeah.
Warren: [01:02:37] But, you know, I'm learning every day about stuff I'm learning all the time.
Elizabeth: [01:02:44] And it’s massive.
Warren: [01:02:45] Yeah, it's massive. And it's complicated, like you didn't realize, you pull a monkey away from its mother. It's like five years to get it back into nature, you know, because you can't just put it back in there and it's going to be okay. The things that you have to do in order that that animal doesn't think that humans are good, right? Otherwise they just become, you know, acclimatized. I mean, there's so much stuff I didn't know. The thing that I relate to with Femke, I had that approach to music, you know, like with Dirty Three, we just sort of started playing. We jumped in a car. We went it turned up in America. I think I had $300 in my pocket and my girlfriend at the time. By the time I landed, she drained it all. We were a pretty terrible couple and, you know, basically we had nothing and just played and lived like that, like and it was just one of the greatest times of my life. I loved it, you know? But I see in Femke, this attitude that I feel like I had and I've still have to the way that I mean, you know, if you saw me back then, you wouldn't have thought this guy is clearly going to make it. I mean, people just left me alone. But there was a drive there that I think I still have, but I think Lorinda knew that. She was just, like, doing her thing, rogue and just like, bam. This sense of purpose that she had. I know I totally connected that with her, that it's like, I'm just going to do this. Amazing woman. Yeah, amazing women. Both of them.
Elizabeth: [01:04:42] Warren, thank you for this. I just want everybody to know and I want your circle to keep growing.
Warren: [01:04:49] Thank you for your help with it, too. I know that you've donated and thank you. I mean, I love that that like you didn't know about this a couple of days ago and you're moved by it. That's what this whole thing is about.
Elizabeth: [01:05:07] There is something about this park and there's something about these animals, right? Like there's just something about it. It's not even just hope and it's not even just symbols of wildlife trafficking and all the other things we said. It's also like they’re broken. They're broken and we're all broken. Right. So there's self-identification that we can see ourselves in this. There's something more, something more like that.
Warren: [01:05:33] Yeah and hopefully it will have a knock on effect on other people as well. That's the thing for me that this thing about connection and passing stuff on and and it's like I say, it's, it's not the size, it's not the amount, it's actually the gesture. It's that thing that is everything.
Elizabeth: [01:05:55] Warren thank you. This was awesome. To learn more about Ellis Park and to help the animals in Ellis Park, go to EllisPark.org. If you can, please donate. Our website is Species Unite.com. We're on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you'd like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santino Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna O'Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day.
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