Warren Ellis was born in February 1965 in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. He studied classical violin and flute and worked briefly as a teacher before travelling Europe. On his return to Australia, he played in a series of bands in Melbourne before forming Dirty Three in 1992 with guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White.
Dirty Three have released nine albums to date, with 2024’s Love Changes Everything their latest. In 1993, Ellis contributed violin to Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ album Let Love In and was asked to join the band as a full-time member. Over the years, Ellis became an integral member of the Bad Seeds, writing, producing and playing multiple instruments, and has also worked on a number of soundtracks with Cave.
In his Letter to My Younger Self, Ellis looks back on complex family relationships, addiction and his conservation work.
I guess my main preoccupations at 16 were just trying to stay out of trouble. I was incredibly unsuccessful with finding girlfriends and things like that. Really, very, very unsuccessful. I think I was aware of that. I wasn’t obsessed with it, but I was aware of it. I must say, I was obsessed with listening to music. I played it, but my main focus was listening to music. I was trying to escape the real world. Because I found the real world too confronting and too harsh, so I tended to lose myself in films and books and music.
My relationship with my mother was complex, as it was for my brother. I don’t really know what was going on. She was abused by her mother. It was passed down, I suppose. When I was younger, I didn’t understand that, and I always thought it was my fault. I didn’t know why my father hadn’t protected us, but then I thought it was our fault too. I don’t want to make my mother a villain, because she could be a mother who made cakes for us and was very sweet, and then she suddenly changed. I don’t know what she was going through. She has dementia now, and I’ll never know. But through the film [Ellis Park, a new, very personal film about Ellis and his sanctuary for abused and rescue animals in Indonesia] I managed to find compassion for her, and it freed me up, because the only person it was fucking up was me, holding on to all this stuff.
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2001: Warren Ellis and Nick Cave perform with the Bad Seeds in Hamburg, Germany. Image: Action Press / Shutterstock
I was garrulous at 16, I was confident, but I was also deeply insecure and riddled with anxiety. Being garrulous was my way of hiding that. I was in trouble quite a lot, but I think I just created this character to cover up this incredibly insecure and anxious person, and that’s probably how a lot of people feel when they’re that age, it’s a difficult time. I felt very undesirable and a horrible person for a lot of my childhood and teenage years, and I still struggle. I couldn’t look at images of myself. Nick Cave would have to grab me and go like, look, you’ve got to sign off on this documentary. You have to watch it. And I’d say, Well, I can’t. And he’d hold me in front of the computer and make me.
Busking was the first musical, truly communicating experience that I think I ever had. I played in a few bands before that, and in the orchestra but it wasn’t as direct. I busked in lots of towns and cities. I busked on the steps at the train station in Edinburgh. I used to make enough money to drink myself stupid at the end of the day and then crash out at night. I went to Ireland, and then I pitched across Europe. I remember when I was busking in Inverness, playing this atonal dissonant stuff, and this Scottish guy came up to me, and said, you’re never gonna get anywhere playing that shite. And then he went off and came back with a book of Irish and Scottish folk tunes. We went to the pub and he showed me how to play a few of them.
I’ve taken drugs. I’ve been a heroin addict. I’ve been an alcoholic. I stopped all that at the end of the 90s, but then I fell into benzodiazepine addiction in the sort of 2000s and 10s, and that continued through until the end of the making of the film. And jumping off that made me go down a fucking hole, a real dark night of the soul I’d never had before. And life was hard as well. I was going through a separation from my wife. I had health issues. I had my father dying with cancer. There was just so much stuff going on. And I was also out playing to 10,000 people a night, and barely able to put one foot in front of the other. I’ve always just been able to barrel on through, I think most people do. Work has always kept me going.
2016: Winning a Best Original Score gong for Mustang at the Cesar Awards, France. Image: Yoan Valat / EPA / Shutterstock
My younger self would be surprised by everything that’s happened in my life. At that stage, I didn’t really think I’d live past 30. I didn’t really care. I never envisioned a career in music. I just never thought that was something that would ever happen, so that’s a kind of miracle for me, even now. But I’d like to tell the 16-year-old version of me, don’t worry, one day you will find peace. I think that would be the most surprising thing of all.
I didn’t know I was an addict until my mid-30s, an alcoholic and a heroin addict, and I kind of wanted to be like that. It was a lifestyle choice. Back in those days people made that lifestyle look so great. Charles Bukowski made it so incredibly romantic to be a drunk. Lou Reed came and shot up on stage in Australia – you were either repulsed by it, or you just thought it was the wildest thing you’d ever seen. Back then my biggest fear was ending up having a mortgage at 22 and a family and being just stuck. My friends and I aspired to being writers. We worshipped authors and musicians, and filmmakers and artists, because they were doing God’s work.
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Collaboration is such a precious thing. I have several of them. Nick [Cave] is the most important one. I don’t really think about why they work. It’s just when they do it’s precious, and the less questions you ask, the more fruitful the work tends to be. That’s been my experience. In the case of Nick, I know that we both like to work, and when we get together, the sum of our parts kicks in. I couldn’t write a song to save my life. I don’t even pay much attention to the words. I just trust him, and I’m interested in doing whatever I can musically to the song. We have an absolute dedication to pushing ideas forward. Our most successful collaboration? I would say, maybe “Bright Horses”. Or “Ghosteen”. I’m very proud of that. When we finished that, we loaded it all up, listened to the playback, and no one said a word, and then Nick just looked at me, and the only thing he said was, “We fucking did it.”
I’m grateful to Justin [Kurzel, director of Ellis Park] for the rest of my life for sort of encouraging me to dive into this. Because it sort of changed how the rest of my life will be on an internal level, because it taught me compassion, and it taught me to surrender to things. Immediately after filming the section in Sumatra, I had a very big nervous breakdown, the biggest I’ve had. And I’ve had several. But this was a classic. It was brought on by the filming but I think now something had to bring it on because I’m in a better place now.
2024: In a scene from his documentary, Ellis Park
I got involved in the animal sanctuary during Covid. I was introduced to Femke [den Haas, animal activist] by a mutual friend, and I just knew she was the real deal. I guess my desire was… I wanted to put something back into a system that’s been incredibly kind to me. It’s the greatest honour of my life to be able to go on the stage and play at 60 years old, and people will listen and people will engage. Buying the land and donating it to Femke and her organisation is the best money I’ve ever spent. This community of people just sprang up, and we raised the money in a couple of months to build the initial sanctuary and construct the school and the veterinary hospital and the enclosures. It’s all volunteer run, except for the vets and the ranger.
I think getting old is a gift. Being open to life. It’s only by experiencing things in life, the good, the bad, the sad, the horrible, the traumatic, the kind of wonderful and all that stuff that hopefully we learn to be better. I don’t know about enlightenment and stuff like that, but I have noticed in the last couple of years there’s a version of me right now that’s probably about as good as it’s ever been. I’ve had great moments, like winning awards, or the first time I shot up speed was just like, every god was in the room, unbelievable. But honestly, the painful things that I’ve learned through my life, the wonderful things, I think they all make you a better version of yourself.
