Warren Ellis — Ballarat, Victoria

Warren Ellis was born in 1965 in Ballarat, Victoria — the nineteenth-century gold rush city 110 kilometres northwest of Melbourne whose ornate Victorian architecture and working-class history give it a character quite different from the coastal capital. Ellis grew up in Ballarat and studied music formally before moving to Melbourne, where he would form the Dirty Three and eventually join Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as Cave's closest musical collaborator and co-writer. His classical training — he is primarily a violinist — combined with a visceral, physically extreme performance style to produce one of the most distinctive musical personalities in Australian music.

The Dirty Three, which Ellis formed in Melbourne in 1992 with guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White, became one of the most celebrated instrumental bands of the 1990s — an Australian group that toured relentlessly, recorded on Steve Albini's recommendation for Touch and Go Records, and built a devoted international following through albums like 'Horse Stories' and 'Ocean Songs.' Ellis's violin playing with the Dirty Three was nothing like classical violin and nothing like folk fiddle: it was loud, distorted, emotionally overwhelming, often closer to feedback than melody. The band's reputation rested on live performance, and they were one of the most intense live acts of their era.

Ellis joined Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds as a full member in the mid-1990s and has co-written with Cave on every album since 'The Boatman's Call' (1997). The two also collaborate as a duo under their own names, releasing 'Carnage' (2021) and 'Wild God' (2024). Their film score work — 'The Proposition,' 'The Road,' 'Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,' 'Peaky Blinders' — has brought their music to audiences far beyond the rock world. Ballarat is his origin point; Ellis has lived in Paris for many years. The city is accessible from Melbourne by train on the Ballarat line.