E is for excellent

The Birmingham Irish Centre is the most bizarre gig venue I’ve ever been to. For a start, there’s a carpeted area surrounding the dance-floor. The speaker stacks jut out into the room either side of the stage so you can’t see what going on onstage unless you’re stood almost right in the middle of the room. The stage itself has a proper arch, behind which the drumkit is set up and where, presumably, numerous amateur dramatic performances have taken place. And most bizarrely of all, one wall is covered with sentimentalized depictions of the Irish countryside and on another hangs a wooden clock in the shape of Ireland.

The mix of people assembled in the venue is almost equally strange – eyelinered teenage girls, portly white-haired fiftysomethings with Cure T-shirts, male indie obsessives in thick-rimmed glasses, soberly-dressed husbands and wives enjoying a night of freedom from the kids… They all have at least one thing in common with each other and with me, though – a love of the idiosyncratic genius that is Mark ‘E’ Everett.

For a man who looks as though he has serious issues just venturing out of his bedroom, E makes an incongruously grand entrance – as his band The Eels crank out the thudding riff to ‘All In A Day’s Work’, the opening track on new album Shootenanny!, a torch picks him out at the back of the room as he makes his way to the stage before ripping into three songs I’ve never heard before. When the familiar stuff hits, it’s evident that – at least initially – they’re in no mood for delicacy. 2001’s Souljacker LP (for the most part a collaboration with Koool G Murder, aka John Parrish, who plays bass tonight) revealed a new more sinister side to E’s songwriting, and it’s consequently unsurprising that the voodoo rock of ‘Dog Faced Boy’ and ‘Souljacker Pt 1’ is more satisfying than the likes of ‘Packing Blankets’. ‘I Like Birds’ and breakthrough hit ‘Novocaine For The Soul’ are both reinvented along the same lines as recent single ‘Saturday Morning’, as wired, upbeat pop-rock songs. Of the newest material, ‘Numbered Days’ and ‘Love Of The Loveless’ (with which they end the main set) sound particularly impressive.

The real gems, though, are reserved for the encores, of which there are three – E thanks us for playing the game of “celebrity cat and mouse” for applauding and encouraging them back on. It is here that the rock mask slips, to wonderful effect. In the first encore, sandwiched between ‘Rock Hard Times’ and ‘Grace Kelly Blues’, we get the one song I’ve been praying for, ‘It’s A Motherfucker’ from the Daisies Of The Galaxy album. Short, simple, understated and effortlessly heartwarming, it’s what E does best and what marks him out as quite such a talent. In the second encore, they finally play ‘All In A Day’s Work’ in its entirety with vocals, and then, with neat and effective symmetry, Shootenanny’s closing track ‘Somebody Loves You’. In the third we get just E and his keyboard for an unexpected rendition of the gorgeous and touchingly naïve ‘Beautiful Freak’ which somehow blows everything that has gone before out of the water.