Eels is Mark Oliver Everett and the musicians he happens to be working with at any given moment. He released two solo albums under the name E, A Man Called E in 1992 and Broken Toy Shop the following year. The Eels debut album, Beautiful Freak, was released in 1996.
Mark is a complex individual, and a talented musician and writer. A large part of Eels music has focused on Mark’s struggles with his personal demons and the pain that resulted from dealing with family tragedies—including the death of his parents (his father was Hugh Everett, the physicist who created the many-worlds theory) and his sister’s suicide.
“I’m not trying to dazzle anyone with versatility or anything. I just do what’s in my heart basically.”
Mark Oliver Everett
"MC Honkey"
Mark isn’t averse to occasionally tormenting his live audiences. During one tour, the audience was treated to an opening performance by “MC Honky,” Mark’s alter ego, who is to Mark what Tony Clifton was to Andy Kaufman. An actor stood on the stage with a pipe in his mouth while recorded sounds played that had only a passing relationship with music. This went on for some 45 minutes.
On another tour, Mark’s pre-show torment consisted of showing a 50-minute Russian animated children’s film of talking clay animals (in Russian with no subtitles). The volume was turned way up to prevent the audience from ignoring the film. After being subjected to these two assaults, I decided to stop attending the band’s gigs.
The video presented above is for Novocaine for the Soul, the first single off Beautiful Freak. Great song, great video. I still have no idea how they did the effects for the video. I figure they used a crane and harnesses. But how did they do the shot of the guy standing on the wall?
I e-mailed the director, Mark Romanek, and asked if he’d say a few words about the making of the video for this blog, but he never replied. Hey, I’m just a guy with a little blog and he’s an important music video director.
A new Eels album, Hombre Lobo (Wolf Man), is due out in June.
• Eels Official Site
• Eels On MySpace
Click CD to buy Meet the Eels: Essential Eels 1996-2006, Vol. 1.
Click book to buy Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Oliver Everett.
Posted by Marc Librescu 
The Cranberries exploded onto the music scene in 1993, with the release of the album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? 
No one who has followed Catherine Wheel over the years will ever understand why they weren’t more popular. Maybe they were ahead of their time. Maybe there just aren’t that many people around anymore with good taste in music.
T. Rex began in London in 1967 as a short-lived four-piece band known as Tyrannosaurus Rex. After the breakup of the first incarnation of the band, Marc Bolan (real name: Mark Feld) reformed the band as a two-piece acoustic psychedelic folk band, with Marc playing acoustic guitar, and Steve Took on bongos and various percussion instruments.
The Stranglers started out in the mid-1970′s as a pub-rock band, evolved into a not-quite-punk band, and then refined their sound until they produced “respectable” pop music. Along the way, they pushed the boundaries of rock music (listen to Outside Tokyo or Threatened off Black and White, The Raven, Dead Loss Angeles or Ice off The Raven, or just about anything off The Gospel According to the Meninblack.
Grant McLennan was a founding member of Australian band The Go-Betweens, along with Robert Forster. Grant died of a sudden heart attack in Brisbane in 2006.
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