An intense evening with Eels in Enschede

When Mark Everett performs these days, he only needs one man besides him on stage: ‘the Chad’. Together with Edial Dekker and Peter Evers I drove 2,5 hours – which is a really long drive for Dutch standards – to see these two men playing the beautiful music of Eels in the theater of Enschede (Try to pronounce that if you don’t speak Dutch, The Chad came up with enchiladas).

My first thought was: how can only two men capture the rich sound of Eels? Yet after four songs, these doubts disappeared: I was blown away by the version of My Beloved Monster. Imagine Everett on just his white Holloway, singing the first lines, and then The Chad hitting the drums – to later switch to a guitar. Oh well, why don’t you just watch the video. (Recorded in Vicenza)

So both guys mastered all the instruments on stage – although I didn’t see Everett playing the saw – and they knew exactly how to show that off. During a raw version of the infamous Flyswatter – due to Desperate Housewives – The Chad and Everett switched piano and drums twice, without stopping the music. Impressive and exhilarating! Everett managed to get the whole theater in some sort of euphoric state (which is hard in the Eastern part of Holland, trust me) and then threw us back in his misery again by suddenly starting one of his sad songs.

Everett has experienced terrible things during his life. As a son of a severely withdrawn genius in quantum physics Hugh Everett , growing up wasn’t easy. During an one-hour BBC documentary “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” which was preceding the show, Mark explored his father’s work at Princeton as well as in his family home. His sister Elizabeth, suffered from schizophrenia and committed suicide in 1996. In her suicide note she said that she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father. During the show, The Chad read two parts of Mark Everett’s autobiography Things the Grandchildren Should Know, one about Everett’s 80-year old neighbor who saw a woman-ghost walking into Everett’s house while he was at his sister’s funeral.

Eels in Birmingham, photo by Ella Mullins

In his songs, Everett sings about these intensely sad events, which makes it sometimes hard for me to listen to them. Although the music is incredibly beautiful, the utterly depressive lyrics are sometimes hard to take. Luckily, Everett showed last night that he didn’t lost his humor. Especially his last words were legendary: ‘The Chad, is there anything he can’t do?” – throws his arms in the air – “Me!”.

Some other posts you might be interested in:

• A bad break-up, sleepless nights, and chopping wood
• Reverend and the Makers at Paradiso, music history?