Under the rainbow

Under the rainbow,
Songs of honesty and wit.
A parallel world.

Greg and I went to see Eels in concert. Oh my, were they good!

I had taken my big camera but got stopped at the bag search. the securty guy asked if I had a press pass (Note to blip central ... can we get a blip pass?), which obviously I didn't, so I was told I couldn't take the camera in. I thought about arguing and pointing out that it was a bit daft to stop me getting a decent image, when someone could just video the whole show on their phone. But the support band were playing, the bar looked welcoming and I knew I had my little camera at the bottom of my handbag, so I thought the better of it and meekly submitted my camera to the cloakroom.

Anyway, the concert exceeded all expectations. I have huge admiration for E (aka Mark Oliver Everett) and the way he has survived a traumatic background* to share with us his thoughts and musings. The song writing is unflinching and human, but also witty and can be uplifting.

You can't see from this picture, but the band were all wearing identical tracksuits and all sported beards. There was a lot of spontaneous hugging between E and the others when he felt particularly blown away by their performance. Before leaving the stage there was a group hug. You can see this and other moments in other pictures on FB here.

They did a brilliant version of Fleetwood Mac's 'Green Manalishi', which I managed to video a bit of ... you can watch it here (if the link works!).

For those that don't know the band, you can read about them here.

*E/Mark is the son of Hugh Everrett, a renowned physicist who came up with the quantum physics theory of "many worlds", or parallel universes. He didn't really gain recognition for this until close to his death in 1982, at the young age of 51. Hugh was not religious and had said that he wanted his remains to be disposed of "with the trash", which must've been quite hard for the family. Mark had quite a distant relationship with his father and then lost both his mother and sister within two years of each other in the 1990's.

This is a quote from the Wikipedia entry about Hugh Everett:
Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from manic depression and committed suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she wished her ashes to be thrown out with the garbage so that she might "end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up with Daddy"), and in 1998, his wife, Nancy, died of cancer. Everett's son, Mark Oliver Everett, who found Everett dead, is also known as "E" and is the main singer and songwriter for the band Eels.

Mark explored his dad's life and his relationship to him in a brilliant TV documentary called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, which is definitely worth watching if you ever get the chance. I'm sure it's on youtube somewhere ...

Oh well back to the other world now....