The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The band that fired my teenage dreams
IT is the fourth of July and he is wearing a hat and sunglasses, even though it’s 11.20pm in Glasgow and earlier it had been drizzling, the disaffected mizzle of a cloud barely going through the motions. But he’s famous and in a band and American so keep your parochial judgements. I am so nervous my heart has escaped my chest and is spinning widdershins around my body. This could go either way: I could say what I’ve come to say.
But I am on the balls of my feet, my calves tensed. I list towards bolting but I am not alone and my friend won’t leave without a selfie. Anyway, that’s not where it starts. This is where it starts.
The sun must have shone once
in Airdrie but it is grey in my mind. In the Airdrie of my memory it has rained for 20 years and will rain there forever.
I yearned for Airdrie to live up to the backdrops enjoyed by my contemporaries on American television shows, which is to lay a challenging gauntlet before a North Lanarkshire market town still finding its feet in a post-industrial age.
It was only a few years since my mum and I had emigrated from Sydney’s northern beaches to Coatbridge, near the cemetery, and I had a lament that in a parallel universe I was suntanned and popular and surfed after school, rather than the reality, which was that I was studious, played clarinet and endured double horror defects: braces and glasses.
But then, I was just nearly a teenager and so all of life was lament. Against this unlikely scenery came what? Eels.
You say to people, in response to a query about your favourite music, “the Eels” and the questioner invariably replies, “the Eagles?”
My friend, I am a 13-year-old girl. I have never heard of the Eagles. “Eels,” you say again. “You know, Novocaine for the Soul.”
The other girls are duelling over Boyzone vs Take That. I am saving my pocket money for Beautiful Freak, which will eventually be purchased
upstairs in John Menzies on Airdrie Main Street. I remember the anxiety of browsing the shelves, certain this backwater store in this backwater town was not going to have Beautiful Freak by Eels on cassette or CD.
For once, my lament was misplaced. There it was, white backdrop and freakeyed nightmare child crouched on the front, and it would alter my life. I carried it home on the bus like a totem. It was raining.
Firsts are mythologised. You might
remember your first kiss or be able to recall instantly the first time you spoke to the man you went on to fall in love with.
It is 25 years since Eels began performing live and more than 25 years since I bought that album. I don’t remember the first time I heard them,
an appalling lapse.
But from the first bar of the opening static crackle of Novocaine for the Soul, I was hooked, I was obsessed.
Eels, at that time, was a trio: lead singer Mark Oliver Everett, known as Mr E, a drummer called Butch and bass guitarist Tommy.
I do remember the first time I saw them live. July 21, 2000, in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. I recall being overwhelmed that these heroes were real and alive and within licking distance.
My friends and I hung around the stage door afterwards but I was too scared to say anything, I merely gazed like a lovestruck wee creep. They, could you believe it, spoke to me and, no, really, can you believe it, were nice.
Imagine, then, my uneasy excitement the next day when I looked up from the
till in my coffee shop job to see Butch in the queue. He sat, we chatted. “Look everyone” – I wanted to shake the store for attention – “it’s Butch from Eels, talking to me.”
The sun shone, but this was Glasgow and I had broken free. By now I had a driver’s licence and a boyfriend and coolly made coffee for American rock stars I was in long-term platonic love with.
Mark Oliver Everett’s USP was as a
tragic figure. At the age of 19 he found his father, the quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, dead of a heart attack. His mother died of cancer, his sister Elizabeth killed herself. Around the time Elizabeth died, his cousin was killed in the Twin Tower attacks. He was man without God or luck on his side.
Teenage me thought: here is a man who can understand my pain. The self-absorbed arrogance of youth is magnificent, isn’t it? To be fair to me, I really was in significant and constant pain.
It would later emerge that I had a staghorn kidney stone but my GP was convinced I was at it. Around the time the pain became so bad I’d started fainting from it, Electro-Shock Blues was released, a masterpiece dealing with the suicide of Everett’s sister and his various other losses.
The song Elizabeth on the Bathroom Floor, with brutal sparsity, details her emotional anguish and fatalistic lethargy. This was my jam as I lay on the floor, sometimes shrieking as the pain ripped at my back and side and groin. Elizabeth did not want to get up. I wanted to get up but couldn’t.
Eventually I was sent for an x-ray and referred for an operation. By then Daisies of the Galaxy was out and it was a gift from my best friend, instead of flowers, when I came home from hospital. I listened to Mr E’s Beautiful Blues on a good day and on a bad It’s A Motherf***er lifted me on a comforting thermal current of sound.
The second time I saw Eels was at
the Barrowlands. My cousin, my friend and I went to the gig and, afterwards, we met the band again. I went on the tour bus and I went back to the band’s hotel. It was a new line-up; new people to meet.
It felt, again, like a dream. And wholesome. Eels were not that sort of band and I was not that sort of fan. For both work and leisure I have met the other sorts of bands and, let me tell you, the difference is distinct.
My workaday teenaged angst was compounded by this: I can’t remember how old I was when my father died. I was in the upper stages of secondary school; I know because I went to the funeral in my blazer and tie. Was I 16? Just 17? 15?
At one of my primary schools in Sydney, I remember hanging upside down from the monkey bars, the metal hot on the backs of my knees and the sun hot on my shins.
A girl I didn’t know told me I didn’t look anything like my mother and said I must then take after my dad. I didn’t have a dad, I told her. Everyone has a dad, she said. She was wrong. Not me. I was insistent.
Anyway, I had been sent to school on the morning of the funeral. I was only allowed time off for important events. The funeral turned out to be a memorial service because the body – as in life, as in death – was elsewhere. It was excruciating for many reasons but not least because I had understood the man’s name to be John yet the minister spoke of some other stranger, “Iain”. My aunt explained they were Highlanders.
I returned to Beautiful Freak for a while around then, on repeat, as I needed its familiar comfort. Electroshock Blues was too neat an embodiment of grief, and I wasn’t sure what I was grieving.
Is there a link, though, to a lack of
male role model and the fact that my longest, steadiest relationship is with Mr E? Mark Oliver Everett. The great unrequited love, the decades-long devotion. We are many more albums down now, many live appearances and several absolutely mental meetings.
Eels were touring a 10th studio album, Wonderful, Glorious, in March 2013. It was snowing, according to my review. I also reviewed them on September 5 that year, a double dip.
In 2011 they played at T in the Park at Balado. But in 2011, I was working at the festival for The Herald, the Sunday Herald and the Evening
Times. My choir was performing so I had a staff wristband and a performer wristband, a tantalising “access all areas”.
By accident – and it really was the most happy mistake – I found myself backstage at Eels. That year Everett was performing with brass musicians, dressed identically and with beards.
After the show I saw Everett standing by his tour bus and went to say hello, not expecting him to recognise or remember me. “It’s you,” Everett said, throwing me. He called me by a nickname, and said I was part of Eels tour legend. He insisted I come and meet the other band members so they could put a face to a name.
With hindsight, neither the nickname nor, I’m sure, the Eels interpretation of the story behind it, were kind. But in the moment I was exhilarated. I was part of Eels tour legend?
I met the other band members and then Everett and I stood chatting by his tour bus as the headliner finished on the main stage.
I’d just been saying that I’d performed for the first time with my choir and, gesturing to the fireworks, I said: “Well, it gives me something to write about.”
Everett misunderstood what I’d said and chided me, harshly. He though I meant I was going to write about the nickname incident. He stepped up and back into the tour bus and shut the door in my face. And I was distraught.
The Barrowlands, the tour bus, my teenage nonsense. I wouldn’t divulge any further – and yet Everett had thought I might and was unhappy. This bothered me dreadfully, this misunderstanding.
It was worse than a pet peeve, it was a pet wrong that had to be set right somehow, or every Eels album was ruined to me.
It’s the fourth of July, 2018, and
Mark Oliver Everett is wearing a hat and sunglasses, even though it’s 11.20pm outside the O2 Academy. My stomach has dropped to my pelvis and a score of iced fingernails are plucking at my scalp.
I use my phone to take a photograph of Everett with my friend but my hands are shaking. This is my chance. T in the Park was seven years before. A normal person would let it go but the record shows I am not a normal person. I want to set it right. I say: “Hey, this might sound weird but listen, that time at T in the Park, you totally picked me up wrong.” I elaborate but keep it brief, light. Everett looks at me. Jesus, he looks right at me. He looks and he says: “I don’t remember”.
Eels opened my musical tastes and
gave me my love of music. I’ve written about music, I’ve travelled overseas to see bands, I’ve had a rare string of adventures all sprung from John Menzies in Airdrie Main Street. It’s a wonder to be energised and thrilled by something for so long, to grow with a thing as it grows. To learn what will soothe and what will energise. To have made friendships. To be part of a collective, even if the collective hardly knows you’re there.
Due to the pandemic, the last Eels tour was postponed. They have a new album out, Extreme Witchcraft, a name paying homage, of a sort, to another of my favourites, Beyonce, and they are touring their Lockdown Hurricane tour. Tomorrow they play Barrowlands and I have my two-yearold tickets fresh ready for use. In the audience I will be a teenager and a young woman and grown and then a teenager again but all now, finally, at a safe distance.
Everett looks at me. Jesus, he looks right at me. He looks and he says – ‘I don’t remember’