How do you deal with pain, suffering, loss and depression? Easy: you turn it into an avant-jazz comedy cabaret, and make the audience laugh at every cruel irony and awful tragedy which has dogged you since birth. Welcome to the unhappy world of Mark Oliver Everett, better known as Mr E, the bearded, pyjama-clad, tortured soul at the head of Eels.
Sunday night's end-of-tour gig at the Olympia was pitched like an old-fashioned musical revue, the theatre's tannoy asking the audience to take their seats "as the performance is about to begin". Enter the band, led by the lumbering, Hawaiian-shirted shape of drummer Butch, anchored by the wispy figure of multi-instrumentalist Lisa Germano, and featuring a sax player dressed as a nun. It's getting weird already.
What follows is the most bizarre overture you can imagine, the band doing jazzy improvisations of Eels's back catalogue, bookended by Butch banging loudly on a pair of tympanis. Mr E then shuffles onstage in his jim-jams, looking like a psychiatric patient who has wandered into the wrong ward, and runs up and down the Olympia aisle waving a flashlight at the crowd before taking his seat at the piano for a weirdcore rendition of Oh What A Beautiful Morning. Looks like E is really bearing up after the death of his mother from cancer and his sister's suicide.
Of course, all of this would be just empty theatrics without the dark, compelling music of Eels, and on this level, Sunday night's show truly delivered. Tunes from the current album, Daisies Of The Galaxy, took precedence; songs like It's A Motherfucker, I Like Birds, The Sound Of Fear and Tiger In My Tank disguised their dark hearts beneath jaunty piano lines and jangly guitar strums, sounding like twisted US TV comedy themes - Cheers turned to tears. Older songs like Novocaine For The Soul and Susan's House were maladjusted into 21st-century blues tunes, while the soul standard, Dark End Of The Street, provided a downbeat dead-end to the show. In a last-minute change of heart, the band returned with a final, almost uplifting epilogue of Mr E's Beautiful Blues. Oh well, it was a beautiful downer while it lasted.
