Another stellar album from Ian Brown

Eels have a new album out now, Hombre Lobo. We talk to the band's frontman Mark Everett, or E as he's better known, about the album, his ability to find humour in the most tragic of circumstances, and how he reacted to the surprise success of the band's debut single Novocaine For The Soul in 1997.

By Andy Welch

In horror stories, werewolves are terrifying creatures blessed with super-human strength, razor-sharp teeth and a deep animalistic rage that can only be subdued by a silver bullet.

While they're common characters in scary films, werewolves aren't usually the subject of concept albums. But then Mark Oliver Everett, or E as he's known, is not your usual songwriter.

Sipping his tea - he takes it black, no sugar - while looking out onto a leafy London park from his hotel suite, it's hard to see any links between him, the lupine beast which inhabits his band's latest collection Hombre Lobo (that's werewolf in Spanish - literally 'man-wolf') and the album's atmosphere of longing and desperation.

E's beard is the key to the origin of Hombre Lobo, a magnificent full-face effort which stretches from chin to mid-chest.

"Thank you, I never get tired of people complimenting it," he says, a grin just visible under the facial fuzz.

"It takes a lot of patience, and you get to points when you're frustrated and it's growing in the wrong direction, but you just have to stick with it and work with it," he says, running his fingers across his face.

"A lot of people would look at it and think it's bristly, but it's actually soft as a baby's beard, should a baby have a beard. It's like having a chinful of cotton candy."

When E started writing songs for, what is now, Hombre Lobo, he quickly realised they were quite different from his normal work. Then one day he was inspired by his reflection.

"I was cleaning my teeth one morning, I looked in the mirror and saw my beard. I thought, 'This beard really doesn't fit these songs I'm doing, I should get rid of it', and then with the razor in my hand, at the last second I thought, 'Why don't I just write an album that suits the beard?'. Now my facial hair is dictating my artistic direction. We all have to start somewhere, I guess."

"I started to think about the last time I had a big beard, which was only half as good as this one, and it was when I did the Souljacker record," he adds, referring to the band's 2001 album, the release of which was delayed in the US after the 9/11 attacks due to its title. Some also believe E's "terrorist-like" beard on the sleeve added to the controversy.

"The first song on Souljacker was called Dog Faced Boy, and at the time I started thinking I was him. So last year, I started thinking about that boy again and wondered what he would be doing now.

"The only thing he could do is grow up and turn into a werewolf, so then I started thinking about werewolves, and passion and desire.

"After that Hombre Lobo became a Dr Jekyll and Mr Werewolf thing, where the werewolf parts come out when things get ugly and the passion has come to the boil. Dr Jekyll is there to cover the tender side, he's a bit more rational and refined."

It's perhaps no surprise that E chose to inhabit a character while creating the band's seventh album. In the four years since the Eels's last album was released - the critically lauded Blinking Lights And Other Revelations - he's done nothing but think about himself.

That 2005 album is a darker-than-dark set, influenced by the deaths of close family members. As a teenager, E found his father in bed after he'd had a fatal heart attack, then his mother died of lung cancer in 1998, two years after the suicide of his schizophrenic sister Elizabeth. As if those bereavements weren't tragic enough, E's cousin was a flight attendant aboard one of the doomed 9/11 airliners.

After Blinking Lights, E wrote his autobiography, Things The Grandchildren Should Know, authored a documentary about his relationship with his quantum physicist dad, Hugh Everett III, called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, and assembled a two-volume career retrospective, Meet The Eels: Essential Eels Vol 1 and Useless Trinkets.

"It was a tough four years because I was constantly living in my past," he admits. "What with the book, the CDs and the documentary, it was really hard. I don't like to look back, which is what's so exciting about now - I'm finally back in the future, looking forward."

Throughout his turbulent private life, E believes it's his celebrated black-as-coal sense of humour that pulled him through - examples of which can be heard in all his music, most notably on Electro-Shock Blues, released in 1998.

"My sense of humour has certainly been a godsend for me. In the situations I've been in, I don't know what I'd have done without it. At some points all you can do is laugh, at the absurdity of how crazy things get.

"Sometimes it goes too far, and I try to stop myself but I can't, and as soon as I say something I have to apologise."

If you've been reading this and wondering why you know the name Eels but can't put your finger on it, it's more than likely because of their smash hit Novocaine For The Soul, and follow-up Susan's House.

The former was the band's debut single in 1997, and hit No 10 in the charts here with considerable radio play. Nothing E has done since has come close to eclipsing the commercial success of that track, and it's no accident.

"I purposefully went away from fame and success," he says. "It's not that I'm opposed to having a hit record, it's just that I don't like it when that becomes the goal that everyone's focused on, you know? If you make a great song and it happens to become a hit, then that's fine, but chasing it isn't.

"Novocaine was so big here, and in America too, everywhere. It all happened so quickly but it was a great experience because I really didn't enjoy it, and it was the motivation for me to grow as an artist. I went in a direction I probably wouldn't have gone in if we hadn't had that big hit.

"The fact we're still here and making music makes me feel successful these days. It feels good that I've got a catalogue of music and I'm adding to it all time.

"On one hand, I wanted to build a career slowly, so it would last, yet on the other, I'm constantly surprised I'm still around, and it's amazing and I remain optimistic. Things haven't turned out so bad, after all."

Extra time - E

:: Mark Oliver Everett, or E, was born in Virginia on April 10, 1963.

:: His father Hugh Everett III was called "one of the most important scientists of the 20th century" by Scientific American magazine. He authored The Many Worlds Theory, which inspired countless science-fiction books and movies with the concept of parallel universes.

:: As a young teenager, Hugh Everett exchanged letters with Albert Einstein, debating whether it was something random or unifying that held the universe together.

:: E is so-called because when he was a child, he had several friends also called Mark. To avoid confusion, they would refer to each other by their initials, in Mark's case ME, which was later shortened further to simply E.

:: One year while growing up, E's sister Elizabeth played Neil Young's album After The Goldrush every day after school. During the recording of Eels's 2000 album Daisies Of The Galaxy, E used the very same piano Young had used on his 1970 classic.