LATE last year, Mark Oliver Everett, better known as E, needed a life-saving emergency operation. When the Eels singer had a routine check-up, an aneurysm was discovered on his aorta. The largest artery in his body, the one carrying blood from his heart to his circulatory system, had to be replaced.
Fast. Otherwise, as he puts it succinctly, he would soon have been “feeling the symptoms of . .
. death”. E says: “I had open heart surgery .
They cut through my pecs, sawed through my breastbone and stopped my heart on the table.” So imagine the scene when he’s wheeled out of theatre, complete with replacement aorta taken from a cow, and is waking up — groggy but happy to be alive. “How are you feeling?” asks one of the medical team in attendance.
“Moo,” he mumbles in response. “I can’t believe I was coherent enough for that punchline,” E tells me via video call from his home/studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Los Feliz. “One of the side effects is that I do moo occasionally.
” Having got to know the singular E over the years, this is exactly the type of dark humour I’ve come to expect from him. It dawned on me why he was wearing pyjamas when I talked to him for an Eels Christmas special last December. “I think the operation had just happened — but I didn’t tell you! I was probably doped up still,” he admits.
“I wore my pyjamas for two months.” We’re hooking up again because of the imminent release of Eels Time!, the band’s 15th stu.