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"Grant, take off the glasses. If you want every one watching VH1 to think we're The Proclaimers, so be it." E laughs. Together with Butch, Jon Bruion and Grant Lee Phillips he performs the first ever live version of I Like Birds in the unaired, unreleased pilot of the VH1 Jon Brion Show. Pitched as a tv-version of Brions legendary evenings at club largo in Los Angles, the show delivers just that. It's fun, quirky and musically beautiful. But at the same time it's easy to see why Jon Brion was not pleased with it and so this pilot was shelved and the show never made it onto television. The most excellent Jon Brion fansite Fairfax Avenue has the complete pilot for download. It has not only EELS and Grant Lee Phillips performing, but also Elliott Smith, Robyn Hitchcock, Rickie Lee Jones, Cheap Trick and many others. In a combined effort the staff of Fairfax Avenue and our friends over at RockingEels.com have put the EELS snippet on YouTube for all our viewing pleasure:

[video taken from the RockingEels.com YouTube channel]