Time Out: March 1-8, 1995
Submitted by Ana
In the world of rock 'n 'roll, twenty-eight-year-old Jeff Buckley is a late starter. His début album, "Grace" didn't appear until last year, but it's been garnering praise ever since. As Buckley's European tour makes its way towards London, Laura Lee Davies travels to Italy to coax him out of his big brown tour bus.
In the world of rock 'n 'roll, twenty-eight-year-old Jeff Buckley is a late starter. His début album, "Grace" didn't appear until last year, but it's been garnering praise ever since. As Buckley's European tour makes its way towards London, Laura Lee Davies travels to Italy to coax him out of his big brown tour bus.
"It doesn't matter to me if people who come to my shows like the way I smell, it's all about the music." Jeff Buckley is rather concerned about his press. It's not that he's been getting bad write-ups; it's just that he doesn't have much of an appetite for being flavor of the month. Well, months actually. Even before his début album "Grace" was released last summer, there Was an almighty buzz about Buckley. Playing the London live circuit he saw word-of-mouth turn into column inches of glowing praise. By the end of 1994 "Grace" was prominent on every albums honours list. An assured and imaginative piece of unfettered rock, heartbreaking folk balladry and stunning vocal beauty, the album easily deserved it's recognition. Hopefully the reception he'll get when he plays London this week will reassure him that, for once, the critics were simply displaying extreme good taste.
Despite his Hollywood looks and wickedly flirtatious nature, Buckley isn't very good at taking compliments. "I showed up in an English daily whose readers probably wouldn't buy me a drink if they knew me. It was like, 'It's a bit loud, but a jolly good crack and you may enjoy it.' " Buckley's delicate American twang becomes a voice from the BBC World Service for a moment. He likes doing impressions, especially English accents and "quaint" vocabulary. When he talks normally his words meander around his ideas. Maybe it's tour fatigue; the croaky voices have set in, but Buckley and his band manage genuine, if knackered good spirits.
Having wowed Milan last September, their second grueling European tour in six months has brought them to a more intimate club date on the east Italian coast. To escape the clank and boom of the roadies, we sit outside soaking up the pleasantly warm Mediterranean winter. There are fears that Buckley's voice might not see them through to the last gig. Buckley nibbles a piece of cheese guiltily; it'll make him too phlegmy later. Still "Grace" is an album that demands to be taken on the road. Along with Buckley originals of screaming retro rock, it features a surprisingly uplifting cover of "Lilac Wine", a stirring version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and a performance of "Corpus Christi Carol" that would shame Aled Jones in his choir boy prime. While last year's trends threw up lad-pop, trip hop and jungle, few artists produced an album so rich and varied.
To Buckley, raised by his music-fan mother on "real post-Dylan, hippie acoustic music that's still fucking great", and the José Feliciano Christmas album (great for doing housework to, apparently), the mix of styles seems perfectly natural. "It's my way of DJ-ing, it's just the way I see all music. CDs are great for that. If there's an artist I'm totally shy of getting into but I like one aspect of what they do, I'll just programme that track, hit the 'repeat' button and listen all day. It's part of my daily maintenance-obsessive-compulsive listening. If you want to link up with your memories it's really, really important to surround yourself with all the music you knew as a child even the crappy hits. I was watching that Melanie Griffith film 'Working Girl' just now and it really took me back to when I first lived in New York with my friend, Brook. It was the best smelling place, dried flowers everywhere, her stuff all over the apartment. It brings you home, somehow, into a place where you can feel replenished instead of this...capsule." He waves his hand towards the tour bus they're sleeping in again tonight. "It's very brown inside, I assure you."
You might think a decent hotel bed and and en-suite bathroom might be more appropriate for one of the most exciting American songwriters to emerge this decade, but scuzziness and a traveling the toilet are as much a part of the rock 'n' roll experience as teen screams and 10-minute guitar trips. "It's humble yet romantic," he smiles, about to launch into another bout of caricatured impressions in a wild variety of accents. "A bit of lower-middle-class glamour: 'I loved your show!' 'Fuck you, you suck!' It's like 'Er, bouncer, could you throw a little dirt on that, there's something smelling over there. Thank you, good night!' Some nights, when the sound's right and the energy's right, you've got four people working together as one unit. It's true there are people smoking everywhere, there are tons of distractions-'Mmm, look at that bird over there'-but the song really gets to you. It's hard, man, but it's a total blast. Anyway, I'm used to this kind of transient life. You know, it's all there in the biog."
The biog also tells you that when Jeff's mother divorced, Scott Moorhead took his father's name on his birth certificate: Jeffrey Scott Buckley. His father, one Tim Buckley, left his mother when he was a baby, snd apart from a surname and the fact that Buckley senior was also a celebrated avant-rock icon the two have little in common. Anyone who knows who Tim Buckley was will already be familiar with this poetic fact. It makes no odds to Junior if the rest of you have never heard of him; he spent nine days with him once when he was a child, and at 28 (Jeff's age now), Tim died of a drug overdose. After the sound-check, Jeff gives the gathered Italian hacks a quick press conference. The only question raised about his father is dealt with swiftly: Jeff could give the guy the phone numbers of some people who might know the answer.
Tonight the gathered throng couldn't give a toss for generations past. The rather wild and traditionally elongated rock show Jeff Buckley and his band were doing last year has been pruned to about one-and-a-half hours. With the crowd behind them and then the sound just right, there's nothing to stop the witty, charismatic Buckley from having one of those rare "good nights". As a few young toughs squabble over a gig poster Buckley defaced earlier, touching up his photo with a beard and swastika, he takes the audience through the highs and lows of "Grace" with mesmerizing conviction and energy.
Perhaps it's because Buckley waited until he was 27 to release his first album that "Grace" is such a remarkable and affecting début. Its intimacy translates into something even more moving live, Buckley drawing you in as if, at any moment, you might hear his own heart breaking over the sound of the PA. "What happens to me informs and inspires me, but the songs are deliberately universal so that they have a life of their own."
The prospect of recording a follow-up album holds no fear for Buckley and watching him on stage, I can't help wishing I'd swiped that poster myself. "I'm going to be old; I'm already older than most people in the charts. No, I'll be doing this until I'm dead...and hopefully I'll get a little grey before that happens." But even if Buckley doesn't mind becoming a rock wrinkly, is it a worry that the ideas might run dry?
"Oh daily. But that's because I have this judge sitting in the back of my mind saying, 'It sucks, do you really think that verse works?' And the fact of the matter is that the judge has never written a song in his life. It's the other people inside me who get shit done. I have this basic distrust of the way the music machine chews artists up and spits them out; especially the eccentric ones who have something almost exclusive to say, something so strange and beautiful that it has to be protected. Every time I brought The Smiths up with my friends I had to defend them. It was like, 'Pah! There's your boy!' Sometimes in order to love something you have to be able to defend it. That's hard for a lot of people, they just delve into things that demand less, like, 'Let the beat control your body.' PJ Harvey went away and got her head sorted out. Sometimes you need to do that. We're like any poor sod in the street. We know we don't want to be fry-cooks, but you know, after a while, that's beginning to look kind of good."
Jeff Buckley plays Shepherd's Bush Empire Sat. "Grace" is out on Columbia.
Despite his Hollywood looks and wickedly flirtatious nature, Buckley isn't very good at taking compliments. "I showed up in an English daily whose readers probably wouldn't buy me a drink if they knew me. It was like, 'It's a bit loud, but a jolly good crack and you may enjoy it.' " Buckley's delicate American twang becomes a voice from the BBC World Service for a moment. He likes doing impressions, especially English accents and "quaint" vocabulary. When he talks normally his words meander around his ideas. Maybe it's tour fatigue; the croaky voices have set in, but Buckley and his band manage genuine, if knackered good spirits.
Having wowed Milan last September, their second grueling European tour in six months has brought them to a more intimate club date on the east Italian coast. To escape the clank and boom of the roadies, we sit outside soaking up the pleasantly warm Mediterranean winter. There are fears that Buckley's voice might not see them through to the last gig. Buckley nibbles a piece of cheese guiltily; it'll make him too phlegmy later. Still "Grace" is an album that demands to be taken on the road. Along with Buckley originals of screaming retro rock, it features a surprisingly uplifting cover of "Lilac Wine", a stirring version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and a performance of "Corpus Christi Carol" that would shame Aled Jones in his choir boy prime. While last year's trends threw up lad-pop, trip hop and jungle, few artists produced an album so rich and varied.
To Buckley, raised by his music-fan mother on "real post-Dylan, hippie acoustic music that's still fucking great", and the José Feliciano Christmas album (great for doing housework to, apparently), the mix of styles seems perfectly natural. "It's my way of DJ-ing, it's just the way I see all music. CDs are great for that. If there's an artist I'm totally shy of getting into but I like one aspect of what they do, I'll just programme that track, hit the 'repeat' button and listen all day. It's part of my daily maintenance-obsessive-compulsive listening. If you want to link up with your memories it's really, really important to surround yourself with all the music you knew as a child even the crappy hits. I was watching that Melanie Griffith film 'Working Girl' just now and it really took me back to when I first lived in New York with my friend, Brook. It was the best smelling place, dried flowers everywhere, her stuff all over the apartment. It brings you home, somehow, into a place where you can feel replenished instead of this...capsule." He waves his hand towards the tour bus they're sleeping in again tonight. "It's very brown inside, I assure you."
You might think a decent hotel bed and and en-suite bathroom might be more appropriate for one of the most exciting American songwriters to emerge this decade, but scuzziness and a traveling the toilet are as much a part of the rock 'n' roll experience as teen screams and 10-minute guitar trips. "It's humble yet romantic," he smiles, about to launch into another bout of caricatured impressions in a wild variety of accents. "A bit of lower-middle-class glamour: 'I loved your show!' 'Fuck you, you suck!' It's like 'Er, bouncer, could you throw a little dirt on that, there's something smelling over there. Thank you, good night!' Some nights, when the sound's right and the energy's right, you've got four people working together as one unit. It's true there are people smoking everywhere, there are tons of distractions-'Mmm, look at that bird over there'-but the song really gets to you. It's hard, man, but it's a total blast. Anyway, I'm used to this kind of transient life. You know, it's all there in the biog."
The biog also tells you that when Jeff's mother divorced, Scott Moorhead took his father's name on his birth certificate: Jeffrey Scott Buckley. His father, one Tim Buckley, left his mother when he was a baby, snd apart from a surname and the fact that Buckley senior was also a celebrated avant-rock icon the two have little in common. Anyone who knows who Tim Buckley was will already be familiar with this poetic fact. It makes no odds to Junior if the rest of you have never heard of him; he spent nine days with him once when he was a child, and at 28 (Jeff's age now), Tim died of a drug overdose. After the sound-check, Jeff gives the gathered Italian hacks a quick press conference. The only question raised about his father is dealt with swiftly: Jeff could give the guy the phone numbers of some people who might know the answer.
Tonight the gathered throng couldn't give a toss for generations past. The rather wild and traditionally elongated rock show Jeff Buckley and his band were doing last year has been pruned to about one-and-a-half hours. With the crowd behind them and then the sound just right, there's nothing to stop the witty, charismatic Buckley from having one of those rare "good nights". As a few young toughs squabble over a gig poster Buckley defaced earlier, touching up his photo with a beard and swastika, he takes the audience through the highs and lows of "Grace" with mesmerizing conviction and energy.
Perhaps it's because Buckley waited until he was 27 to release his first album that "Grace" is such a remarkable and affecting début. Its intimacy translates into something even more moving live, Buckley drawing you in as if, at any moment, you might hear his own heart breaking over the sound of the PA. "What happens to me informs and inspires me, but the songs are deliberately universal so that they have a life of their own."
The prospect of recording a follow-up album holds no fear for Buckley and watching him on stage, I can't help wishing I'd swiped that poster myself. "I'm going to be old; I'm already older than most people in the charts. No, I'll be doing this until I'm dead...and hopefully I'll get a little grey before that happens." But even if Buckley doesn't mind becoming a rock wrinkly, is it a worry that the ideas might run dry?
"Oh daily. But that's because I have this judge sitting in the back of my mind saying, 'It sucks, do you really think that verse works?' And the fact of the matter is that the judge has never written a song in his life. It's the other people inside me who get shit done. I have this basic distrust of the way the music machine chews artists up and spits them out; especially the eccentric ones who have something almost exclusive to say, something so strange and beautiful that it has to be protected. Every time I brought The Smiths up with my friends I had to defend them. It was like, 'Pah! There's your boy!' Sometimes in order to love something you have to be able to defend it. That's hard for a lot of people, they just delve into things that demand less, like, 'Let the beat control your body.' PJ Harvey went away and got her head sorted out. Sometimes you need to do that. We're like any poor sod in the street. We know we don't want to be fry-cooks, but you know, after a while, that's beginning to look kind of good."
Jeff Buckley plays Shepherd's Bush Empire Sat. "Grace" is out on Columbia.
No comments:
Post a Comment