Early NME Write Up

August 7, 1993
By Simon Williams
Submitted by Ana

JEFF BUCKLEY

CRASH! CRANG! BLING! The sound of a plastic spoon digging into an ice bucket shatters the hushed calm.The distant rumble of subway trains suddenly resembles a herd of amphetamine-crazed elephants trampling through the toilets. It's 1:30 am, we're in a bar which manages to combine the aesthetic displeasures of Ronnie Scott's and Raymond's Revue Bar, and Jeff Buckley has stunned a roomful of normally gossiping biz types into complete, reverent silence.
  Melodramatic? Oh, absolutely, but thoroughly deserved. Any one-man performance by the son of songwriting legend Tim Buckley is bound to be a fatal attraction, but few could have expected a show by, hell, a showman such as this.
  Let's face the facts: Jeff Buckley is 26 years old. He has just signed to Columbia Records in the States, and Alan McGee is desperate to ensnare him on Creation in the UK. He has the voice of an angel shagging. He looks like Matt Dillon gone grunge. He makes "Lilac Wine" sound like a classic song. He is funny, cocky, charming and-most important of all-manages to play an entire set in front of a sparkling gold stage curtain without ever looking like a wanker.
  See, almost two decades after his father's somewhat reckless death, Jeff has been perfecting his craft in bars like this; coming back week after week to toy with a benevolent blend of mocking humor and the sort of soul The Commitments wouldn't comprehend if it crapped on their carpet. So he swoons through five minutes of immaculate acoustic material, all angst attacks and tearful poetry (cf "I'm down and tortured/The white horses flow").
  Sassy will love Jeff. He's hip, trippy and not adverse to ridiculing The Knack or doing his joke about How Elvis Died. By the time he rolls into a quite astonishing version of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" even the bar staff have given up and are simply staring, enraptured at the stage. Has Jeff got soul? I enquire of one particularly gobsmacked waitress.
  "Has he got soul? F-, yeah-he's got SHITLOADS!" she beams.
  What an absolutely marvellous, marvellous geezer.