The London Times, May 5, 1995
By Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran tries to find out why Jeff Buckley has dreams about having his skin flayed by a mad sculptor.
The last time I attempted to telescope the emotions that Jeff Buckley's music inspires into mere paragraphs and words, the phrase "Soon to be awe-inspiringly famous" crept up with as much regularity as the word "genius". That was last August, when Buckley's biggest UK gig to date was before an exceedingly cramped hundred people Upstairs at the Garage in London. Nine months later, and Buckley has sold out the 2000 capacity Empire and had his debut album, Grace, lauded as the best of 1994 in several magazines.
"I told you so", is such a pinched-mouth phrase I won't even begin to utter it; but...
And so my powers of cognition have brought me to New York, Buckley's adopted home town, and a conference room in the massive Sony Records building. Buckley's been doing phone interviews all day. He's greasy-haired and his eyes are bruised with lack of sleep, but he's as polite as ever, leaping around trying to make everyone comfortable before dropping back into his chair and spilling his Bad Dreams when requested.
"I tend to forget my dreams," he says. "They seep out of the room as I wake, and the more I try and clutch at them, the more ferociously they wriggle... but I had a dream a couple of nights ago where, to cut a long story short, this mad artist wanted to cut my skin into strips and weave me into rococo shapes. So I'd be like a living sculpture, beautiful in his eyes, but horribly disfigured and unable to do anything but die."
Erm, that's a bit heavy. I was kind of expecting the old, "Well, I'm walking naked through a supermarket when I see my old math teacher..."
"I have those kinds of dreams as well, I guess," he says. "It's just I don't remember them."
Does he think the bad dream had anything to do with the reams of cod-psychology written about him in the past year by people looking for his dark side; for the fissures in his personality that mean he will turn into another rock ghost whose untimely death will haunt us all?
"No one has really come anywhere near to describing me as the person my friends know, let alone me," he says. "Perhaps my personality is all in the inflections and can't be transcribed."
So let's see if Jeff can do the impossible and describe his own music. Go on, give it a go. "Music affects people in different ways," he says. "We've all got different chemicals swishing around in our bodies; we've all got different emotional imperatives. With some people, the chemistry will cause an explosion or a breakdown, or lust, or extreme joy. I can talk about what I feel when the music takes hold of me, my posture changes. I hold my head high, stick my chest out; my bones seem to bend easier; the shape of my face seems to change. I feel I can do anything. It's almost sexual."
That is the end of the interview. Buckley starts striding around the building, muttering "And what's wrong with being horny?" under his breath. Nothing at all.
By Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran tries to find out why Jeff Buckley has dreams about having his skin flayed by a mad sculptor.
The last time I attempted to telescope the emotions that Jeff Buckley's music inspires into mere paragraphs and words, the phrase "Soon to be awe-inspiringly famous" crept up with as much regularity as the word "genius". That was last August, when Buckley's biggest UK gig to date was before an exceedingly cramped hundred people Upstairs at the Garage in London. Nine months later, and Buckley has sold out the 2000 capacity Empire and had his debut album, Grace, lauded as the best of 1994 in several magazines.
"I told you so", is such a pinched-mouth phrase I won't even begin to utter it; but...
And so my powers of cognition have brought me to New York, Buckley's adopted home town, and a conference room in the massive Sony Records building. Buckley's been doing phone interviews all day. He's greasy-haired and his eyes are bruised with lack of sleep, but he's as polite as ever, leaping around trying to make everyone comfortable before dropping back into his chair and spilling his Bad Dreams when requested.
"I tend to forget my dreams," he says. "They seep out of the room as I wake, and the more I try and clutch at them, the more ferociously they wriggle... but I had a dream a couple of nights ago where, to cut a long story short, this mad artist wanted to cut my skin into strips and weave me into rococo shapes. So I'd be like a living sculpture, beautiful in his eyes, but horribly disfigured and unable to do anything but die."
Erm, that's a bit heavy. I was kind of expecting the old, "Well, I'm walking naked through a supermarket when I see my old math teacher..."
"I have those kinds of dreams as well, I guess," he says. "It's just I don't remember them."
Does he think the bad dream had anything to do with the reams of cod-psychology written about him in the past year by people looking for his dark side; for the fissures in his personality that mean he will turn into another rock ghost whose untimely death will haunt us all?
"No one has really come anywhere near to describing me as the person my friends know, let alone me," he says. "Perhaps my personality is all in the inflections and can't be transcribed."
So let's see if Jeff can do the impossible and describe his own music. Go on, give it a go. "Music affects people in different ways," he says. "We've all got different chemicals swishing around in our bodies; we've all got different emotional imperatives. With some people, the chemistry will cause an explosion or a breakdown, or lust, or extreme joy. I can talk about what I feel when the music takes hold of me, my posture changes. I hold my head high, stick my chest out; my bones seem to bend easier; the shape of my face seems to change. I feel I can do anything. It's almost sexual."
That is the end of the interview. Buckley starts striding around the building, muttering "And what's wrong with being horny?" under his breath. Nothing at all.
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