Garage, Glasgow, review

(Thanks to Gabby for finding!)

Jeff Buckley, Garage, Glasgow

1st March 1995

  ABOUT his voice and singing ability there was no doubt on Monday night: Jeff Buckley is the vocalist as we near fresh twenty-first century vistas. When not insinuating himself into your heart with his plaintive whispers and intimate, little-boy breathiness, Buckley is unrolling vast, creamy swoops or raw-throated, free-form, higher-register shrieks. His voice floats and flutters, feather-light, embodying a complex mix

of pain, pride, and bewilderment. Or it keens and roars with a brutal proto-punk edge.

  The effect on an audience is invariably the same: spine-tingling and awe-inspiring. But as for Jeff Buckley's own songs and his on-stage presentation...well, the jury remains out. His half-dozen or so self-composed songs conform to a samey-sounding formula best summed up as plangent grunge. No wonder then that Monday's genuine show-stoppers were covers.

  His version of Lilac Wine, immortalised by Nina Simone prior to ruination by Elkie Brooks, was eerily astounding. Concluding with Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Buckley left us rapt, arrested, astonished, sated. Earlier, though, we'd seen him slough his shirt and jacket with an unattractive, self-loving shimmy. His jokey between-song chats were less than necessary too.

  Or, to quote the two Paisley women standing next to me in the sell-out crowd, ''Start the singin' and stop the comedy!'' Otherwise, they kept bellowing ''AC Milan!'' in hormonal appreciation of Jeff's resemblance to Paolo Maldini. Moral? Keep your feet on the ground and your eye on the ball, Jeff.

94-96 tour itinerary

List of shows from 94-96, though unfortunately pages 3 and 5 are missing... hopefully someday they will surface somehow!

Phantom Solo Tour flyer

Flyer for the "Phantom Solo Tour", December, 1996

MM Grace review

August 13, 1994

JEFF BUCKLEY

GRACE

Columbia Col475928

10tks/55 mins/All formats/FP

BECAUSE, after a series of desperate but sadly unsuccessful attempts, he finally realized that it wasn't actually possible to carve lyric poetry into the night sky with a 300-foot flamethrower, Jeff Buckley became a singer.

  "Grace" puts me in mind of what all those bands formed by young Hollywood stars might have sounded like if Hollywood was still HOLLYWOOD, and the square-jawed buggers could boast a single grain of stardust between them-partly due to Jeff's movie-star looks, cool-Californian stage persona, and his habit of talking wonderfully incoherent Utopian stoner babble, but mainly because near enough all these songs are awash with the drama and mystique they first built 25-foot screens for.

  In "Mojo Pin", a choked, meandering vocal weaves through ornate ripples of open-tuned guitar; the title track boasts a chord sequence to cartwheel to. Elsewhere he adds a wonderful feel of doomed, youthful romanticism to covers of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", the "Corpus Christi Carol" and, rather more bizarrely, "Lilac Wine" by perennial "Two Ronnies" guest Elkie Brooks.

  "So Real" is a song of surrender to the raised-vein thunder of The Moment (being, in this case, a night when Jeff and some pretty chum "walked around till the the moon grew full, like a plate, and the wind blew an invocation"). He never stepped on the cracks because he thought he'd hurt his mother.

  "I love you," whispers Jeff. "And I'm afraid to love you." My Bloody Valentine once conveyed that sudden, shocking self-realization with a mesh of bleeding noise; Buckley uses his voice, drawn out like a slow-stretched bolus of heavenly bubblegum (Alright!!!-Ed).

  It's a voice that leaps tall buildings in a single bound, smells of sex and Chanel and never stoops to showboating. Dull people would remark "He could sing his shopping list and it would sound fantastic," (Like, YOU'D never slip it in a review, right?-Ed) which, luckily, legitimizes his more embarrassing stabs at lyrical flash. Indeed, when Jeff sings about girls with green eyes and "butterscotch hair", you don't just picture them, you fancy them rotten (but that's the thing about the Nineties, don't you think? The most alluring quality one can possess is to be fictional). Anyway, "Grace" is a massive, gorgeous record, a record that floats all talk of famous dads out onto the lake on a makeshift raft and leaves it there, and starts where every other singer-songwriter in town says, "Whoa!", pulls up his horse and backs off.

  Because the point at which others are struck dumb with rapture is the moment Jeff Buckley finds his voice, and starts singing.

Jeff Buckley appears on the MM stage on Sunday, August 28

TAYLOR PARKES

MM Sin-e review

April 9, 1994

JEFF BUCKLEY

LIVE AT SIN-E

Big Cat ABB61XCD/4tks/27 mins/MP

FOLKIES-Arran sweaters, sandals and a face that would disgrace even Captain Birds Eye after a night on the lager. Jeff Buckley-young and electric with the kind of fanny-moistening good looks only a Hollywood surgeon could chisel. And he can write a good tune too. Nirvana!

  The highlight of Buckley's two recent London shows was to watch someone actually working for their wage-going for notes which, by rights, they had only an even chance of hitting, yet, in the process, creating an atmosphere which left everybody in the room stunned into silence.

  This four-track mini-LP (fat bastid of a single?) retains the edge an abandon that characterized those shows yet, because it was recorded in a tiny bar in Greenwich Village, loses none of the intimacy that makes JB so special live. Take the lovelorn "Mojo Pin", with its dreamily insistent guitar motif that sounds like it's been beamed in from the edge of sleep or "Eternal Life" which starts off like the most depressed Hendrix reflection then turns inward into a drama-filled confrontation with his own mortality.

  Buckley's version of Van Morrison's "The Way Young Lovers Do" is a fine example of what I was on about earlier, his cavalier approach to creating time-stopping, wonderous moments.

  He actually picks out the individual instruments from the thick mesh of the "Astral Weeks" big-band arrangement and wails, hollers, cries, and croons their parts. Somehow, none of the churning urgency of the original is lost. It could so easily be a grand folly but isn't, simply because of his sheer brass-neck, his intuitive knowledge of what made the song so brilliant in the first place and the small fact that he could sing the wallet out of Pavarotti's back pocket.

  I get blank looks trying to order a vodka in Paris, but I think "Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin" is one of those heart-destroying paeans to lost youth that only the frogs-Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel (I know he's Belgian) knock out so lovingly.

  Jeff Buckley has created one of the albums of the year with just a Telecaster and a voice that sounds like a choirboy singing from the rafters of a whorehouse. Buy it and melt.

MAT SMITH

94/95 tour itinerary

Itinerary booklet for the Autumn 94/Winter 95 tours...how I wish I had this!