(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.
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