Florent le Veil poster

From the Classical Festival show with autograph

HMV Toronto

Newly unearthed footage of Jeff and the boys on October 27, 1994 at the HMV in Toronto, Canada...enjoy!

Buckley takes on the world

(submitted by Lex Frumpy)

In just over two and a half years the enigmatic Jeff Buckley has risen from relative obscurity to the top of the cult ladder. He talks about life on the way up to Ray Purvis.

  JEFF BUCKLEY has grown from being a sensitive, expressive, New York cafe performer to a...sensitive, expressive, worldwide auditorium performer.

  And he has done it without compromising any of his innate charm and essential musical perversity.

  Buckley defies easy categorisation. A listen to his one-and-only full-length CD Grace or the extended live workouts on the B-side of his singles shows that he is totally out of whack with almost all of today's formatted guitar-based rock.

  He believes in just letting things happen. As his bass player Mick Grondahl describes him, "he is a person who wants to just fall into the abyss and trust that he'll land on his two feet-just like a cat."

  Leaving aside the obvious comparison with his legendary father-the late Tim Buckley-the handsome singer, who has the same taut, wild good looks as the actor Matt Dillon, has few peers when it comes to vocal gymnastics.

  He is blessed with a unique and marvelously intricate voice. Imagine something like a cross between Nick Cave, Van Morrison and Maria Callas.

  Besides having the reckless affrontery to tackle covers such as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Alex Chilton's KangaRoo and Benjamin Britten's Corpus Christi Carol, the 29-year-old Buckley has the ability to write complex and subtly structured songs.

  Born in 1966, Buckley was raised by his Panamanian mother Mary Guilbert in California. His biological father, the legendary singer Tim Buckley who recorded eight jazzy, ahead-of their-time records in the 60s and 70s and died of an accidental drug overdose at about the same age Jeff is now.

  When Buckley Jun. was about eight he spent a week with his natural father "I met him one time and a couple of months later he died," Buckley explained two years ago to a songwriting magazine. "But between that he never wrote and never called and I didn't even get invited to the funeral. There is no connection really."

  Speaking from New York on the eve of the Hard Luck Tour of Australia that brings the charismatic singer to Perth for concerts at the Belvoir Amphitheatre on Saturday and the Sandringham Hotel on Sunday, Buckley is quite willing to sketch in the background to his rise to fame, including his early years in suburban Los Angeles.

  "I wrote songs when I was in high school and I had had a band in my room almost every day but we didn't play out, we just played. The first band I had was in northern California and we played a few dinky places." Buckley joined various hard rock and reggae bands in California and studied guitar at the LA Musicians' Institute.

  "I went through this period where I couldn't find my own voice. I was chewing myself from the inside and I didn't know why. I laid off for maybe like two years...I got this huge depression or something. I didn't do anything, I was like this kind of tumbleweed guy. So I went to New York... actually I went twice...and when I got there I got these ordinary jobs but I always got fired for sleeping or being accused of stealing something when I hadn't."