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

Reading Reviews

Melody Maker: September 3, 1994

Something's gotta give and Jeff Buckley gives it in loads. "Grace" is much rawer than usual, "Kangaroo" is simply lust-crazed. "When I first saw you"-he sounds almost disgusted with himself-"you had on blue jeans." He spits out the line as if blue jeans were the utmost in degradation. I swear the sky's turning red and molten electricity is swirling around our ears. And is that really Liz Fraser jumping up and down in the front row or am I finally succumbing to Festivalitis? I dunno, my hangover's turned into nervous exhaustion, someone's given me a strange pill and there's a champagne cork popping inside my stomach.

***

The Observer: September 4, 1994

By Sam Taylor

  The highlight of the weekend was, by some distance, Jeff Buckley, a 23-year-old New Yorker, whose father was cult icon Tim Buckley. Buckley Sr is remembered for his wonderous voice, angelic looks and premature death (at 28, of a drug overdose); as a result of the latter, Jeff barely knew him and is understandably tight-lipped about the astonishing genetic inheritance of That Voice.

  Buckley Jr's talent is still raw, and he and his accomplished three-piece band have an occasional tendency to over-indulge, but it's a minor criticism of a hugely impressive performance. His songs are structurally complex but harrowingly direct in terms of mood, combining the blues-rock drive of Led Zeppelin with the free-flowing emotionalism of Van Morrison's early masterpiece Astral Weeks. His lyrics are less amazing than Morrison's, but it hardly matters as they are carried above all meaning on his incredible heartbreaking wail.

Garage, Glasgow Review

Melody Maker, April 1, 1995
By Jamie T. Conway
Submitted by Ana

JEFF BUCKLEY

THE GARAGE, GLASGOW

EVERY year. Without fail. Teachers would smile at my mate Stephen Parker and say, "Ah, brother of the glorious Robert! At Oxford now, isn't he? I'll expect great things of you." And later wondered why he tried to kill him.
  The surefire method of incurring Jeff Buckley's wrath is to invoke the memory of his Famous Biological Relation (He met him twice. This is not a father. This is a car park attendant.) He hates that. Loathes it. Bellows for blood whenever page features written by journalists who remember his father appear.
  We shouldn't be surprised he's eager to avoid comparisons; Buckley Snr's legacy is justifiably sacrosanct, and as Jeff isn't charging full-tilt at the windmills of convention, some have begun dismissing him as an unworthy heir, conveniently forgetting the Arran-sweatered tedium of pater's debut, or that it took him five albums to trump Creation with "Lorca"and "Starsailor". Having had the wisdom to begin his recording career later, Jnr is already a more promising proposition than his father would initially have seemed; the eclecticism of "Grace" indicates a talent which will consistently confound and wrongfoot its critics, underlined by tonight's bizzare but invigorating lurch through "Kick Out The Jams". And snigger all you want, but I'm furious when he betrays "Lilac Wine" by inserting "you broke my heart, you bastard." Someone must have told him about Elkie Brooks.
  When he's not playing the clodhopping clown, we get a spirited trot through his own material, and once you've got over the undeniable similarity of that bloodied harpoon of a voice and you-know-who, you think more of Van Morrison, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Marvin Gaye, and every other poetic, sensitive soul moved to write songs like snowfall in moonlight because they haven't had any in months.
  But his greatest asset-his naive, unalloyed idealism-is also his Achilles heel. The line between purity and puerility is a fine one, and so however lovely his output may be, it's ultimately somewhat facile, and his cover of "Hallelujah" fails; it was made to be sung by grizzled veterans like John Cale, someone buckling under the weight of accumulated regret and who truly understands "Love is not a victory march/It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah". But when Jeff Buckley's dreams have been reduced to ash, and he can't rinse the acrid aftertaste from his mouth, expect Mount Everest on stilts.

Def Jeff

Melody Maker: April 9, 1994
Submitted by Ana

JEFF BUCKLEY's unfettered emotional outpouring have dazzled a multitude of Makerites, DAVE SIMPSON included.

  DESPITE what we read in the live pages, many gigs are sterile, perfunctory affairs. Bands arrive, playing the roles they're comfortable with and the music that suits a career and we applaud wildly out of numb obligation-maybe because we've forgotten what it feels to be astonished. Go see Jeff Buckley, however, and the chances are you'll be left staggered, awestruck and drained by electrifying flashes of guitar virtuosity and his amazing, heart-wrenching Voice.
  You won't have felt so purified in years.
  "I feel it and I wanna go there," says Buckley of his refreshingly intuitive, spontaneous vocal style.

  "Every feeling has an articulation. You know when you get drunk or you try Ecstasy for the first time, and all your secrets come tumbling out? That's what it's like every night.

  "Sometimes people will f***ing hate it and walk out but I still feel...connected. I just sing what I feel. Emotions are very hard for people to handle. The Greeks made up Gods and goddesses around their emotions, and gave their names and faces and had relationships with them. We don't have that, we have therapy. Which ain't bad. I love therapy. But generally people think they're just meat and that emotions visit on them like in-laws. I've never felt like that."
  Jeff is the son of Tim Buckley, who confronted audiences with a similar spiritual barrage in the Sixties/early Seventies and died in 1975. Jeff met him only once, and hasn't come to terms with the rejection. Ask him about his dad and the best you'll get is an ambivalent shrug, and the insistence that his childhood with his musical mother and mechanic stepfather is much more important. Ask him about politics, poverty, Dylan or Duke Ellington and he'll talk you into the floor. Somehow, conversation always comes back to music.
  "I write mostly personal poetry," he urges. "From dreams, or sometimes I'll wake up in love."
  Does Jeff Buckley ever feel that some weird trick of destiny or genetics has cast him in a similar role to that of his father, some 25 years before?
  "No," he spits instantly. "I get it from my mother."

An EP, "Live At Sin-e", is released this week on Big Cat

Glastonbury Reviews

The Gaurdian: June 26, 1995

By Ed Vulliamy

  The main stage acts were cappped without question by the haunting, almost operatic voice and the winding, elastic tempo tapestries of Jeff Buckley. Son of the tragic hero of folk rock, Tim Buckley, he is probably a better balladeer. He was greeted by his devotees, but then found himself rousing the entire valley as he narrated the soft and harsh episodes in his stories of desolate love in a "world gone cold, no one cares about love any more."

***

Select Magazine, July, 1995

Pyramid Stage, Saturday 2:50pm
Only those with the foresight to bring high-power binoculars could salivate over his spectacular cheekbones, so it's all down to Buckley's music. But he plays all his grunge-beast songs, and not stuff like "Hallelujah" which is what usually gives Jeff his full kaleidoscopic spectrum of mood and magic.
Best Song: "So Real"
Best Onstage Ad-lib: "You're so quiet, we're so quiet together. We never talk anymore. Haha."
Worst Moment: Jeff invites on Ben Watt.
Best Moment: He and Watt launch into a version of the MC5's "Kick Out The Jams".
Overall Score: 3/10. AP

***

Melody Maker, July 1, 1995
Submitted by Sai

Jeff Buckley's too unsullied, too compassionate to really rub my lamp. I want fear and loathing, dread and desire, a stubborn, vindictive refusal to understand. Some HATE in his love songs. And isn't it time he wrote some new material? (JTC)

Orgasm Addict

Melody Maker: May 27, 1995

"There is no name yet for the places he or his voice can't go." They said that about Sixties archangel Tim Buckley and they're saying it about his son, JEFF BUCKLEY. CAITLIN MORAN gets orgasmic with the multi-octave vocalist.

OH NO, MISSUS

  JEFF BUCKLEY swishes through Sony's New York offices with seven or eight lackies trailing behind him. They're showing him the way to The Gold Room. He could probably find it himself, but all of Sony US seem to have signed contracts binding them to fulfill Buckley's every need. When we finally reach The Gold Room, Jeff closes the door behind him.

  "How many Jeff Buckleys does it take to change a light-bulb?" he asks, lighting up a cigarette and pacing the room. 

  Dunno. How many Jeff Buckleys does it take to change a light-bulb?

  "It's OK, Jeff, we'll do it for you. No, no-we'll do it. Just sit down. Do you need anything else?"

  He grins. He's aware. He's aware, all right. So are we, now.

THE PAST...

  THE Big Cat Record offices, New York, are in a dirty brown street that smells of malted chocolate and exhaust fumes. The building itself seems to be all about gentility and utility. Basically, it's a dump-and-a-half. The lifts take 17 minutes to arrive. A huddle of Hungarian students waits perpetually in the lobby.

  Jeff Buckley used to be signed to Big Cat.

THE PRESENT...

  THE Sony Buildings are in the most expensive part of NY-the exhaust fumes are so dense here that the tops of buildings disappear in a cloud of neon-lit pollution. The trees are decorated with fairy lights. The buildings themselves make me experience infinity for the first time: the walls are too far away to see. There are uniformed cleaners scuttling around, constantly buffing and polishing the already spotless marble and chrome. Every so often, a television flashes up maps, to show you where you are. The air conditioning pumps out what appears to be Chanel No. 5.

  Jeff Buckley is now signed to Sony.

  Companies as big as the UK government don't employ lackies to run around after nobody.

  Wosser story here, then?

IN THE BEGINNING...

  SO we were in this tiny room in the arse-end of London, right, snorkling gin through our noses and laughing as John McEnroe started snogging Chrissie Hynde.

  "Love all!" we cried, amusingly. "We cannot believe it! Your tongue was over the line!"

  A friend so amazingly good at guessing the Next Big Thing that she seems to mainline The Future into her veins at the weekend, has dragged me down here, muttering such words as "genius" and "obsession," as is her wont. Some son of a famous dead man is appearing tonight-and I, she, John McEnroe and Chrissie Hynde are waiting, as Radiohead would put it, for something to happen.

  Suddenly, this boy wanders onstage, skin lit holy by the spotlight, and a guitar tucked under his arm. The way he moves suggest street-level royalty-the cool friend of a friend you're too nervous to ever speak to, but spend hours practicing how to light cigarettes like they do. His hair was rumpled and appealing-how do you get hair styled like that?

  "By f***ing wild-eyed on the floor," my friend explained.

  Sigh.

  The boy starts singing. It is his album, "Grace". As each song unravels, it fills you with a desperation that sucks at the heart, and puts sparks in the eyes. It moves through the blood and makes the veins glow. It crackles across the skin and leaves scorch marks.

  Imagine if you could actually sing the sound of all hope leaving. Imagine if you knew the syllables of falling in love. If you had fingers that could coax a guitar to sound like the sun in your lover's eyes, the smell of hot skin, the taste of their throat.

  Yeah, well...

  Kristin Hersh once posited a theory that love is like an addictive poison-one lick of it and you crave the next hit. Anyone who hears Jeff BuckleyMusic will spend the next month craving the next hit.

LET THE BLOKE GET A WORD EDGEWISE, CAITLIN

  "Music is my mother...and my father...it is my work and my rest...my blood...my compass...my love."

  Jeff is hunched over a pile of old take-away cartons and a head-sized ashtray full of dead cigarettes. He has spent the afternoon explaining his soul away to regional papers and fanzines over the phone. Shaving has not been an issue for the last three days, at least. Neither has sleep, judging from his sore eyes and greased hair. Buckley talks weird-like he'd learnt how to have conversations by reading poetry and New Age "Self Help" books. When his phrasing turns rococo and sounds slightly stilted, you cringe until you realize it appears awkward because he's singing it in his head. He can hear the music and you can't.

  "I try to make my music joyful-it makes me joyful--to feel the music soar through the body. It changes your posture, you raise your chin, throw your shoulders back, walk with a swagger. When I sing, my face changes shape. If feels like my skull changes shape...the bones bend. 'Grace' and 'Eternal Life' (from the album) are about the joy that music gives-the, probably illusory, feeling of being able to do anything. Sex is like that. You become utterly consumed by the moment.

  "Apparently orgasm is the only point where your mind becomes completely empty-you think of nothing for that second. That's why it's so compelling-it's a tiny taste of death. Your mind is void-you have nothing in your head save white light. Nothing save that white light and 'YES!'-which is fantastic. Just knowing 'Yes.'

  Jeff smiles, and his teeth show. He has wolf-teeth.

  So what noises do you make when you come?

  "Whaaaat?"

  Well, me and my mates have all seen you baby-scat-singing live. You make wibbly sounds and go "Awwuhagh" a lot, as does Bjork. We've got a bet on that you sound like that. Do you sound like that?

  "Well, no...," he seems genuinely thrown for a minute. "Although it's very flattering that you should think I can imitate the sound of orgasm. However, some of the pictures that have been taken of me onstage have brought back a couple of happy memories when I look at them-y'know, head thrown back, jaw locked, sightless eyes..."

  Jeff does his orgasm face. One can almost see a speech-bubble drawn in the air, saying, "And this is my 25-minute encore-version of "Kangaroo."

  Talking of orgasms, did you and Liz Cocteau Twin "do" it? Everyone thought you were An Item some months back.

  "Oh no. Oh no," Jeff looks shocked. "We were just friends-very, very close friends. She's such a good person, so sweet. F***ing her would be like f***ing a sister-no, Liz and I were never bed buddies. That was all lies.

  "I am fucking Courtney, though," he adds. "All those rumors are true, obviously."

  Jeff is lying so much, his pants are on fire.

BAD DREAMS...

  "NIGHTMARES...oh, I have wicked dreams sometimes." Jeff pulls on his hair. "Last night's was stunningly twisted, the King of Bad Dreams. There was this artist who wanted to show me his art; took me to this warehouse out in a bleak, bleak piece of desert, showed me into his barn. It turns out his art is human bodies, with the skin eased away from the bone with razors, and woven into baskets, into sculptures of living skin. all of his works of art are still alive-but their vocal chords are nicked and they are blind-they writhe and writhe, with their bodies twisted and out of shape by this man's vision. And he's looking to me for conformation that his art is valid and special. He keeps saying, 'It's shit, isn't it?' But in the way that you do when you want the other person to go, 'No, no, it's brilliant.' I tell him it's brilliant. And then he turns on me, knife glinting in his hand, and tells me he wants me to be his greatest work of all. I run..."

  Jeff shudders, and looks up with dark, troubled eyes.

  Well, that's not just eating cheese before you go to sleep, is it?

  "No," says Jeff. "No."

SO...

  SO why does this man do what he does? And why is a company as big as Sony so interested?

  Well, partly because he's had a restless, rootless upbringing, and wants to feel part of something, a member of a gang. When he talks about his band, he speaks of them in the way that one would a brother, a sister, a lover. He obviously enjoys the camaraderie and the closeness; the in-jokes and the we're-all-in-this-togetherness. Buckley's only history that he can speak of without anger or regret is that which he makes himself, through his music and his gigs; his only childhood (partly robbed by bringing up his younger brother, partly from being the "man of the house" from such an early age) is when he stands, glowing and stripped in the spotlight, eyes screwed up and scat-singing, reeling off sherbert-bubbles of angel-phrasing unto eternity.

  Why are Sony so interested? Well, they've got over two hours of live concerts in the vault, in case those brooding good looks turn out to have serious cause behind them. And if he lives, well, critical adulation always converts into units if a pretty boy's on the receiving end. His face is his fortune-and his downfall.

  No wonder the happiest I've ever seen him is pulling grotesque faces for Steve Gullick.

  The prettiest genius around, more's the pity.

The single "The Last Goodbye", is out now on Columbia

Low Cal Vocalist

JEFF BUCKLEY
LA2, LONDON

Melody Maker: 1995 Jan 28
By Jennifer Nine
Contributed by Sai

  I DONT know what it costs elsewhere in Soho, but here at the Astoria 2, Jeff Buckley does it for eight quid.

  Virtual ecstasy. Every throat goes dry. Oh god, oh god, oh god. God’s face and Chris Isaak’s chest. You’ll get no sense from the supplicants, drinking him in in that ray-traced, blue nimbus of light, mumbling in that low, persistent, coercive intimacy. Armed to the perfect teeth with our scrabbly dreams.

  And triumphant with the weight of our love-and his self-love, shot through the prettiness like a bad aftertaste. The brooding, blank-faced cool of a million Matt Dillons and twice the actor. A shadowy band whose shimmering guitar haze is a mere backdrop even when it swells to the calculated, bruised massivity of Soundgarden strapped to a flywheel.

  And That Voice! Oh, it’s so real. Rapacious with ambition, swelling with orgasmic ululations that all the vowels in the universe couldn’t spell, although “eeeyah-uh yiii ayy eeyuuaa” is a start. You could play air guitar to it. It goes on forever: his dad, Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, choirboy, Robert Plant, Robert Plant, Robert Plant with instruction in New Man humility. Pleading, pretend frantic. “Oh, baby”, troubled “I love you”s, huge slicks of heartbreak, swooping over the rock critics’ and Q fans’ backtrack devotionals, massaging moody young things clutching their calculated self-pity and their self-abuse a deux. Massaging the massed ranks of PAs, whose catcalls and tipsy shouts to the stage are the only spontaneous truths here tonight.

  But he’s an artist. Artfully unselfconscious, shrugging of his plaid shirt and ignoring the wolf whistles-Richard Gere in “American Gigolo” with a guitar as prop. Head tilted back onto those heartbreak cheekbones, hovering languidly through his own songs’ passing delicacy, pinned to an endless linear succession of Led Zeppelin rockist crescendos laid end to relentless, numbing end. The self-referential proclamations of “Grace”; the sudden, melodic prettiness of “Last Goodbye”, drenched here in scrotum-tightening yowls of “kiss me, oooh, kiss me” as though the demand needs to be made; the world going cold; tears spilling; ecstatic, slow-mo, spiritual sex; the moonshine; the ocean.

  And, of course, the finest quality covers, smothered half to death under pillowtalk. Cohen’s still, majestic “Hallelujah” stretched to a narcoleptic crawl of pained intensity and incomprehensible Kermit-The-Frog vocal excursions. Or the jaw-dropping travesty of Big Star’s “Holocaust”, Buckley slipping from sassy misinterpretation to milking the junkie chic as greedily as a vampire at an artery, while the band’s surging guitars club it into a coma.

  No, not whoring. Colder than that.

Amazing Grace

Melody Maker: August 27, 1994

Forget about any specious comparisons with his father, the legendary Tim-JEFF BUCKLEY is a unique and individual talent, as his fabulous debut album, "Grace", brilliantly demonstrates. MAT SMITH met him in Washington DC on his way to the Reading Festival.

  SCOTT MOORHEAD was just five years old when he fell in love for the first time. At an age when most of us were still sticking bogies under the classroom desk, grappling with the challenge posed by shoelaces and learning to excuse ourselves from school dinners by secreting the worst excesses (brussel sprouts) into the pockets of our shorts, young Scott was already intent on carving up hearts.

  "Her name was Blythe Elliot and I would ache for her just to come through the door," he says, and his eyes twinkle at the memory.

  "I drew pictures of dinosaurs for her on a chalkboard. My mother and her parents had the foolhardy notion for me to go over and spend the night at her house. I remember golden music played in my ears when they suggested it. There was a kind of pale eroticism about it. We'd been playing all day. She had a big brother in the next room who was shooting at the walls with his dart gun like a f***ing psycho. I was staring at him and it was like 'Hi, way to go'. And she was like...I just adored her.

  "And I kissed her on the elbow and she said, 'stop it'. Then we had a little adult peck on the lips. Then that night when we'd taken a bath and we had our jammies on and we were ready for bed, I remember us walking in a circle together with my arm around her shoulder. We walked around three times, all the time talking, and then we stopped and we kiss. Then we walked around and again and kissed again. And that's what lovers do. They go walking, then they stop and kiss. Then they walk and talk some more, then they stop and kiss. A few weeks later I had to move away. That was my first heartbreak and it was long."

  I WONDER if Blythe knew what she lost that day. I wonder if she ever found out that eight or so years after their innocent tryst little Scott Moorhead reverted to the name on his birth certificate Jeffrey Scott Buckley. By now he was getting pretty good on his grandmother's guitar, the one he found soon after being hauled away from Blythe. Would she, if she scanned the review pages of the US and UK music mags, recognize this Jeff Buckley as that Scott Moorhead who stole her heart all those years ago. How would she curse fate when she saw how words like "Immaculate", "Irresistible", "Startling" and "Fascinating" were being used to describe his debut album, "Grace"-an album created with as much care as he used to draw those dinosaurs for her when they were both just five. How deeply would she fall in love again when she played the album, how confused yet entranced like all of us she'd be.

  Like us, she'd wonder how something so dazzling can be so organic, so innocent one moment so grindingly sexual the next, and how choirboy-sweet its protagonist soothes us only to roar like a savage when we think we're safe in his lyrical embrace. Like us, she'd glow for days. Poor Blythe.

  Or maybe...not.

  "YOU have beautiful nails," Buckley whispers, flirting with a waitress in the way only the outrageously attractive can. At a sage 27, he exudes that stereotypical wonderlust seemingly mandatory for Californians. We're in an Ethiopian cafe, a few doors down from the Black Cat, the Washington club where Jeff and his band are playing tonigh.

  In between trying to explain the concept of "all-tones" by bashing away at every piece of crockery on the table, he's telling me how as a kid, he'd steal into abandoned buildings and scream, just to hear his voice echo all around him. Jeff Buckley's scream is but one weapon in a formidable arsenal. Later, much later, he'll tell me that a scream is "the only noise someone can make when they're crying. You can't talk if you're crying, but you can scream and say all you need to say." Recalling a little more of his youth, he continues.

  "I really identify with that book 'Geek Love'. It's a lot like my family, the way we moved around all the time and how things were so freaky. My mother was into the metaphysical study called Escatology. My friends would all come over and because they all had enormous guilt complexes it would be easy for them to become born-again Christians. They'd give me all their records saying, 'here take them, they're the devil's music!' I mean, what can you do?"

  Buckley's eclecticism is not the sort however that merely comes from having a big record collection. It's more disengaged than that, surely approaching a peak early on with his enormously strange cover of Van Morrison's "Young Lovers Do" on the recent "Sin-e" EP and surpassing itself any number of times on "Grace". His attitude to sound and on what constitutes "music" is rewardingly wayward.

  "Music is something you do not control," he explains, "just like you do not control life. All you can do is understand its nature and its relationship to you. All you control is your will to let go. The rest of it is how you feel underneath."

  All this of course was the rage when Paganini was the toast of the town. It's just that we seem to have forgotten it somewhere along the way.

  At the Black Cat, before a Saturday night crowd more into getting pissed than possessed, Buckley's voice wails and swoops then mutters madly to itself for nearly 15 minutes before the crowd's attention is gained and the teasing opening chords of the sleepy racial ballad "Mojo Pin" flutter into the room and his fan club grows by another 300 or so. The effect is mesmeric. From here, unimaginably, it gets even better. If only there was room.

  These are Jeff's first shows with the band who play on "Grace". Mick, Matt and Michael had seen his solo shows and literally begged to join him. They're perfect for the music.

  "Dream Brother", (the final track on "Grace" and the one with the lyric, "Don't be like the one who made me so/Don't be like the one who left behind his name/Cos they're waiting for you like I waited for mine and nobody ever came") is introduced with an explanitory, "this is not who most people think it's about."

  JEFF Buckley had no dad but he had a hell of a mum. It's her influence that can be felt breathing and dancing through the most beautiful songs on "Grace". Jeff's natural father, Tim, up and left as soon as Jeff was born. He OD'd and died in 1975. Jeff met him for the first and last time just two months before. Singing in the car with his mother, a classically trained pianist, is Jeff's first musical memory. It's her these lazy pipe-and-slipper critics with their Sixties CD reissues should be citing, not someone who bounced him on his knee for five minutes when he was still dribbling all over himself.

  "He wasn't a bad father he just wasn't raised right and this life, is insane."

  He didn't have the emotional capacity to deal with a love affair and being a musician?

  "Apparently not. Especially not a child, so he just split. But there is a real exquisite insubordination in just being a woman that I think I got in touch with early on. My mom taught me so much, stuff that I'm actually only finding out now.

  "As far as my dad's situation goes, I've become a better person from being able to be organically un-attached from it. It's a pointless comparison to make. It's not a key to my work or my intentions."

  THE Sixties of course, so the story goes, died at Altamont. As we speak, however, just down the road, those good old hippies at Pepsi are trying to re-live the memories with Woodstock '94 the merest mention of which provokes a wonderfully vitriolic attack from Jeff that you've no doubt read on this week's news pages. One basic premise comes from it-in the words of one of Jeff's labelmates who was greeted in his day with similar critical fervor: you shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.

  "It's important to know the difference between real life and an IV going into your brain. It's important to know that life is going on around you, you have to gather the knowledge and nutrition from your everyday hours. You can't depend on MTV for your beauty. You've got to make your own life. You can't leave it up to leaders. Jesus, JFK, Kurt Cobain they all got f***ed up. Kurt didn't feel loved or maybe he didn't recognize it. But it won't ever happen with a leader, independence has to come or you'll die. You'll end up like someone's puppet and you'll be gone like a chump before you're 30."

"Grace" is out now on Columbia. Jeff Buckley appears on the Maker stage at Reading Festival on Sunday, August 28

Heir Born

Melody Maker: September 10, 1994

by Dave Simpson

JEFF BUCKLEY

WHELAN'S BAR, DUBLIN

  IT'S an epic tale: one of drama and passion; of man's capacity for struggle and the desire to conquer everything that the elements, destiny and his fellow men can throw at him. And it's taking place hundreds of miles away as Leeds take on Arsenal, while I'm here in a crowded Dublin bar-room reviewing the only performer alive who could cause me to miss the first home game of the soccer season.

  You should know (t)his story by now: son of legendary avant-garde folk singer releases uncontestable debut of the year ("Grace"), an album which emerges from the shadow of the father he never knew. Artist, prodigy, Great White Hope, maybe Jeff Buckley is the boy who has everything. The film star looks and That Voice, the unmistakable, howling falsetto that sprays magic and emotional confrontation and leaves awe in it's wake.

  Tonight, grown men are reduced to quivering jelly. One guy shakes his head uncontrollably as if undergoing extreme primal scream therapy and one beautiful, chestnut-haired girl is visibly moved to tears. Jeff has the songs, too, songs that will nag at your memories and eventually tear them apart. There's the terrifying, near-blackmail wonder of "So Real" ("I love you/But I'm afraid to love you") or his shattered, superior rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".

  But Jeff has something else and it's the reason why, for him, all the aforementioned counts for everything and nothing. He's carrying a Hurt, a painful longing that can never be resolved. Imagine the deepest burden of unrequited love and still you're getting nowhere near. The Hurt all but cripples Jeff and yet it drives him, as if an alchemical transference has taken place between that Hurt and the singer to make magic in the songs. Some sell their soul to Satan; Jeff never had a choice. The Hurt follows him, haunts him, it's there in every vocal swoop, each anguished, beautiful wail and in the relentless, purifying heartbreak of "Eternal Life" and "Dream Brother": "I'm waiting for mine/And nobody ever came."

  We've got things in common, me and Jeff; we've both got two dads. Sometimes, he'd love to kill the one who's already dead and I spent years wanting to do for mine who's still alive. You can't can't understand that. We just plug into bitter, almost alienated songs like "Lover, You Should've Come" ("It's never over/My kingdom for a kiss upon the shoulder") where the performer's prayer for release is the listener's treasure.

  I flew so high tonight.

  I heard music I've scarcely dreamed of. If I were critical of the band's occasional heavy-handedness and Jeff's slight tendency towards indulgence, I'd be spotting cracks in Michelangelo's ceiling. He isn't the new Dylan or Van Morrison and he's certainly not the new Tim Buckley.

  He's just the first Jeff Buckley and, right now, we can be very, very excited about that.

Son Sung Blue

Jeff Buckley, Borderline, London 

Melody Maker: March 26, 1994

By Joy Press

His voice is both a godsend and a millstone.
Swooping and melting in muezzin arpeggios, Jeff Buckley's voice is a genetic remnant of his father, Tim Buckley. But that's not why so many people are here tonight. Second-generation saplings rarely inherit the genius of their famous parents ( think of Julian Lennon, Ziggy Marley), but Buckley is a 27-year-old songwriter coming into his own, transcending potential comparisons with a blindingly good London debut.
Jeff's been the darling of the New York music industry for a few years now, the name every A&R man loves to drop. His work with the band Gods and Monsters, a turbulent haze of experimentation, has given way to the stripped down, sensuous sound of his current solo material-a sort of jazzy, bluesy "cosmic folk". His songs are nimble and diffuse; they branch off and loop skywards, returning to earth before overreaching themselves.
Though it's just Buckley onstage, he makes an epic noise. On "Mojo Pin", his guitar is blurry and frenetic as it pulls away from the vocals, scattering in several directions at once. Buckley looks like a teenager, thin and gangly inside his white T-shirt. His speaking voice is boyishly high, and the enraptured audience laughs and applauds as he chugs down a pint of Guinness with a mock-manly gesture. I'm told that he chooses a different persona for every gig, he was "raunchy" in Sheffield apparently.
Tonight it seems he's opted for "guileless and angelic' as evidenced by his take on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" as a ballad that cultivates pious delicacy with its cradling guitar and choirboy chorus. "Eternal Life" is a more cynical, harder edged number, and the final song gives way to melancholy, wallowing in vocal excesses (though just the right amount) and lyrical weariness: "I feel too young to hold on and too old to break free and run'. 
By taking such vocal risks, Buckley occasionally steers towards overwrought blues cliche, but he always soars clear again. Mostly, he radiates an incandescence that's too unassuming to be called "star quality". But for lack of a better word, I guess that's what I'd call it.