Queen's Hall Review

The List: June 30, 1995

By Alastair Mabbott

JEFF BUCKLEY

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, 20 June.

  With a mere one-and-a-half albums behind him, Jeff Buckley is casting a gargantuan shadow-even if it is only on the back wall of the Queen's Hall and comes courtesy of an ankle-level spotlight. Until you realise how much work he's still got to do before he fulfils his potential, it can seem like Jeff's already a towering colossus. There's tremendous raw talent here, presence and power. But there are also a lot of opportunity missed, others pursued beyond decent limits and, beneath his easy-going and likeable stage presence, a sense that he's still looking for the coontrol and hair-fine judgment he needs before he can be truly great.

  Which is not to say that he doesn't have fleeting moments of brilliance. These usually occur in his own songs-anything from the first half of Grace and a few new ones unveiled tonight-though even they sometimes suffer from an overdose of Buckley's flamboyant self-expression.

  He tells us a joke that suggests he's aware of at least some of the pitfalls of his position. "How many Jeff Buckleys does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer goes something like "No problem, Jeff, I'll fix it, you just sit there. Want some peanuts? A Coke?"

  Perhaps to break out of that trap of fawning indulgence, or to piss off the punter who yells for his dad's "Song To The Siren", he leads his band into two gnarly grunge-outs. They're shit. And the cage remains unrattled. At the end, he struggles with "Hallelujah", forgetting the words and visibly straining to put across a song that remains just out of his grasp. But, like Tinkerbell, he's carried through it by the audience, who see a victory not a messy draw. Closing with Chilton's "Kangaroo" is a risky move, too-the original was so bent out of shape that there's little for Jeff to do but dick around with it in slightly different ways.

  The thing is that there's enough evidence that Jeff Buckley will mature into a brilliant performer, and it's hard to leave here tonight totally disheartened. This man's shortcomings hold as much promise as most people's highlights, but it's going to be a long-if interesting-slog.

The Garage (Glasgow) Review

The List: March 10, 1995

By Fiona Shepherd

JEFF BUCKLEY

The Garage, Glasgow, 28 Feb.

  Already, after Jeff Buckley has been less than one year in the public arena, it seems that We Are Not Worthy. Any lost souls taking a wrong turning at Charing Cross and ambling into The Garage would have been forgiven for thinking they'd walked into the middle of a church service, with the willing flock lending the firebrand preacher their undivided, submissive attention.

  Obviously, some of us just belong to a different denomination. See that cynical dissenter? That was me, that was. The one that dared to have a conversation while Jeff (that's Mr. Buckley to us riff-raff) tortuously wrestled with his Muse. The one that yawned while Jeff changed guitars in such a talented way. Pardon me for not joining so readily in the mass genuflection.

  Well, it's easy to scoff at Buckley's over-indulgence, but it's also easy to see why he's accorded such reverence. In a world where (slot in personal mediocre bugbear) can be given the time of day, we're unaccustomed to expecting 24-carat emotion from our musical heroes. But Jeff gives it 110 per cent, Brian. Not Whitney-Houston-belt-it-out-and-call-it-emotion emotion, but the feeling of being swept along, even manipulated, by the total sound emanating from the stage. Guitars swell, then fall away to a spare, clear chime and the Voice really is something potentially awesome, ebbing and flowing in harmony with the rest of the band.

  At their best-and there are some powerhouse moments in among all the fudge-Buckley and band have a thrillingly instinctive, organic feel, like Led Zeppelin when they weren't too busy being rock pigs, and the quavering vocals have the power of a Robert Plant or an Ian Gillan. But there are whole chapters with no plot where it seems Buckley is just skating along, relying on the audience's frequently-articulated heckles of goodwill, and, the empty aftertaste of these moments is as enduring as the memory of his howling passion. So let's hold the canonization for now, eh?

State of Grace

The List, August 26-September 8, 1994

JEFF BUCKLEY's new album proves that he is destined for greatness. Alastair Mabbott talks to the singer/songwriter who will play one night in Scotland.

  Whipped up a full nine floors by the wind, a small plastic bag drifts past Jeff Buckley's hotel room window. He takes this as a good omen-as if the auspices weren't already favorable enough. At 27, with movie-star looks and enough raw talent and vision to overcome the tribulations that inevitably face the son of a legend, things are already looking remarkably good for him.

  Already, he's been responsible for a head-turning live solo EP. Now comes one of the year's most essential albums, Grace, which features shrewdly-chosen covers of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah", Elkie Brooks' "Lilac Wine" and Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol". But it's Buckley's own songs that are the heart and soul of it. The opening track, "Mojo Pin", is an instant classic, delicately-picked verses shattered by thrashed climaxes of brittle, ascending chords. Hear 'So Real" once and you'll be singing it for the rest of the week. And tracks like "Eternal Life" and "Grace" show that contemporary American rock has bitten him as deely as jazz, blues, and everything else he's absorbed in his life.

  Jeff Buckley grew up as "rootless trailer-trash" in Southern California, moving from town to town with his mother and stepfather and feeling like a misfit everywhere he went. His natural father was the late, great Tim Buckley, but Jeff, with understandable tinges of bitterness, plays this down; he only met his father once, spending nine days with him, two months before Tim's untimely death. He prefers, instead, to credit his mother with his musical backround.

  Nevertheless, hearing Jeff Buckley in full voice inevitably brings on the sense of a family tradition being kept alive. And it's not just down to the fact that both were blessed with angelic vocal cords. It's also a shared eclecticism, a respect for jazz and a taste for improvisation, a passionate struggle the voice and merge with the infinite.

  His mother never gave him lessons, he says in his rambling but engaging way, never pointed him in any particular direction. "But we always sang. It was very important to us, music. Always. There was nothing we ever really talked about. We never really talked about our relationship to it, we just lived it."

  In his teens, he recorded his own songs at home and did session chores for friends ("for grocery money"), but between the ages of sixteen and twenty he stopped singing for anyone but himself and submerged himself in bands. "I was just depressed. My life had been pretty weird."

  "I had been obsessing about being alone, and I was in a band at the time and I was in a lot of pain, and just rotting away in Los Angeles-which is pretty easy to do-and I just didn't want to die anymore. I wanted to really learn, you know, that learning that you want to get for yourself, so I just obsessed about how to do it and I would write it down, write it down, how to do it..."

  "What I was gonna do was hang out on Venice Beach, get a permit and just play and play and play and play and play...anything that anybody asked and anything I knew and anything that came into my head, even if the song turned out to be fourteen minutes."

  What he actually did, in 1991, was relocate to New York and front a band called Gods And Monsters with ex-Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas and Bob Mould's old rhythm section. The collaboration didn't last long, and despite the excellence of the musicians involved Buckley seems not to look on it as a very significant episode. "It was important, because it showed me that everything else was a complete distraction. It was just an impetus to get me into this with all the more conviction."

  So he followed his initial instinct, setting about solo gigs in Greenwich Village and its environs, the same stomping ground that Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell had cut their teeth on.

  "I started out with a lot-a lot-of old-time Delta blues; precisely to get it out of my system, because there's a propensity for white people to do old-time blues and it sounds like complete shit. Just sounds fake. That was one thing, but the real reason was to find myself in the songs. Because the whole thing about the blues, and the reason it's so beautiful, is that it comes from a very disturbing part of American history-I don't know any part of American history that isn't disturbing-just that you speak exactly about where you are and what has happened to you. And you make it very simple and you make it groove. The poetry in the blues is very biting, ha! I just got a taste for the metaphors and the sights and the visions that you see."

  One of those gigs, at a hip Irish cafe-bar in New York in August last year, was the basis for the Live at Sin-é EP. A disappointment by his standards, but a stormer by most other people's, Sin-é was the sound one young man with a Telecaster makes when he's standing in the corner of a bar blowing minds, playing anything from his own material to songs by US hardcore band Bad Brains to Judy Garland to Cocteau Twins.

  Did his audiences get off on all these different things being thrown at them? Didn't they get restless?

  "No, not at all, because it would depend on what would come before and what would come after, 'cause it was all about the show. The shows are like dreaming, and dreams will grab anything they can to show you the movie."

  What about your dreams Jeff? Do they inspire many of these songs?

  "Of course," he says. "Sure. But...mostly, my dreams help my life.

Jeff Buckley plays La Belle Angele, Edinburgh on Tue 30.