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!

Mahare Buckham flyer and ticket

Some rare gig things from his high school days courtesy of Jason Hamel 🙂

1982

1983

David's autograph

Grace Under Pressure

The Advertiser: December 15, 1994

By Mike Gribble

  Jeff Buckley met his dad, 70s rock contemporary Tim Buckley, only once but in music both have been struck by a similar sense of love-sickness and devotion to raw, spontaneous passion. Jeff Buckley's debut album, Grace, is a soaring, unique mix of styles, without consistent or specific direction, but is underscored by lyrics pleading for understanding.

  Buckley's voice carries flecks of operatic strains, rock angst, and even reveals glimpses of child-like hesitancy. Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas paints Buckley's soundscapes with sparse and well placed caresses of strings.

  "A trademark of my presence has been that, at first glance, people either hate me and run away screaming, or we sit down and talk and get on with knowing each other," says Buckley, 27. "I've lived in bars since I was 14, doing gigs in southern California. I remember any gigs I did had a lot of range to them but I didn't do things with the same focus I have now.

  "Music is a force of nature; it's not really an art. The conventions built around music are art forms. I experience music as being like the wind, or ocean, or fire.

  "It comes perfectly natural to humankind. It gets into the bloodstream and you can hate it, or it can totally elate you.

  "Initially, songs come to me very easily but bringing them to full bloom takes a lot out of me. The way you see the song in your mind and the shape it takes...if you see any apprehension in the song, that's usually the way it came out when I first did it and I don't like to change it. I don't like to say it any better than that. I'm hard-pressed to find a different expression for it.

  "If it's a little rusty at the beginning, if it's like stars gathering in the galaxy, that's the way it comes out.

  "I love the place music takes you. It's like a whole other universe where all musics exist. Music takes time and it takes moments for people. It hovers like flies over a picnic before it goes in for the kill and you really...like, really experience it."

• Jeff Buckley will perform at the Big Day Out in Sydney and Melbourne. Adelaide fans should start requesting an SA visit through Sony Music.