And don't start me on the stuff on (Sketches For) My Sweetheart The Drunk - although I'll be less cruel in my criticism, as I know they were sketches, not finished songs. But Grace also hoists on its shoulders the hugely under-par clunky, clompy rocker, Eternal Life.
JEFF BUCKLEY HALLELUJAH LYRICS YOUTUBE FREE
Yes, he wrote the gorgeously sexy Lover, You Should've Come Over, and its lyric about the passage of love, "Too young to hold on/And too old to just break free and run" is pure and perfect. Thirdly, Buckley was a hit-and-miss singer-songwriter. These days, I find that kind of calculated sexiness deeply spurious. (Watch him lowering his eyebrows, pouting deliciously, and making seductive, Alfie-like asides to the camera in this interview, released as a DVD alongside Grace's 10th Anniversary Edition.) Nothing new about that of course - rock and roll lives and breathes through its self-appointed, self-made, heroic men - but Buckley had sold a merry story about him being a male Phoebe out of Friends, falling in and out of coffee shops and dive bars, playing his songs to anyone who would listen, and, damn it, I'd fallen for it. Watch any YouTube clip of him being interviewed and you'll find a very clever, canny young man, incredibly aware of his good looks and the marketing power of charisma. Secondly, he wasn't the accidental genius he made himself out to be. Skip to the end of the title track of Grace, and tell me it wouldn't have benefited from a little more care and control. Blessed with a fabulously versatile voice - one that could turn itself to gentle ballads, opera, gospel and rock with equal competence - Buckley all too often wrenched the old seven-octave beast up to 11, delivering delicately-worded phrases with a big heap of X Factor-style melisma, rather than subtlety and measure. I realised that Jeff Buckley wasn't the man I'd made him out to be.įirstly, he was the Christina Aguilera of alternative rock. And, moment by moment, song by song, it all fell apart. For two years ago, when Grace was reissued, and after I gave the album a rapturous review in Word Magazine, I kept listening.
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Twelve years later, and ten years to the week after his mythical death in the Mississippi River, plenty of people still have that sweet, heady love for Jeff Buckley in their hearts. Just like Pulp on that day in June 1995, I lost an important part of my brain somewhere in a field in Wiltshire.
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Tears misting in my cidery eyes, I wandered idly past the Pyramid Stage on my way back to a warm tent and a cold can, and there he was - this beautiful man in a beige shirt, his fringe falling onto his perfect forehead, his guitar strap held on by black masking tape, parting his beautiful lips, starting to sing. Like the Lilac Wine he sang about on his first album, Grace, I was young, sweet and heady, and he caught me at the right moment, my heart having been bruised half an hour earlier by my darling Evan Dando, who had failed to turn up for his set at the Acoustic Stage because of "exhaustion". Twelve years ago, on a balmy, blissful summer's afternoon at my very first Glastonbury, I fell in love, just like so many others did, with Jeff Buckley.