{"id":105700,"date":"2025-08-30T02:19:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T02:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/105700\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T02:19:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T02:19:06","slug":"jeff-buckley-was-a-once-in-a-lifetime-australias-30-year-love-affair-with-an-enduring-tragic-talent-jeff-buckley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/105700\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Jeff Buckley was a once-in-a-lifetime\u2019: Australia\u2019s 30-year love affair with an enduring, tragic talent | Jeff Buckley"},"content":{"rendered":"

You had to see Jeff Buckley<\/a> to believe him.<\/p>\n

Jon Pope, a veteran of the Australian music<\/a> industry, was tour manager for the singer on his first visit to Australia, in 1995. Three days after Buckley\u2019s first show at the Metro in Sydney on 28 August, the road crew were preparing for a much more intimate gig at the Lounge in Melbourne for an audience of a few hundred.<\/p>\n

Pope had an unusual request to make, per Buckley\u2019s management. \u201cYou know those old cash registers that would go \u2018ping\u2019 when the tray would pop out? I had to tell them to turn them all off,\u201d he remembers, laughing. The bar manager was aghast. \u201cYou\u2019ll understand why when he starts playing,\u201d Pope tried to reassure him.<\/p>\n

When Buckley and his band took the stage, the effectiveness of the edict became apparent. Buckley\u2019s voice, and his band, soared and swooped. It was a masterclass in dynamics: in the silences between and sometimes during songs (the brief drop-out in So Real<\/a>, for example), you could hear the proverbial pin drop.<\/p>\n

It is now 30 years since that first tour by Buckley to Australia (where his career first began<\/a> to gain international traction) and 31 years since the release of his only finished album, Grace. The anniversary coincides with a revival of interest in Buckley, with a documentary, It\u2019s Never Over, Jeff Buckley<\/a>, showing first at Sundance<\/a> and the Melbourne international film festival earlier this month. And in September, singer Katie Noonan is touring a 20-date Buckley tribute show<\/a>, with shows at Melbourne\u2019s Hamer Hall and Sydney\u2019s Enmore theatre already sold out.<\/p>\n

As an 18-year-old, Noonan saw Buckley for the first and only time on his second and last tour of Australia, in February 1996. \u201cI had never heard a voice used that way \u2013 never before, never since,\u201d she says. \u201cHe was a once-in-a-lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Buckley\u2019s death in 1997 at the age of 30 (an impromptu swim in the Wolf River in Memphis ended tragically when he was dragged underwater by a passing tugboat and drowned) has left a difficult legacy. A contentious unfinished album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk<\/a>, was released in 1998, followed by a seemingly endless stream of live recordings and assorted barrel-scrapings.<\/p>\n

Those live recordings are almost all variations of the songs Buckley recorded for Grace, one of the most acclaimed albums of the last three decades. Buckley simply didn\u2019t live long enough to fulfil his enormous talent. Overfamiliarity has bred a degree of contempt. So too the many pale imitators, not to mention the buskers laying waste to his version of Leonard Cohen\u2019s Hallelujah on seemingly every street corner.<\/p>\n

As a witness to those shows though, I can confirm: Buckley was the real deal. A few days after his performance at the Lounge, I drove 13 hours from Brisbane to Sydney to see the last gig of the tour at the Phoenician Club<\/a>, recorded by Triple J for Live at the Wireless. (I still give thanks to my then-partner, who brazenly purchased our tickets before we were officially an item.)<\/p>\n

He had it all. He could sing like a bird, he was a great guitar player, he was a superb bandleader, he had the songs (Lover, You Should Have Come Over<\/a> sounded like an instant standard). He was also a gifted interpreter of other artists\u2019 material: no one else could tear through the MC5\u2019s Kick Out the Jams<\/a>, then slip effortlessly into Nina Simone\u2019s crushing Lilac Wine<\/a>. It didn\u2019t hurt, of course, that he was terribly good-looking.<\/p>\n

He had it all. He could sing like a bird, he was a great guitar player, he was a superb bandleader \u2026 Jeff Buckley in Atlanta, Georgia, in August 1994. Photograph: Dave Tonge\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Warwick Brown, who runs the Melbourne record emporium Greville Records<\/a>, was an early convert. Already a fan of Buckley\u2019s father Tim<\/a>, he\u2019d heard Jeff\u2019s first release, the EP Live at Sin-\u00e9, before Grace appeared in August 1994. \u201cThe day it came in, we stayed back after work to smoke a joint and lie on the floor and listen to it,\u201d he remembers. \u201cIt just blew our minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown points out that if Buckley isn\u2019t exactly a hip name to drop now, he wasn\u2019t at the time, either. Coming at the tail end of grunge, Buckley was covering Van Morrison, \u00c9dith Piaf, even Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Alongside Hallelujah and Lilac Wine, Grace also featured a rendition of Benjamin Britten\u2019s Corpus Christi Carol<\/a> as delicate as gossamer.<\/p>\n

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But it wasn\u2019t an instant hit. \u201cIt was the sort of record you had to turn people on to, which is hard to believe these days,\u201d Brown remembers. The Lounge show was full of hardcore music nerds, so perhaps Buckley was preaching to the choir, but once the show finished, \u201ceveryone was a fanatic\u201d. By the time his Australian tour finished at the Phoenician Club, he was a star.<\/p>\n

Jeff Buckley performs at the London Astoria in 1995. Photograph: Brian Rasic\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Six months later, Buckley was back in Australia, playing more shows to much bigger rooms. \u201cWe tripled the audience,\u201d Pope says. It was unusual for an international artist to return to Australia within such a short time frame, but Australia (and increasingly France) remained his stronghold. Back in the United States, he was still a cult act.<\/p>\n

Noonan drove from Brisbane down to Seagulls, a sports club on the Gold Coast, to see him: \u201cIt was a hugely transformative event in my life. I just went, whatever this band is doing, I want to do that, whatever that is.\u201d But to Brown, Buckley looked exhausted at this point. \u201cI heard someone say \u2018It\u2019s great to have you back,\u2019 and he said, \u2018I haven\u2019t been home since last time I was here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

After Buckley died, he says, \u201cIt was so painful that I don\u2019t think I could listen to him for a long time without that sadness that came with it. I just couldn\u2019t believe it. It was such a tragic, silly way to die, and I wish we were talking about his fifth album, not his first one. He was a phenomenal artist.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is the younger music fans who come through Brown\u2019s shop who are the acid test of Grace\u2019s longevity. \u201cWe\u2019re all jaded old men, but then 20-year-olds come in and go, \u2018What the fuck is this?!\u2019 That\u2019s a sign of good music. Grace is a record that just never stops selling. We would sell a copy of that record every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Really, though. You had to be there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You had to see Jeff Buckley to believe him. Jon Pope, a veteran of the Australian music industry,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-105700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}