(Credits: Far Out / Roy Tee)
Mon 3 November 2025 0:00, UK
Some things come beautifully and tragically full circle, like when Jeff Buckley’s final ever performance was alongside the person who first made him want to be a musician.
Most artists have a story like this, where they talk about one clear and vivid moment a particular song, performance or artist broke through and hypnotised them: for instance, Paul McCartney cites Elvis Presley bringing his world into colour, while Keith Richards mentions the influence of Chuck Berry. Even modern artists have the same thing, as rising creatives today still talk about the impact of icons like Debbie Harry, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and so on.
It takes just one moment to change a person’s path, suddenly putting them on track to becoming an artist as they witness someone else and become overcome with inspiration. For Jeff Buckley, it was punk that did it, and one punk in particular.
Buckley’s introduction to music is an interesting one. The elephant in the room is always his father, Tim Buckley, but given that his dad walked out when he was barely sentient, the folk legend didn’t have all that much of an impact in shaping young Jeff’s taste. Instead, that was left to his mother, who raised him on an eclectic mix of rock and roll, folk, prog-rock, metal and beyond, a diet that ranged from Kiss to the classical music that his cellist mother would play. But one of the key discoveries he made for himself changed everything, as the first time he saw Patti Smith perform, he knew what he wanted to do.
“I remember seeing her on TV, on The Mike Douglas Show. It was when Horses was released,” Buckley recalled. He would have been only nine as Smith unleashed her debut album and stepped up from being a niche New York scene star into being a bona fide rock star. “I think she did ‘Gloria’, and she had these skinny feet, no shoes,” he said, rehashing the wild image of the punk poet bringing her chaos to a relatively clean-cut television show to freak out the normies.
“She was insane. Fucking insane. This, like, royal guttersnipe, siren girl-woman, and she rocked. She freaked Mike Douglas out,” he remembered, remaining forever enamoured by this image of rebellion and how electrifying it was to witness.
“Right there, I was like, ‘Hmm…there’s one kind of life on the one side and then there’s…her. I want that. That’s what I want,” he explained his rising determination to venture down the path, and then everything was different as he travelled into his own musical life.
It’s a path that would end by Smith’s side as the final ever recording of Buckley’s voice is on a Smith song, singing prophetically “Crossover boy”, on ‘Beneath the Southern Cross’, a track about death and grief, only months before his own tragic passing.
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