Much nonsense is talked about artists dead before their time. It is the stuff of myth-making and downright, stupid, romantic projection - better to burn out and so on. Certainly the image of Jeff Buckley swimming on his back in an offshoot of the mighty Mississippi and singing up at the stars would in other circumstances be a beautiful one. But the reality is that this was the last time he was ever seen alive. A very special person drowned. Dead at 30.
The music business loves a tragedy and certain temperaments and many fans are fascinated by it. Young deaths are seen as something sad and beautiful, like that of Ophelia briefly borne up by her garments and chanting snatches of old tunes. But this is so very wrong. Jeff Buckley was a unique and gifted person whose talent, while evident to anyone who heard him, had nowhere near reached the heights it undoubtedly would have. And so, apart from the personal loss to his family and friends, for the rest of us, his death is a truly frustrating one, although I appreciate the inadequacy of that word. There was so much to come from Jeff Buckley, so many songs to sing. And this, like all accidents, might just as easily not have happened. It's very hard to resist the word "unfair".
I met and interviewed Jeff Buckley once. He was a very nice person. He was gentle, and happy to talk about Led Zeppelin, New York and what the human voice can do. I don't think he even noticed when I did the inexcusable and accidentally called him Tim - but then he did look so like his father. "Don't mention his father," cautioned the record company over and over again and so what do I do? I call him by his father's name. When I asked him about his cover version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, I put it to him that it must be a very hard song to sing and not just in terms of the vocals. He answered that it was "hard to live" and I confess that a few of us hard Northern tickets found this response a bit much at the time and put it down to some kind of weird Greenwich Village thing. If Jeff noticed my reaction, again, he never mentioned it.
AND now his new album is in the shops and it's a posthumous one. Sketches suggests that these are in fact sketches, indications as to what Jeff Buckley intended for an album to be called My Sweetheart, The Drunk and so it has the finished title, Sketches (for My Sweetheart, The Drunk). It's a double CD which features both multi-track recordings produced by Tom Verlaine and once intended for release and other four-track revisions and new songs recorded by Buckley himself. At the time of his death, Jeff was about to go into the studio in Memphis to work further on all of these songs and so Sketches is as fair a guess as possible as to what he was about to do. The chosen tracks were compiled with both his band members and his mother, Mary Guibert, on hand. It is an honest and at times quite stunning effort.
Jeff Buckley first emerged on the New York scene not very many years ago. He had the respect of his peers and a voice like no other. I am honoured to have met him.