“I mean he’s Plant and Page in one,” Brad Pitt said of the mercurial talents of his late musical hero, Jeff Buckley. “On a technical level it’s mind-blowing.” Indeed, Buckley followed in his father’s footsteps with a prowess that was almost perturbing. He had a voice that could haunt an empty house and stir honey into tea from a thousand paces, and a tonal jazzy guitar knack that made it seem he was simply lassoing notes out of the ether at will to match the will of his marauding muse. It stood to reason that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant themselves wanted to witness their heir.
“We actually made a point of going to see him play,” Page recalls in Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You. “It was absolutely scary,” he adds with unflinching seriousness. Both of them were awed by his talents that seemed to actually be heightened beyond the force of his debut album Grace – the record that Page calls perhaps his favourite of the 1990s. “One of the things that was a little frightening was that I was convinced he probably did things in tunings, and her didn’t. He was doing things in standard tuning and I thought, ‘Oh dear, he really is clever isn’t he,” Page adds.
“Jeff Buckley’s voice […] was mind-altering,” Plant concurs. “Spectacular singing. And so much conviction.” Of all the vocalists he inspired, Plant holds Buckley the highest. This would’ve delighted Buckley himself. When reflecting on his biggest influences, rather than rattle off a list of bands Buckley famously quipped: “Love, anger, depression, joy and dreams… and Zeppelin, totally.” Like his heroes, his music was performative rather than stringently structured which is why both soared in a live setting.
In Buckley’s case, it wasn’t just the mind’s of Page and Plant that he blew, but an entire generation of musicians. In fact, he changed the face of music with his work. In an era when the mainstream seemed to be launching itself towards more of a pint-swilling direction, Buckley held a beacon that proclaimed wine sipping will always have its place too, and this was manna from heaven for those who were picked last in PE, so to speak. With the Britpop war waging and the mainstream seemingly racing along for the ride, the zeitgeist had bleeding-heart outsiders losing faith in what they were doing faster than a couple on Grand Designs amid the first harsh winter in the caravan. But Buckley, his electric guitar, a constant chest-voice that could take Sputnik out of orbit or hush you to sleep, and not a jot of anything else, came along to the UK shores and helped to restore the stock of introspection.
Dougie Payne of Travis was lucky enough to be among the 40-strong crowd in Glasgow in 1994. He told us, “I saw him on that tour, in the Vic Bar, on a stage that was just six inches high in the corner of the room. It was unbelievable. It is still the most intense live show I have ever seen. His voice was just remarkable. You were just open-mouthed. It’s funny because there was about 40 or 50 people there. And it was [Travis], two out of Franz Ferdinand, one out of Mogwai, three out of Belle and Sebastien. Everybody was there.” And everybody was moved. In fact, Thom Yorke was so moved that after seeing him he would never be the same singer again.
Page also remains moved by his live presence to this day. “I was really affected by Jeff Buckley when I heard him perform. I was at one of his last concerts in Australia. It was just absolutely staggering. He just touched every emotion in you. He was really superb and in a total class of his own as you know because you hear so many singers and you go, ‘Well, they got that from Jeff Buckley’. He was so iconic,” Page says. “I thought he was a master.”