In the late 1990s, in years that were critical to my musical development, there was a flurry of popularity for emotionally poetic rock. Radiohead opened the door, and Coldplay, Travis and Muse gladly stepped through it.
As a nerdy teenager, it was typical of me to get heavily into bands I liked and read anything and everything that was written about them. Interviews, snippets, reviews, articles. One musician that was namechecked a lot was American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley. He was a key influence on a lot of my favourite bands. A mystery surrounded both his music and his short life, and it was a no-brainer for me to take a punt on picking up his album based on hype alone.
It proved a wonderful gift at that time in my life. Those ten songs contributed heavily to the soundtrack of my late teens. Outwardly fitting in with my peers by frequenting local rock bars and declaring my love of bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Offspring, at home I studied hard and allowed to Jeff Buckley’s ethereal voice to inhabit whatever brain capacity was left at the time.
A frustratingly short career is a good way to secure your eternal legacy, with every song heightened and held up as clear evidence of a future cruelly denied from your new-found fans. And so it is with Jeff Buckley and the new documentary that covers his life, music and untimely death.
The documentary is the most in depth study of his life that has ever been committed to film. It builds up layers of his life slowly, by incorporating audio messages, demos, live recordings, never-before-seen video footage, and new interviews with people key to his life. The focus here is his relationship to the women in his life, including his ex-girlfriends and his mother Mary Guibert.
Tbe film was a wonderful way to rekindle my love of Jeff Buckley and his small but strong musical output. His life may have been cut short but his legacy will live on for many years to come.
Cinema, etc. 