In his ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, Rainer Maria Rilke gives this advice, “to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in nature to which his whole life is devoted.” Such an artist was Jeff Buckley. And there are too few of them to be able to lose with their creativity still so breathless and new.

We saw the purest Buckley, the writer of such sweet songs of lamentation as seem to be his own elegies, his own songs for the dead. I was lucky enough to see him at Reading in 1994. He sang with his heart in his throat and left the audience reverent. To do this at a festival is a sign of a power few can magic in.

But he seems to have stuck to Rilke’s entreaty, avoiding the attachments of fame, attempting to avoid artificial affectations that would distance him from an audience. And though there was some bastardisation of his image, as is unavoidable in the media, he maintained his singular artistic conception. Which is sadly why his completed works are so sparse and his first flawed but awe-inspiring album will remain his masterpiece. Such a thing is a tragedy since the forces of his growth, his demons and his solaces would have created a legend to enforce a person who could slip into being no more than a myth. It is difficult to maintain our own faith in the artistic will with parodies of expression surrounding us, but Jeff Buckley should be believed. So the art of Jeff Buckley will remain for me the greatest unfinished symphony whilst the achievements he bore before an untimely death will remain a potent reminder to revere only those who ‘must’ create and to accept nothing but. That is the border between those who listen with their common body and those who listen with their will. To the late, great, barely created Jeff Buckley, I raise my drink a full minute, and smile.

Sam.