I want Jeff Buckley back. Do people really believe that effecting that falsetto is all they have to do to channel this man�s spirit? Knock the last three letters off �falsetto� and you�re there.

It wasn�t a dramatic death; it was a stupid one. Booted, suited, larking in the Mississippi whilst hollering along to Led Zeppelin, showing off in front of a younger, less prodigious friend, consumed by the little demon that drives all performers and pushes them towards that edge of ridicule, step up to it, step on it, step over it, it�s alright, you can pull it off, you can keep your balance� It�s a dangerous business, opening yourself up to an audience, giving in to their desires, taking control of their desires; the further you push yourself the further they want you to be pushed. Such is the mind off the exhibitionist, shirt drenched in sweat, tearing at his chest and opening blood vessels in the hearts of all those near enough to make out that voice, arcing through the octaves, skipping notes and lines and keys, a whisper, a rumble, a yowl, a screeching echo. He doesn�t mean it; who could mean it? He�s an entertainer! He doesn�t mean anything! The key is the illusion; look as if you�re meaning it enough to drive the story forward, enough to catch people in your wake and carry them along behind. There�s a reason why he posed in a golden jacket, the most iconic of microphones in hand, gazing moodily downwards on the cover of Grace. Image is important. But go and listen to �Je n�en connais pas la fin / hymne a l�amour� from Live at the Bataclan; he�s a man so caught up in his audience, so desperate to please and beguile and astound that he�ll change language, brazenly beg for acceptance, anything just to get an astounded reaction. The master manipulator. No wonder the Europeans loved him so. The Americans didn�t quite get him because you�ve either got to be 100% real or 100% fake in the US, Cobain or Carey with no staging posts in-between, and Jeff was always about blurring things, about making the fake, the contrived, the illusory and the ridiculous profound and magical and real through the sheer ability he had to emote like a bastard, to swoop into the dramatic heart of a song and take it two steps too far but to take you with him.

I�ve had enough of the hand wringers and quietly downcast, the ones who confuse melancholy with depression and children with angels, who are earnest and committed where they should be theatrical and exceptional, breaking rules and bonds and hearts. I guess it�s not their fault; they see the signified and don�t understand the signifiers, don�t understand the process that takes you from one to the other. How could the university-educated son of a conservative caravan-salesman understand the drama and passion, the flourish and gaze, the pose and poise and hyperbole? The sense of theatre and performance? The sheer bloody-minded ego, the void that needs filling with the tear-soaked adulation of all who hear the voice? But the semi-orphaned son of the tragic avant-folk singer and his temporary muse, schooled in the bohemian environs of New York�s most ponce-heavy cafes, alone with a guitar and a million different songs from a thousand different cultures; he knew. Jeff Buckley�s legacy doesn�t belong with the whingers and whiners. It belongs with the freaks and fools and the two-dimensional shadows of the stage.

History hasn�t been kind to Jeff Buckley�s legacy, even if it has been kind to Columbia�s coffers. His voice and name have become a short cut to a particular kind of troubled male sensitivity, a misappropriated signifier of a certain type of angst and emotional resonance utilised by dour young men with ulterior motives, cynicism masquerading as romanticism, who only see one side of the many-faced thing that is a human being, who assume the public face is the only face and who don�t even understand the public face anyway. If you sound like someone else who is passionate, doesn�t that make you passionate too? Buckley would have hated the bands that sprung up in his �image�, the conservatives, line-walkers and risk-avoiders who want nothing more than safety and comfort. How could a man who�s musical passions swung from the pomp and sex of Led Zeppelin to the irritated thrash of The Dead Kennedys to the spiritual rapture of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan feel anything for the innocuous guitar whimpering of Coldplay or Starsailor?

Buckley was as much a wolfish imp as he was a romantic idol, as given to and guilty of petulance and ego as the worst of any of us, a tardy time-keeper with a closet full of skeletons. Someone once said that Jeff�s music was akin to the music of his father filtered through the revolution of punk, electrified and spitting bile. Were it that simple we�d have no need to still listen to it, some six years after he sank to the bottom of that river because he forgot that you should never swim with your boots on.

What�s been lost most over the last six years of obfuscation and misappropriation of the supposed (and misunderstood) muse of Jeff Buckley is the actual music of the man. One proper album. A handful of b-sides and live cuts. Two-disc�s worth of out-takes and unfinished ideas. It�s not much to base a mythology upon� The indecipherable vaults and stomps of �Haven�t You Heard�, in which a boy is lost in pure joy at his own ability, stretching and contorting the voice in bizarre directions with fantastical, ludicrous words. �The Sky Is A Landfill� flirting with grunge-y doom, attempting to bring down society or the government or something through acts of sexual defiance and rebellion, the too blissful and eager call of �we�ll share our bodies in disdain for the system� signifying a desperate and heady lust that runs through and beneath everything else no matter how sentimental or angered or abstracted. Sex here, sex there, sex every-fucking-where in Buckley junior�s music, sex and myth. The sussurant murmur that opens �Mojo Pin� is the sound of the male human voice sullied beyond reason and then wrung-out until it is pure again, a moan to bring dancing girls to melancholy and misanthropes to ecstasy. Buckley�s ostentatious vocal antics on Grace were underpinned by a backing band who were magnificent at making their frontman look stratospheric, once again pushing him further and further. Where the songs came from unimportant (Benjamin Britten, Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone [definitely not Elkie Brooks!]), a vague allusion to his father and a premonition of being submerged; what was important was that Jeff sung them. Two minutes into �Last Goodbye� when he suddenly, shockingly caterwauls �kiss me / please kiss me / kiss me out of desire / baby / not consolation�, and it might be the most honest thing any man has ever uttered.

Yet still whenever I put on a record now I hear less than I see; and I see images of fools and thieves and earnest young men who think they understand but don�t. Where is the pomposity? The showmanship? The guile, bravery, ridicule, idiocy, genius? Whenever I used to see Grace on sale I would want to buy armfuls of copies and hand them out to people on the street who looked as if they would understand it. Now I�m not so sure.