| Peyote Radio Theater Tour Europe.
"September 1, 1994, The Garage in London's Finsbury Park. Jeff Buckley removes his shirt. The first three rows - entirely comprised, it seems, of smitten women - swoon en masse. The room ripples with sweat and electricity throughout the heady song which follows. As it finishes, one girl yells in a desperate, yearning tone, "Have my babies!" "And mine!" shouts another. Jeff laughs. "Hey I gotta show to do." " -- Jim Irvin ("It's Never Over: Jeff Buckley 1966-1997", Mojo Magazine, August 1997)
"This one has taken on almost mythic status among Buckley fans, with good reason; it might be the most harrowing and disturbing performance he ever gave, and it certainly engendered the magnificently angry "road version" of Eternal Life. The final encore starts breezily enough, with a relaxed Jeff joking about a lost phone number and dedicating the song to a fan ...and then to "someone else". Nina Simone's beseeching All That I Ask morphs into Big Star's Kangaroo and then into Jeff's own Chocolate improvisation, here stretched and extended into the kind of wired, spontaneous theatre which might have made Jim Morrison proud. It's a descent into the underworld, a stream-of-consciousness assault on stores of memory and desire, a devastating self-flagellation.("There you stare, your finger twisting your red hair, your accusations flying from you, oh you call me a liar, a cheater, you call me a whore..") It's sometimes violent, sometimes erotic, sometimes tender, sometimes terrifying, and so painfully intimate that it becomes overwhelming to witness. "Some day I'd like to become you and to know what it's like to feel me inside...when I wake up in your hair, when I wake up in your arms, I swear upon my blood I understand you, I swear on my grave I understand you..." A Sony executive in the audience later sent him a memo asking him not to repeat the half-hour encore, claiming he was failing to "do justice to himself as an entertainer." Jeff reacted by turning his song Eternal Life into a vicious piece of hardcore directed straight at the music business he so mistrusted. However, Thom Yorke, who was in the audience that night, was reduced to tears. Bassist Colin Greenwood told UK music magazine Mojo how Radiohead returned to the studio after the show and recorded their classic Fake Plastic Trees - a performance which had been eluding them for days." -- (Web Article, Clare O'Brien, 'Flowers in Time' website |
