Jeff Buckley was more than simply a rock'n'roll tragedy

Amy Berg's documentary delves beyond the singer's image as a handsome, moody crooner. She tells Stevie Chick about her journey into his humour, his fears and his vulnerabilities

- Stevie Chick

Though his 1993 debut Grace enraptured critics on its release, Jeff Buckley didn't score his first hit single until a decade after his death.

His cover of Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” began its curious afterlife scoring The West Wing’s momentous 2002 season finale, becoming a standard sung by buskers and TV talent-show hopefuls alike, before eventually being released as a single in 2017.

“Hallelujah” saw Buckley embraced by a new, more mainstream audience who imagined him simply as some swoonsome moody crooner who'd died too young. But, as Amy Berg’s new documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley explores, he was much more than just another handsome rock’n’roll tragedy.

“Jeff was a glorious weirdo,” says Berg, whose movie dives beneath the heartthrob surface to deliver a powerfully intimate portrait of the late troubadour. “I didn’t want Jeff to feel as if he walked on water. I wanted him to feel real and human and flawed, and some of the people in his life revered him in such a way that it was hard to see that. But I was able to peel those layers back and find this quirky guy that loved to make jokes, and make people laugh, and find his way through a crowd with humour and performances.”

In early 1992, shortly after relocating to New York from his native California, Buckley began a regular Monday night residency at an East Village café named Sin-é. “I’m a ridiculous person,” he’d confess to the patrons, during solo performances that detoured through Buckley originals and covers of songs by artists as diverse as Nina Simone, Led Zeppelin and qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

And perhaps Buckley was ridiculous, but through these performances he attracted squadrons of thirsty A&R execs. The one who signed him, Columbia’s Steve Berkowitz, saw Buckley in the lineage of the label’s roster of legends: “Dylan... Springsteen... Buckley.”