I haven't spent as much time as I'd hoped on digging through my old archives of the rock journalism I wrote back in the first half of the 1990s for newspapers like the West Australian and the Herald Sun, and magazines like Rolling Stone and Hot Metal, but I'm getting there, bit by bit. Where possible, I've gone back to the original first or second drafts I wrote, which were usually cut way back in length by the time they were published, and were far more loose.
Here's an excerpt of an interview I did with Jeff Buckley, back in August, 1995. The full interview can be read over at Junkhead :
Is it like you have all these other people, these many other sides to yourself, is that what it's like?
"People have many people inside them, many selves I feel, and I feel that they shift from one to the other sometimes in times or stress or total importance. I'm not talking about psychopaths, I'm talking about normal people.
"You notice the difference in your girlfriend if she becomes the mother, and she slips into the mother telling the child what they can or can't do - drawing boundaries around the child. It's a normal thing.
"And every side of you has a language and a feel and rhythm and a melody and a colour, and it's hard to get to it, you just have to be open and unafraid. The more uptight and conservative that I am, the more conservative the music I'm making will be."
Is that a totally different self of you up onstage, from the one who walks through a garden, thinking about the world?
"Oh yeah, (onstage) that's me with the floodgates open. A different me....I don't fear that person......that's more me, empty......like a faucet with water gushing through it. But I know who that person is.
"People are different when music is in them, they change physically. A child feels different when it is singing. The energy in the room is different, you stop and listen, or you laugh, whatever. "When any artist is channeling through other people, they transform into this......I don't know, some people might call it the divine.....it has a special nature that is yours, even though you don't see it very often."
Have you got your head around (facing death) yet?
"These two friends of mine were robbed. These thieves broke in and tied them up and pointed guns in their faces.......my friends were talking about the numbness that came with the acceptance that they were going to die......and the calmness, almost a ridiculous calm."
He think about this for a while, a sigh, a silence of maybe 20 seconds.
"Like missing a bus, 'oh well, I'll just wait for another one'."
He laughs to himself. He seems appalled and fascinated by what happened to his friends. To face death, to know you are going to die.
"It must be the fear that hits you and it stops the mind from panicking, you just freeze and think 'okay, here I am'. I think that's the sensation that hits the rabbit before the truck plummets into it, they freeze.....I've frozen many times.....there's no life without death......it's very simple...."
Read The Full Jeff Buckley Interview Here
