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He's been dead over a decade now, but the supernatural talent of Tim Buckley's beautiful boy shines on: his spine-tingling version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is suddenly everywhere again after one Jason Castro sang it on American Idol. A little over a year before he drowned in the Mississippi river, Buckley visited Australia and spoke to interviewer Toby Creswell about music, poetry, and being propositioned by girls. Here's an excerpt from piece, originally published in Juice in February 1996. Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

At 28, Jeff Buckley is very much a product of his times; his songs have the jagged world-weariness of the best "complaint rock"--lyricists like Billy Corgan or Eddie Vedder--and his band has that stripped-down, deconstructed sound. However, in an art form that is increasingly divided by a generation gap, there is a thread that links him to the artists whose songs he covers, like Leonard Cohen, John Cale, and Alex Chilton. The sum of those influences is a songwriter who is very much his own man.

As Buckley put in a Japanese fanzine, "I'll always be a slobbering idiot for people I love: the Grifters, Patti Smith, the new Ginsberg boxed set, the MC5 – totally pulled out that one. I listen to Sun Ra. I listen to Kiss. Anything. Led Zeppelin. Bad Brains. Shudder To Think. Tom Waits. Lou Reed. De Niro. And Dylan. People who have had an actual life, have come through flame after flame, either on their own flame, or other flames of people hating them, or completely elevating them to god status, and them still being around. The last two things Dylan did are great. He is beautiful still. I appreciate that, and I'm happy. He hasn't lost any of his...shock."

Juice: You've got a reputation for being attractive to girls.

B: Oh no. Girls want me to sign things.

J: That's the extent of it?

B: That's not always the extent of it. There's a certain type of character that will come up to somebody in a band and propose sex, right off the bat, and I really haven't met one yet. There was this person who sent a letter to me in London saying how lonely she was and that she was attractive and would I please have sex with her. I think she was married. Because the letter so astounded me, I had to call this woman up and say whatever came to mind like, "I'm sorry I can't have sex with you, but..." Believe me, at that time I was not in the mood for something like that. I called her up and I said, "Hey, it's Buckley, Jeff...you know you wrote the letter." And she says, "Oh I don't want to talk to you right now." And she hung up the phone. I don't know. It's because...Talk to the guys in Oasis about getting chicks because it's very different for a band like this. We're sort of there to play and there could be lots of coolness and adventures along the way but it's not like hordes of women are after me at all.

J: I imagine you get the types who read poetry.

B: Lots of people send poetry. Lots of people are poets. Everybody's a poet.

J: Yeah. I think it's kinda unfortunate myself. Do you read poetry?

B: I read very few things. The stuff I do read is not dense at all, believe me. Like, Rimbaud is very appealing to me, just the way it reads and how utterly shocking it is sometimes, thinking about who he was. Also poetry is supposed to have lots of metre and rhyme and stuff like that, but I prefer it to have more crazy shapes, like Ginsberg or good prose. I'm terribly interested in writing...I mean reading it. Just recently I started Cities Of The Red Night [William Burroughs] and at the same time a Noam Chomsky book, Lies And Democracy, but he's easy to read and great to listen to.

J: I think it's depressing that they're making a Hollywood movie out of the life of Rimbaud with Leonardo DiCaprio.

B: That thing? It's typical. I've ceased to be depressed by anything that comes out in the major media eye. It all pretty much sucks.

J: Things can lose their dark mystery if you expose them too much.

B: Yeah. It would take a really vibrant, sympathetic and sick mind to pull of that story in a movie setting and not pull punches...I haven't seen it, I've heard reports. I don't know, I'll see it sometime maybe in a hotel or on a plane. I head the same thing happened with DiCaprio and The Basketball Diaries--very lame, but this is second hand. I really don't care to go and see the movies. It is depressing. It's depressing to go into a movie and know you'll have all your buttons pushed rather than being taken through a really compelling story and really being transported to another place. Usually it's all things that play on our fears or disgust or makes us very aware of ourselves. It's a real test of romanticism that is missing from most things I see. Did you see The Addiction, the new film from Abel Ferrara? No? It's yet another vampire movie, but it's vampirism as an allegory for the Nazis and also for high society. [Laughs] The theme or the motif is that people are victimised by vampires only because they don't resist evil. Time and time again in the movie the evil one comes up to the victim and says, "I just want you to tell me to go away like you really mean it." And they always say, "Please, please don't hurt me," and that's when they get their necks chopped off. You've gotta see it. It's really great.

Read the full interview, and more Jeff Buckley articles, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.