the songs on “pornography” were written either “stream of consciousness” (“streams of extreme drunkenness”!) style on an old typewriter in my bedroom at home in crawley, or on torn scraps of yellow paper on hallucinating early mornings walking through and around horrible bits of london in cold december 1982. they range from acutely personal observations on my immediate surroundings and friends, to general rants against the futility of everything and everyone, to back to the horrors going on inside... it is very difficult to explain the songs, as even within each verse of any one, there are several layers of (logically) unconnected ideas. but i will colour...
100 years – is pure self loathing and worthlessness, and contains probably the key line – the line that underpinned this period of writing: “it doesn't matter if we all die”...everything is empty. this song is despair
a short term effect – is about a drug and it's effect. short-term i thought.
the hanging garden – is something like about the purity and hate of animals fucking, and i think
siamese twins is about the hate and purity of people fucking too...
the figurehead – was a grotesque skull sculpture i discovered in the disused asylum we used in the “charlotte sometimes” video. i took it home to talk to – to confess to? and this song is about guilt.
a strange day – was how i would feel if it would only be the end of the world – and...
cold – is another song about another drug and it's grip...
pornography, the last song, and in fact the last song i wrote for a while, is fueled by the same self-mockery, self-hate, that burned in 100 years, but it is, if only very slightly, a little more hopeful than the others... i am escaping (i escaped) by blaming someone else. a murder or suicide? “i must fight this sickness...”
“pornography”, an album that almost chokes on itself, remains a dairy of one of my blackest times. but it's one of my favourites!!!!
Bloom inside, my beautiful flower
If you feel your blood moving under your skin
Then let it kiss every inch of you
Let the friction of its rushing through your riverbed
Arise like applause in your breast
And sparkle like kisses upon your belly
Close your eyes and fly
Stretch your legs and sing
Because inside you the sea is swelling in love with the moon
No such things as self defense or bondage
Or regret from the past, the ocean only lives and creates and flows
But always in love with the moon
Speak out to me
My beautiful sparrow
In the morning you fly over a city
Of lunatics walking in pain and waiting for betrayal
All you know is the wind
The rhythm of the fragrance of the world
Only, you can sing me awake
Sing it to me with the smell of your back
Sing it to me with the heat of your lips
Kiss me where you want and the song is all I can hear
Inside you the sea is swelling over
Spilling over my head
And I stay submerged
Waiting for your rose to open to me
And your song to sink into my skin
Avant-garde singer and actress Rebecca Moore was Jeff's lover during the early 90s, and the inspiration for much of Grace. Her album Home Wreckordings includes the wistful Live in Blue Sparks: “all kinds miss Jeff....I'm not afraid, I walk with my little horned kids”. Stilletto'd Young Stars explores the pathos of love lost and the loneliness of art. “If the song was meant to be, it'll come again some day – like you.”https://web.archive.org/web/20230419220847/https://mojopin.org/pages/tribute_songs.php
Ironically, the singer on one of the This Mortal Coil covers, “Song to the Siren,” was none other than the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, with whom Jeff would later have a romantic relationship.
“I only met Jeff a few times. He was introduced to us when he was just a young teenager having come to one of our shows at the Zenith in Paris. We were all thrilled to meet him. It was especially poignant I am sure for Elizabeth and Robin who had recorded that beautifully sparse and atmospheric version of his father’s ‘Song to the Siren’ for This Mortal Coil a few years prior” — Simon Raymonde
1990
He was, by then, deep into British pop—not surprisingly, the sulkiest and most sensitive of it, bands like the Cocteau Twins, the Smiths, and the Cure.
“I’d love to sing with Jeff Buckley … He is currently making his first album, and if it’s anything like a radio session I heard by him, it should be amazing. He’s written this song called ‘Grace’, which literally makes the hair on my neck stand on end. I was sweating like a fucking June bride when I first heard him. Music has never done that to me before.” (Elizabeth Fraser)
https://jeffbuckley.com/quotes
Chopin: Nocturne Op.55 No.2 in E-flat Major (Pogorelich)
“Chopin's most richly contrapuntal nocturne, played with some truly daring (but nevertheless persuasive) tempo fluctuations and surprising intimacy by Ivo Pogorelich.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTvfpwAGMHs
1. Jiyeong Mun | J. S. Bach – Chromatic Fantasy & Fugue, BWV903 🎹
2. Ilva Eigus | Ysaÿe - Sonata for Violin Solo Op.27 No.4 "Fritz Kreisler" 🎻
3. Anastasia Rizikov | Prokofiev - Sonata No. 2 in D minor, Op. 14 🎹
4. Marta Czech | J. S. Bach - Kunst der Fuge , BWV 1080 🎹
5. Chloe Chua | Ysaÿe - Sonata in D minor, Ballade, Op. 27, No. 3 🎻
6. Clara Haskil | J. S. Bach - Bach Toccata in E minor, BWV 914 🎹
7. Sayaka Shoji with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra / Sibelius Violin Concerto 🎻
8. Hilary Hahn | J.S. Bach - Sonata for Violin Solo No. 2 in A Minor, BWV 1003 - II. Fuga 🎻
9. Nikol Bóková | César Franck – Prélude, Choral et Fugue 🎹
10. Polina Churbanova | Dmitri Shostakovich - Prelude and Fugue No. 24 in D minor 🎹
