Ikon (UK) -1995

Tim Buckley: Honeyman (Edsel)

By Caitlin Moran

There's just something (beauty beauty, glory glory) about a man with a 12-string semi-acoustic: something in the detailed flurry of finger-picking; in the suck and swirl and sway of silver strings producing that heat and light from friction with skin; in the fuck as you wind it up and the hush as you slow it down. Tim Buckley, starsailor, dreamwarrior, bending those high frequencies so he could ride the low ones, was crying out the glory so high and loud that the Gods panicked he was giving away their heaven for free and struck him right through with white-out lightning.

Well actually, he went on a huge drink and drugs bender and overdosed on a sticky motel-room floor, eyes boggling and calling for Hughie. But when we rewrite the silent history in our heads, these are the lines it spins along.

Honeyman is the final release in a trio of live albums, this from 1973, in the midst of Buckley's swamp-sex-rock phase, where he sang of the stretch marks and the sweat and the sting of desperate, broken down, end-of-the-world riding -- the deathly hushes and the muted wailing; ripped sheets and lung-bursting gasps.

This is one of the best shagging albums of all time -- in between Buckley's astonishing vocal mountain-hikes through Sweet Surrender and Pleasant Street through his delirium-babble of Stone In Love and Dolphins, an audience applauds, adding wonder to your encore fucking and sucking.

Wilder than Greetings From LA, not the out-there Starsailor, or Blue Afternoon but the right-in-here of Live at the Troubadour, Honeyman will inspire you to cruise the curve of your best-beloved's spine with a hungry tongue and electricity sparking six-fold from your fingers.

Bloody hell. I'm going to have a fag now. Recommended like you wouldn't believe...

Caitlin Moran is now TV critic and current affairs columnist at The London Times.

Ikon was a short-lived monthly British magazine
which ran for five issues between September 1995 and February 1996