Katie Noonan: Jeff Buckley’s Grace

Katie Noonan first saw her musical hero at the age of 18 when Jeff Buckley and his band had a modest tour stop on the Gold Coast. She was hooked. It was 1995, just two years before he drowned, and left us with his one and only album. Grace was famously a slow starter but after a decade, the album and Buckley’s astonishing voice and musicianship were celebrated worldwide by fans and industry legends.

To a packed opening night for the Sydney Festival, Noonan and her band of three guitars, drums (played by her teenage son), support singer and occasional violin have big shoes to fill as they work through each song of the Grace album.  Noonan is an icon of Australian music, representing myriad organisations and festivals, collaborating across so many bands and genres, and with a warm syrupy voice and empathy.

Her lovely engagement and famous self-deprecating manner is here perhaps not all modesty given the struggle she admits in reaching all of Buckley’s four octaves. “Up there and down there,” she jests, “Lots of notes and things, trying to do four octaves – it’s hard for a girl!”.  Yet singing one of Buckley’s covers (she calls them tributes), Benjamin Britten’s ‘Corpus Christi’, she matches beautifully to his ethereal falsetto.  And rocks and screams with high energy through his thrashing ‘Eternal Life’. 

Noonan’s expressive hands also appeal although, in the soulful gentler songs, she conducts herself through the octaves, often pointing upwards to charge her voice to follow.  Unfortunately she sings Buckley with her eyes closed, and articulation is sacrificed for vocal range. 

Jeff Buckley’s profound yearning, his storytelling and introverted lyrics are lost in operative dynamics. Jane Shelton’s ‘Lilac Wine’ may be a great love song but we don’t hear or feel why. Another tribute, that great ballad to broken love, ‘Hallelujah’, from Buckley’s sympatico Leonard Cohen, needs a stronger commitment to storytelling. 

Noonan beautifully sustains Buckley’s long and soaring notes but clarity is here also missing in some of his nine original songs. ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’ is without a young man’s urgent desperation. Surely we should feel an almost suicidal danger, as Buckley concludes “it’s not too late.”

Most significantly Katie Noonan was working with a terrible sound mix where her inflexions of voice and performance were overpowered by the band.  And nor was the theatre and audience pull of these songs much served by minimal lighting and cheap staging. The ending was rushed and soon we were all cleared out for the next festival performers. 

Perhaps it was all like that back then in 1995 for Jeff and his boys up the Gold Coast.

Martin Portus

Final image of Katie Noonan by Cybele Malinowski.