Guardian

"I've tried to really believe it, that he really loved me," he wrote to an inquisitive fan of Tim's that summer. "I question that. He longed to see me, I believe that. He regretted not seeing me, yes. But he was too afraid for a very long time, 'just a young kid going down his own road', right, I understand, but I don't get it. It seems so over-romanticised, all of the accounts of his actions . . . How does a baby keep you from making records? ... I don't know - he just didn't want to be stuck with Mary, so typical, no frills, no big deal, I totally understand. But, love me? I don't know what that means."

The same appetite Jeff brought to the arts - absorbing a musician's or writer's body of work - was applied to his search for Tim. When Judy Buckley, Tim's widow, gave him tickets to a concert by the Cocteau Twins, Jeff told a friend he kissed Judy on the mouth - partly, he said, out of appreciation, and partly to feel exactly what Tim had seen in this woman. Even as he attempted to sort out the good, bad and ugly in his family's story, there remained the matter of his own music and career. He made a demo of four songs, which he called the Babylon Dungeon Sessions tape, but had had no response from the record companies, and his lack of a band meant he couldn't perform.

Then, early in 1991, Jeff was back on the west coast when the phone rang at the house where he was staying. A woman was calling long-distance, from New York, to tell Jeff about an upcoming concert she was co-ordinating. It was a tribute to his father, and she asked if he would like to attend.

No one working on the Greetings From Tim Buckley tribute concert at St Ann's, an arts centre in Brooklyn Heights, had known there was a son. Early on, one of concert organiser Janine Nichols's tasks was to find a publicity photograph of Tim, and she tracked down the name and number of Tim's old manager, Herb Cohen. In his cut-to-the-chase manner, Cohen said he not only had photographs but news: "You know he has a kid?" And, he continued, the child was more talented than his father. Nichols didn't think much of the information; offspring of 60s rock stars had begun sprouting up on the fringes of the music business, and most of them inherited their parents' looks but rarely their talent. Nevertheless, she jotted down the kid's name and number; the least they could do was invite him to the concert.

Nichols dialled the Los Angeles number, and the first thing she noticed about the voice on the other end of the line was how tiny it sounded. When she told Jeff why she was calling, he was hesitant. He'd never sung his father's music in public, he said, and had spent only a very limited amount of time with Tim. Nichols could tell he was very conflicted, and the faint voice asked for time to think it over.

Jeff mulled over the unexpected invitation. He still had ambivalent feelings about the paternal figure he barely recalled, and he had long studiously avoided any public connection to him. Yet something about the idea intrigued him. He called his mother and told her about the call. "I said, 'Well, what's your purpose? What do you want to get out of it?'" Mary recalls. "And he said, 'I always missed not going to the funeral.' I said, 'There you go - there's your reason, you'll pay tribute to your father.' " At the same time, she warned him to stay away from anyone who approached him about becoming "the next Tim Buckley".

By the time Nichols called back, about a month before the concert, Jeff had warmed to the idea. Neither of the organisers was sold on the kid's talent. They had listened to the demo tape he had sent and found it noisy. Still, Jeff agreed to come.

The tribute concert was part way through when a new group of musicians took the stage. One of them was a long-haired kid wearing a black T-shirt. Danny Fields, Tim's one-time publicist, was in the audience, keeping an eye out for the supposed son. Though Jeff had his back to the audience as he tuned his guitar, the spotlight caught his profile and one cheekbone. "And I said, 'Whoa - there he is,' " Fields recalls. "I didn't have to wonder too hard. It could take your breath away." ("My God," Jeff said to a friend after the show, "I stepped onstage and they backlit it and it was like the fucking Second Coming.")

Jeff, who had billed himself as Jeff Scott Buckley, began strumming rigorously as Gary Lucas, formerly with Captain Beefheart's band, surrounded him with waves of soaring-seagull guitar swoops. It was I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, Tim's song to Mary and her son. The audience suddenly stopped glancing at their watches. After an hour of esoteric music, here was one of Tim's most recognisable songs, emanating from a very recognisable face and sung in a familiar (if slightly deeper) voice. Just before he went on stage, Jeff had finished writing his own verse for the song: "My love is the flower that lies among the graves," it began, ending with a plea to "spread my ash along the way". Anyone familiar with the subject matter of the song knew that this performance was more than a faithful rendition of a 60s oldie. It was a tribute, retort and catharsis all in one.

When it was time for a finale, Jeff appeared on stage alone. "Uhh," he started, with a nervous giggle, "a long time ago, when I was a little kid, my mom sat in a bed and she put this record on. And, uhh, it was like the first song where I ever heard my father's voice. I must have been ... umm ... six. I was bored." He chuckled winsomely. "I was bored. I'm sorry. But you know, what can you expect from a cat who's into Sesame Street at the time?"

Then he began singing Once I Was. Here was Jeff, on stage, singing his father's wistful remembrance of an old affair. Suddenly, before the last chorus, a string broke on his acoustic guitar and Jeff sang the lines, "Sometimes, I wonder for a while/Do you ever remember me?" unaccompanied. If that weren't dramatic enough, his voice spiralled up on the last word - "me" - like a thin plume of smoke, holding on for a moment before drifting up to the ceiling. He took a quick bow, said "thanks", disappeared off stage, and the concert ended. The audience was abuzz. So that was the son. Within a month, four record companies were vying for him. The irony of the situation was not lost on Jeff: after years of avoiding any connection with his late father, he had awakened the interest of the music business as a result of singing Tim's music, and he was being checked out by veteran record executives old enough to remember and admire his father. "I'm convinced part of the reason I got signed is because of who I am," Jeff said in 1993. "And it makes me sad. But I can't do anything else."