“There’s a spiritual quality in Hallelujah that touches people,” Buckley’s one-time collaborator Gary Lucas once told this writer. By the time the 30-year-old’s body was dredged from the choppy waters of Tennessee’s Wolf River in May 1997, the song had taken on an almost unbearable poignancy. Released between grunge and Britrock, Buckley’s Hallelujah seemed a fragile anomaly, too good for this world.

“I hope Leonard doesn’t hear it,” he once said – but that could only have been to spare the older songwriter the ignominy of hearing his own song perfected and wrestled away from him. There was a little of the Cale version (from 1991’s I’m Your Fan) here, but whereas the Velvet Underground man had led with the piano, Buckley elevated the song with a showcase of solo electric guitar, starting out rich, sad and slow, then blossoming into a shimmering instrumental passage that stopped all the clocks. “Whoever listens closely to Hallelujah will discover that it is a song about sex, about love, about life on earth,” Buckley once said. And in late 1993, when Grace was recorded, he hammered home that sensual treatment (the track even begins with an audible sigh).

In early days, the singer-songwriter had made New York’s Sin-e club shiver with a reading that he said nodded to “the hallelujah of the orgasm”.

Hallelujah jeff buckley chords