Why do departed icons like Jeff Buckley, Matthew Perry and George Michael still captivate us?

Jeff Buckley is one of those special musical talents who prompts the purists to exchange a meaningful look, as if to say, “If you know, you know.” You could be forgiven for not knowing, though: his star burned brightly but ever so briefly between the release of his only completed studio album in 1994 and his death in 1997.

Why, then, 29 years later, does he still command such awestruck attention, including a night dedicated to him on BBC Four this week?

For a start, he was an otherworldly character whose birth and death both have mythical qualities. He was the son of the celebrated folk musician Tim Buckley, an absent father who died from a heroin overdose aged 28, while he himself accidentally drowned in the Mississippi river at the age of 30.

In between, he recorded Grace, which is revered by many as one of the greatest albums of all time and features a haunting cover version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that has since gone on to be streamed more than a billion times.

He once claimed it had taken him 27 years to create the album. Did he have another to equal it inside him? We will never know.

This comes on the heels of the Netflix documentary The One about Matthew Perry, exploring the life of the actor who found global stardom as Chandler in Friends. Perry lent the character his own distinctive way of speaking – “Could I be any more awkward?” – but also, we learn, his own habit of “trying to distract everybody from how miserable he was by being funny”.

Perry’s figures are revealing: $1 million an episode for a show that lasted seven seasons and is still watched all over the world, but also 8,000 AA meetings, 30 years of therapy and $7 million spent fighting addiction – until, in 2023, a ketamine overdose killed him at the age of 54.

His Friends castmates are absent from the documentary; instead, other friends and family share their love and despair at realising Uncle Matty would not make old bones.

Before he died, Perry wrote a bestselling memoir in which he shared the prayer he’d made on his arrival in Hollywood: “God, you can do anything you want to me, just please make me famous.”

Also out now, George Michael: the Faith Tour revisits the singer in a Paris arena in 1988, bursting out of his Wham! chrysalis and turning into a solo superstar in front of our eyes. Still only in his early 20s, he already had the vast songbook of a veteran crooner.

The press at the time were obsessed with discovering his girlfriends, or otherwise. Watching now his precocious stagecraft and musical prowess, it seems staggering that journalists were, as Michael later pointed out, “so busy trying to figure out if I was gay or not that they never asked, ‘How is a 22-year-old writing, producing and arranging these tracks all by himself?’” Damn. We would have learnt so much if they had.

Michael, who died almost a decade ago, said he wanted to be remembered primarily for his songwriting and integrity. Perry spoke of needing always to make people laugh, but added, “It’s weird to live in a world where my death would be shocking but not surprising.” Buckley was perhaps the most optimistic, building his album around the idea that “you can achieve a real state of grace through somebody else’s love in you”.

All three, as we now know, had their wishes fulfilled. For all three, sadly, pulled off the perfect showman’s trick: leaving us wanting more.

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Jeff Buckley Live in Chicago and Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You are on BBC Four on Friday at 9.30pm and 10.30pm respectively. The One about Matthew Perry is available to stream now on Netflix. George Michael: the Faith Tour is out now in cinemas

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