Twelve years ago, on a balmy, blissful summer's afternoon at my very first Glastonbury, I fell in love, just like so many others did, with Jeff Buckley. Like the Lilac Wine he sang about on his first album, Grace, I was young, sweet and heady, and he caught me at the right moment, my heart having been bruised half an hour earlier by my darling Evan Dando, who had failed to turn up for his set at the Acoustic Stage because of "exhaustion". Tears misting in my cidery eyes, I wandered idly past the Pyramid Stage on my way back to a warm tent and a cold can, and there he was - this beautiful man in a beige shirt, his fringe falling onto his perfect forehead, his guitar strap held on by black masking tape, parting his beautiful lips, starting to sing. And lo, our romance began. Just like Pulp on that day in June 1995, I lost an important part of my brain somewhere in a field in Wiltshire.

Twelve years later, and ten years to the week after his mythical death in the Mississippi River, plenty of people still have that sweet, heady love for Jeff Buckley in their hearts. But not me. For two years ago, when Grace was reissued, and after I gave the album a rapturous review in Word Magazine, I kept listening. And, moment by moment, song by song, it all fell apart. I realised that Jeff Buckley wasn't the man I'd made him out to be.

Let me count the ways.

Firstly, he was the Christina Aguilera of alternative rock. Blessed with a fabulously versatile voice - one that could turn itself to gentle ballads, opera, gospel and rock with equal competence - Buckley all too often wrenched the old seven-octave beast up to 11, delivering delicately-worded phrases with a big heap of X Factor-style melisma, rather than subtlety and measure. Skip to the end of the title track of Grace, and tell me it wouldn't have benefited from a little more care and control.

Secondly, he wasn't the accidental genius he made himself out to be. Watch any YouTube clip of him being interviewed and you'll find a very clever, canny young man, incredibly aware of his good looks and the marketing power of charisma. (Watch him lowering his eyebrows, pouting deliciously, and making seductive, Alfie-like asides to the camera in this interview, released as a DVD alongside Grace's 10th Anniversary Edition.) Nothing new about that of course - rock and roll lives and breathes through its self-appointed, self-made, heroic men - but Buckley had sold a merry story about him being a male Phoebe out of Friends, falling in and out of coffee shops and dive bars, playing his songs to anyone who would listen, and, damn it, I'd fallen for it. And now I've grown up. These days, I find that kind of calculated sexiness deeply spurious.

Thirdly, Buckley was a hit-and-miss singer-songwriter. Yes, he wrote the gorgeously sexy Lover, You Should've Come Over, and its lyric about the passage of love, "Too young to hold on/And too old to just break free and run" is pure and perfect. But Grace also hoists on its shoulders the hugely under-par clunky, clompy rocker, Eternal Life. And don't start me on the stuff on (Sketches For) My Sweetheart The Drunk - although I'll be less cruel in my criticism, as I know they were sketches, not finished songs. But Remember The Sky Is A Landfill, anyone? No, I didn't think so.

Fourthly, his interpretation of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, lovely though it is, is often seen as the pinnacle of his musical achievements, proof of his masterful way with an arrangement as well as a vocal. But it wasn't his interpretation. It was John Cale's, from his album I'm Your Fan. And although Buckley took it to another level - thanks to a quietly restrained, and tender, vocal performance, let me tell you - he very often took the credit for its genesis.

Fifthly, there's Buckley's legacy. Not a day goes by when another woe-is-me bleeding heart comes along, someone who's taken his wide-eyed, romantic visions, and his operatic way with a tune, and made them farcical or lily-livered. Coldplay wouldn't be Coldplay without Buckley. But this isn't Buckley's fault. And perhaps I'm being unfair.

Perhaps that first concert, attended by a teenage girl experiencing her first feverish flushes of rock star idolatry, was too high a bar to match. For Buckley did have many things - a wonderful voice when he controlled it, a wonderful face, wonderful eyelashes and wonderful cheekbones, and a wonderful way of promoting himself. But I can't help but think that if he'd lived on, he'd have been another Ryan Adams - a handsome, charismatic singer-songwriter, with a love for a dazzling array of genres, who would never have quite got it right again. And I can't help but wonder - and wonder if there are any people out there that agree with me - that everyone's unquestionable love for him has gone just a little bit too far.