The life of a music superstar has never been a passport to longevity.
But for Eric Clapton to be turning 80 at the end of this month seems little short of miraculous.
In Clapton’s 60-year career as undisputedly the greatest British rock guitarist ever to wield a plectrum, he has survived the double whammy of heroin addiction and alcoholism that often left him incapable of doing anything on stage other than lie flat on his back.
Yet blessed with extraordinary good luck, he somehow avoided rock stardom’s other perils: the drug busts, crooked managers, swindling record companies, car and plane crashes, giant divorce settlements and shaming kiss-and-tell memoirs by disenchanted ex-lovers.
In 1969, I went on a Clapton tour of the north of England as a reporter with ‘access all areas’.
It allowed me close-up observation of the man who once called himself ‘an egomaniac with an inferiority complex’.
By then he’d already joined, transfigured and walked out on four classic British bands, the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream and Blind Faith, and inspired the graffito ‘Clapton Is God’, a status even The Beatles never attained.
Nonetheless, he thought of himself merely as a jobbing musician, content to stay out of the limelight until stepping forward to play one of his stunning solos, then fading back into obscurity.
For Eric Clapton to be turning 80 at the end of this month seems little short of miraculous, writes Philip Norman
In Clapton’s 60-year career as undisputedly the greatest British rock guitarist ever to wield a plectrum, he has survived the double whammy of heroin addiction and alcoholism that often left him incapable of doing anything on stage other than lie flat on his back. Pictured: Eric Clapton Pattie Boyd
Pictured: Eric Clapton is during a family beach holiday in Calvi, Corsica in June
The tour’s official headliners were the American husband-and-wife duo Delaney & Bonnie (Bramlett), whose fusion of rock, folk and gospel was Clapton’s musical fad of the moment.
He himself was just a member of their backing band, credited on the posters as ‘And Friends’. With him was his own close friend George Harrison, whom he’d invited to join the tour incognito to get away from The Beatles’ ongoing traumatic break-up.
As I sat with the two of them in a motorway café near Leeds, a female employee spotted George, despite the black Stetson pulled down over his eyes, and asked for an autograph. However, she failed to recognise Clapton and demanded to know whether he was famous, too. ‘No’, he muttered in embarrassment, ‘just a hanger-on.’
The tour had a subtext that its enraptured audiences – mostly there to see Clapton – could never have imagined: he was secretly infatuated with George’s wife, Pattie Boyd, and racked with guilt about it.
For the Liverpool show, Pattie travelled up from London with her 17-year-old sister, Paula, whom George, a tireless lecher despite his Indian mysticism, had long been planning to seduce.
With no inkling of Clapton’s feelings for Pattie, George offered her to him as a bedfellow to get her out of the way while he propositioned Paula. But the plan misfired when Paula jibbed at being seduced by her brother-in-law and Clapton ended up sleeping with her instead.
Back then, such treatment of women by rock legends was considered one of the perks of the job.
Later, as his (unofficial) biographer, I came to understand the complex psyche behind Clapton’s mastery as an instrumentalist and inadequacies as a human being.
From left to right: Eric Clapton, John Lennon (1940 – 1980) and Keith Richards perform live on stage as The Dirty Mac on the set of the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus at Intertel TV Studio in Wembley, London on 11th December 1968
Eric Patrick Clapton was born in March 1945 and raised in Ripley, a Surrey village within sight and earshot of London yet feeling as remote as deepest Cornwall or Devon.
His mother, Pat, gave birth to him aged 16 after an affair with a wartime Canadian serviceman who turned out to be married and consequently returned to his wife with the coming of peace.
To avoid the stigma of being a single mother at that young age, Pat gave Clapton into the charge of her mother, Rose. He thus grew up believing Rose was his mother, not grandmother, and Pat his grown-up sister.
Although Rose spoiled him rotten, his persona until well into adult life would be that of a wronged and hurt child for whom everything had to be done and every allowance made.
With such a temperament it was inevitable that when he began teaching himself the guitar as a schoolboy, all he wanted to play was the blues.
The do-it-yourself music of the African American Deep South, which can make suffering heroic and misery sublime, paradoxically brought him more happiness than he’d ever known or would know. Yet the convert soon became a zealot at a time when every cool British band was a blues one.
Clapton quit his first professional slot in the Yardbirds, then second only to the Rolling Stones, when, in his eyes, they polluted themselves by having a pop hit. And no other musicians he ever worked with would quite measure up to his own commitment and perfectionism.
During this era, he received his nickname of ‘Slowhand’, widely thought to refer to the erotic potential of his strumming hand, which the Pointer Sisters’ steamy ballad of the same name two decades later seemed to verify.
In reality it dated from a gig where he took so long to tune his guitar that the audience broke into an impatient slow handclap. His first manager was Australian Robert Stigwood, a character so slippery that one enraged business rival dangled him out of a fourth-floor window by the ankles.
Clapton quit his first professional slot in the Yardbirds, then second only to the Rolling Stones, when, in his eyes, they polluted themselves by having a pop hit. Pictured: Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix
Like Clapton’s doting grandmother-turned-mother during his childhood, Stigwood shielded him from all everyday pressures and obligations. Even when he had to take his driving test, a roadie was deputed to do it for him.
His creative high in the mid-1960s was the power trio Cream, an enthralling mix of blues, rock and jazz with wild-man drummer Ginger Baker and vocalist/bass-player Jack Bruce augmenting his guitar to create thunderous magic.
Unfortunately, Baker and Bruce hated each other to the point of trying to kill each other, onstage as well as off, and the trio lasted barely two years.
Clapton seemed to symbolise the tumbling social barriers of the Swinging Sixties when he took up with 17-year-old Alice Magdalen Sarah Ormsby-Gore whose father, Lord Harlech, had been British Ambassador to Washington.
Of all the (very) young women bewitched by Clapton who made the mistake of trying to keep up with him, Alice’s fate would, as I will explain later, be the saddest.
After the curdling of Cream, he went solo for a while, becoming the first outside musician to penetrate The Beatles’ magic circle when he played searing riffs for George’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps on their White Album.
He believed he’d found his greatest-ever line-up with Blind Faith, the first supergroup: Ginger Baker from Cream on drums; Steve Winwood from Traffic on organ and vocals, and Ric Grech from Family on bass.
They made their debut in London’s Hyde Park in front of 120,000 people and released one album – its cover image of a topless 13-year-old girl, sickening to 21st century eyes.
But then Clapton became unnerved by all the money, excitement and hype, baled out of Blind Faith and climbed aboard Delaney & Bonnie’s tour bus.
Eric Clapton performing at The Concert for New York City to benefit the victims of the World Trade Center disaster at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 20, 2001
Though a gluttonous user of pot and cocaine, he held out for a long time against taking heroin, but Keith Richards’ drug dealer ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez always made him purchase a small amount in pill form, together with his regular order of cocaine.
Then one day Clapton noticed the accumulated pills in a drawer and thought, ‘Why not give it a try?’ One try was enough for its hook to sink in. He was still desperately – though mutely – in love with Pattie Harrison and distraught to see the coldness and serial infidelities she now had to endure from his best mate, George.
To add to his discomfort, he was leading the back-up band for George’s first solo album, All Things Must Pass, which he managed to do brilliantly, despite being on heroin throughout.
At last he found the courage to write Pattie an impassioned love letter which George opened first but didn’t read, thinking it was fan mail for him.
Clapton and Pattie began meeting secretly, although never at his Surrey mansion, Hurtwood Edge, where she might run into one of his two teenage girlfriends, Alice Ormsby-Gore and Pattie’s sister, Paula (both of them competing for his attention and squandering their beauty and, eventually, their health in the process).
George’s eyes were eventually opened to the situation at one of Robert Stigwood’s lavish parties. ‘I have to tell you, man,’ Clapton blurted out in front of Pattie and George, ‘that I’m in love with your wife.’ George’s weird macho response was to challenge Clapton to a guitar duel, with Pattie as the prize.
He tried to rig it in his favour by handing Clapton an inferior instrument and dosing him heavily with brandy while himself drinking only tea. But even under those handicaps, Slowhand was unbeatable.
By now Clapton had the first band of his own, formed with members of the All Things Must Pass ensemble and, at a new level of self-effacement, named Derek and the Dominos.
This image shows Clapton in concert at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1974
One of the first tracks he recorded with them was his song Layla – the name inspired by an old Persian fable – that was both a desperate plea to Pattie and a coded reproach to George: ‘I tried to give you consolation/When your old man let you down. . . ’
Pattie was understandably overwhelmed and they had a brief fling but then Clapton disappeared from her life – and nearly from his own. His heroin addiction, in which Alice Ormsby-Gore joined him, was costing £1,000 a week (multiply by ten for today’s value).
When his need exceeded hers, as it generally did, Alice gave him the entire score and in its place took to drinking two bottles of vodka a day.
He found the quickest results came when he snorted the stuff through a tightly-rolled £50 note, which he then put into the kitchen rubbish bin.
Since the notes had been officially thrown away, his gardener, Arthur Eggby, felt justified in retrieving them, wiping off the heroin and using them to spend on holidays with his wife on the Isle of Wight.
In 1971, Clapton agreed to take part in George’s historic charity Concert For Bangladesh held at New York’s Madison Square Garden on condition his old friend would provide enough heroin to see him through it.
But when he and Alice arrived at their hotel, George’s supply turned out to be ‘street cut’ – mixed with talcum powder or baby milk formula – and only a fraction of its proper strength.
For three days before the show, Clapton suffered agonising withdrawal symptoms as George’s people and Alice searched for a dealer with the right grade of merchandise.
Eric Clapton and Alice Ormsby-Gore in London after announcing their engagement, 1969
Even with that in his bloodstream, George ordered that when Clapton was on stage, a substitute lead guitarist should stand by in case he keeled over.
In 1973, after several failed attempts, he was weaned off heroin for good by a new treatment called NeuroElectric Therapy which involved being wired up to a black box while electric impulses dulled the horrendous pangs of ‘going cold turkey’.
Alice was not so fortunate, struggling vainly with the drug after Clapton left her behind and dying, poverty-stricken, of a massive overdose in a Bournemouth bedsit, aged just 42.
Everything she possessed was in two plastic bin liners and the syringe was still stuck in her arm.
Once cleansed of smack, Clapton segued with hardly a beat into full-blown alcoholism.
He would keep a tumbler full of brandy and 7Up at his bedside, start on it before breakfast and keep replenishing it throughout the day, regardless of his show that night.
A year later, in 1974, he finally persuaded Pattie Harrison to leave George for him, having even resorted to a voodoo love spell supplied by the New Orleans bluesman-cum-shaman Doctor John.
Far from there being any awkwardness with George, the two guitar behemoths bonded even more closely than before, leaving Pattie in the middle and feeling like an intruder.
She represented yet another amazing piece of luck for Clapton, being tolerant of his drinking and the self-destructiveness that resulted (such as an anti-immigrant rant from the stage in racially-sensitive Birmingham) not to mention his obsessive jealousy, despite his own affairs, and multitude of eccentricities and neuroses.
After Layla, she was his muse for another love song that has far surpassed it. Wonderful Tonight seemed an idyllic portrait of a rock star’s domestic life as he watched Pattie ‘brushing her long blonde hair’ with utter adoration while waiting to drive them to a late evening party.
Actually, he wrote it fuming because she was taking so long.
The couple married in 1979, in less than romantic circumstances. Clapton had bet his second manager, Roger Forrester, over a game of billiards that he could get a story about himself into the next day’s gossip columns. His proposal to Pattie won the bet.
The ceremony was in Tucson, Arizona, at the start of Clapton’s next American tour. Arizona state law then required marrying couples to have a blood test.
Clapton was afraid of needles so – as with his driving test – a roadie stood in for him, despite it being a federal offence.
The car that took Pattie to the airport for her flight home also collected his current girlfriend, model Jenny McLean, whom he’d invited to join him for the rest of the tour.
In 1982, he checked into a clinic in Minnesota and enrolled in the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Steps programme, but it would be years before he succeeded in staying on the wagon.
As he and Pattie drifted towards divorce, he began an open affair with an Italian film and TV star named Lory Del Santo, who quickly became pregnant.
It was particularly hurtful for Pattie after their unsuccessful attempts to have a child, latterly by IVF.
Clapton’s son with Lory was named Conor and, although they broke up soon after the birth and Conor remained with Lory in New York, the hitherto self-obsessed rock star became increasingly enchanted by his child.
Then, one day in 1991, while Clapton was on en route to collect Conor from Lory’s high-rise apartment, the four-year-old strayed to an open casement window and fell 53 floors to his death.
Inarticulate with grief except through a guitar, Clapton wrote a song about Conor, Tears In Heaven, containing more emotion than all his blues laments put together.
Ironically, it became his most successful single ever, reaching number two in Britain and five in America and winning three Grammy awards that he would rather have been without. It was also the impetus for putting an end to 20 years of alcoholism.
From now on, he could always refuse a drink by thinking of it as a betrayal of Conor.
After dodging real life for so many decades, Clapton finally joined the grown-ups.
First proof of this was his financial support of a drug and alcohol rehab centre on the Caribbean island of Antigua.
Then, after George Harrison’s death from cancer in 2001, Clapton helped organise a multi-star memorial ‘Concert for George’ at the Royal Albert Hall.
In 2002, Clapton, aged 56, married 25-year-old American Melia McEnery whom he’d met at an auction of some of his guitars for the rehab centre. He proved a model husband and, later, father to three daughters.
The former fretboard deity also became a practising Christian.
The years haven’t left him totally unscathed: he now suffers from a condition called peripheral neuropathy which impairs the hands, a tragedy for someone whose guitar has always been like an extra limb.
And he showed that musicians aren’t always great thinkers during the Covid pandemic by becoming a vociferous anti-vaxxer and threatening to boycott venues that required audiences to show vaccination certificates.
The OBE he received in 1994 – since upgraded to a CBE – was for his ‘contribution to British life’.
No one, surely, could argue with that.
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