The story of Eric Clapton

A secret childhood in Ripley

Eric Patrick Clapton was born on the thirtieth of March 1945 in Ripley, a village in Surrey. His mother, Patricia, was sixteen. His father, Edward Fryer, was a twenty five year old Canadian soldier from Montreal who went back to Canada before the baby arrived. Eric was raised by his grandmother Rose and her second husband, Jack Clapp, and he grew up believing they were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. When he was about nine he learned the truth. Later his mother married another Canadian soldier and moved away, leaving him behind. Clapton has said that rejection shaped the rest of his life, his troubled love affairs and his long fight with addiction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The music that rescued him came through the radio. On Saturday mornings a BBC children's show hosted by Uncle Mac would slip in the odd blues record among the kids' songs, and young Eric felt it spoke straight to him. His first album was Buddy Holly's The Chirping Crickets, and seeing Holly with a Fender guitar on television felt like a glimpse of the future. For his thirteenth birthday he got a cheap German made Hoyer acoustic guitar. It was so hard to play that he gave up for a while, but two years later he picked it up again and practised for hours, taping himself on a Grundig reel to reel recorder and playing it back until he was satisfied.[1] [2]

His grandmother paid the price. She later remembered lying awake at three in the morning while Eric played Big Bill Broonzy songs downstairs. In 1961 he went to Kingston College of Art, but his mind was on music rather than drawing, and he was thrown out at the end of the year. By sixteen he was good enough to get noticed, busking around Kingston, Richmond and the West End of London. In 1962 he played pubs around Surrey in a duo with another blues fan, Dave Brock. Then at seventeen he joined his first proper band, an early British rhythm and blues group called the Roosters, alongside the guitarist Tom McGuinness.[1] [2]

The Roosters lasted from January to August 1963. That October, Clapton did a short run of seven shows with a group called Casey Jones and the Engineers. Then came the offer that started everything. The Yardbirds, a young rhythm and blues band from the Kingston area, had lost their original lead guitarist, Top Topham, and they asked Eric to take his place. He joined in October 1963, still only eighteen. The London club scene was full of white kids obsessed with Chicago blues, and Clapton was about to become the most talked about guitarist among them.[1] [2] [3]

Yardbirds, Bluesbreakers and a slogan on a wall

With the Yardbirds, Clapton soaked up Chicago blues and players like Buddy Guy, Freddie King and B.B. King. The band took over the Rolling Stones' old residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, run by their manager Giorgio Gomelsky, and in December 1963 they toured Britain backing the American bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson the second. It was Gomelsky who gave Eric his nickname. When Clapton broke a string on stage he would calmly replace it, and the crowd would wait with a slow handclap. Gomelsky turned that into Slowhand. In December 1964 Clapton played the Royal Albert Hall for the first time, the start of a love affair with a venue he has since played more than two hundred times.[1] [2] [3]

In March 1965 the Yardbirds finally had a big hit with For Your Love, a pop song written by Graham Gouldman, who later joined 10cc. It went top ten in Britain and America, and Clapton hated it. He was a blues purist, and he felt the band had sold out, even growing Beatle haircuts. He quit right as the single came out, leaving them with a hit and no lead guitarist. He suggested his friend Jimmy Page as a replacement, but Page turned it down and recommended Jeff Beck instead. So one band launched three of rock's great guitarists in a row, although Clapton, Beck and Page were never in the Yardbirds at the same time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 1965 Clapton joined John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, a band so full of future stars that it has been called a clearing house for guitarists. He did not stay long the first time. That summer he drifted off to Greece with some friends in a band called the Glands. While there, a car crash killed the bassist of a Greek band called the Juniors and injured its guitarist, and Clapton played with the survivors at memorial shows in October 1965. He then went back to Mayall. On his second stint, club crowds started to treat him as the best blues guitarist in the country, and he began to play a sunburst Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall amplifier.[1] [2] [3]

That combination produced a thick, singing tone that changed British guitar playing. Clapton also changed the way it was recorded. He hated engineers putting the microphone right up against his amp, and moved it back so the record would sound like the clubs. Roger Waters later said it changed everything. The result was the 1966 album Blues Breakers, with Eric Clapton, known to fans as the Beano album because on the cover he is reading The Beano comic, just to be awkward during the photo shoot. Around this time someone spray painted Clapton is God on a wall in Islington. It spread across London, and Clapton said he found it embarrassing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Cream, the first supergroup

In 1966 the drummer Ginger Baker came to see Clapton play with the Bluesbreakers, then drove him back to London and asked him to start a band. Clapton said yes, on one condition, that the bassist and singer Jack Bruce join too. Baker was so startled that he nearly crashed the car. He and Bruce had a notoriously violent history from their time in the Graham Bond Organisation, including onstage fights, and Baker had once threatened Bruce with a knife. Still, they agreed. They called the trio Cream, because they were already seen as the cream of the crop, after briefly considering the name Sweet and Sour Rock and Roll.[1] [2]

Cream played an unofficial first gig at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester on the twenty ninth of July 1966, then made their proper debut two nights later at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. Their manager was Robert Stigwood. On the first of October that year, a newcomer to London named Jimi Hendrix sat in with them and played Killing Floor. Clapton had been crowned Britain's top guitarist, and suddenly he had a rival. The debut album Fresh Cream came out in December 1966. In March 1967 the band first played America, at the bottom of a six act bill in New York, where they were sometimes reduced to a single song per show.[1] [2] [3]

In May 1967 Cream recorded Disraeli Gears in New York in just five days, with producer Felix Pappalardi and engineer Tom Dowd. The title came from a roadie who mangled the phrase derailleur gears when Clapton was talking about racing bikes. The album gave them Sunshine of Your Love, their biggest American hit. Clapton played much of it on a Gibson SG painted in psychedelic colours by a Dutch art collective called the Fool, and he described his smooth, sustaining sound as his woman tone. On stage they stretched songs into jams of twenty minutes, and in 1968 their double album Wheels of Fire reached number one in America and became the first platinum selling double album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The success came at a price. The volume grew so extreme that Baker said it permanently damaged his hearing, and Bruce and Baker were at each other's throats every day, with Clapton left as the peacekeeper. He once stopped playing in the middle of a concert and neither of the others noticed. Two outside things sealed it. Clapton fell in love with the rootsy sound of the Band's first album, Music from Big Pink, and he read a savage review in Rolling Stone that called him a master of the blues cliche. It hit him hard. In May 1968 Cream decided to split.[1] [2] [3]

Cream said goodbye with a farewell tour and two final shows at the Royal Albert Hall on the twenty fifth and twenty sixth of November 1968. They left behind one last album, Goodbye, which included the song Badge, written by Clapton with his friend George Harrison, who played on it under the name L'Angelo Misterioso. In just over two years Cream had sold millions of records and helped invent the heavy blues rock that led to Led Zeppelin and beyond. They would reunite only twice, for their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1993 and for sold out shows in London and New York in 2005.[1] [2] [3]

Beatles friends, Blind Faith and Delaney and Bonnie

Clapton had become close friends with George Harrison, and on the sixth of September 1968, while driving into London, George asked him to play on a new song called While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Clapton was reluctant. Nobody, he said, played on Beatles records. George talked him round, and Eric recorded the solo that evening on a red Gibson Les Paul called Lucy, which he had recently given George as a present. Harrison said the other Beatles behaved better with a guest in the room. In January 1969, when George briefly walked out of the Let It Be sessions, John Lennon even suggested carrying on with Clapton instead.[1] [2] [3]

After Cream, Clapton started jamming with Steve Winwood of Traffic in his basement in Surrey. Ginger Baker turned up, the bassist Ric Grech joined from Family, and the press had a new supergroup called Blind Faith. They debuted with a free concert in Hyde Park on the seventh of June 1969, in front of around one hundred thousand people, although Clapton felt they were badly under rehearsed. Their only album caused a scandal because its cover showed a topless eleven year old girl, and the American label swapped it for a photo of the band. It also contained Presence of the Lord, the first song credited to Clapton alone.[1] [2]

The American tour showed the cracks. Blind Faith had barely an hour of songs, so crowds demanded old Cream and Traffic numbers, and Clapton felt he was trapped in the very thing he had tried to escape. He even wanted to play Woodstock, but was outvoted. Instead he spent his time with the opening act, a raw soul and gospel revue called Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and he thought they were far better than his own band. Blind Faith fell apart after that summer tour. Clapton joined Delaney and Bonnie as a sideman, and in September 1969 he also played with John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band in Toronto.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Delaney Bramlett pushed Clapton to sing and write, and Clapton later said Delaney taught him everything he knew about singing. With Delaney and Bonnie's band, Clapton made his first solo album, simply titled Eric Clapton, in 1970. Delaney produced it and co wrote most of the songs. The surprise hit was a cover of After Midnight, a song by an obscure Oklahoma songwriter named J.J. Cale, who was so broke at the time that he first heard Clapton's version on his own radio. Clapton also switched guitars in this period, moving to a Fender Stratocaster he called Brownie, partly inspired by Steve Winwood.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Layla and the love he could not have

By now Clapton was hopelessly in love with Pattie Boyd, the model who had married George Harrison in 1966. He wrote her a letter she later described as bursting with passion, phoned her begging her to leave, and even dated her younger sister Paula for a while. Pattie said no, she was married to George. A friend, Ian Dallas, gave Clapton a copy of The Story of Layla and Majnun, a Persian poem by Nizami about a young man driven mad by his love for a woman he cannot marry. Clapton said he saw himself in it, and that he saw his whole experience with Pattie as a tragedy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the spring of 1970, three of Delaney and Bonnie's players, keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon, walked out on the duo, reportedly because Delaney would not give them a raise. Clapton grabbed them. Whitlock moved into Clapton's house, Hurtwood Edge, and the two wrote songs on acoustic guitars. The new band cut its teeth as the house band on George Harrison's triple album All Things Must Pass. Clapton wanted to escape his own fame, so the band played small British clubs under a joke name, Derek and the Dominos, and his name appeared only on the back of their album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 1970 the Dominos went to Criteria Studios in Miami to record with Tom Dowd, and before long the sessions stalled. Dowd was also producing the Allman Brothers Band, and on the twenty sixth of August he took Clapton to see them play. Clapton was stunned by the slide guitarist Duane Allman. The two met on stage, played together all night in the studio and became inseparable. Allman joined the sessions as an unofficial fifth Domino. Dowd said their playing was like telepathy, two hands in one glove, and Clapton later called Duane the musical brother he never had.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The title song was built in two halves. Clapton first wrote Layla as a slow ballad about Pattie, but it became a rocker once, according to Clapton, Duane came up with its famous opening riff. The first part was layered with six guitar tracks. A few weeks later Clapton heard Jim Gordon playing a piano piece he had written separately, and persuaded him to let the band use it as a long closing section, which Dowd spliced onto the end. The double album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, came out late in 1970. It was an album of love songs to another man's wife, and it flopped.[1] [2]

Tragedy followed the band. On the seventeenth of September 1970, Clapton bought a left handed Stratocaster as a birthday present for Jimi Hendrix. The next day Hendrix was dead. The Dominos toured America in a haze of drugs and alcohol, the album did not even chart in Britain, and in the spring of 1971 the band fell apart during sessions for a second album after a clash of egos. On the twenty ninth of October 1971, Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle crash in Macon, Georgia, at the age of twenty four. Only in 1972, when Layla was reissued as a single, did it become a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heroin, the Rainbow and 461 Ocean Boulevard

Rejected by Pattie and grieving his friends, Clapton hid away at Hurtwood Edge and sank into heroin addiction for about three years. His girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore, the teenage daughter of the aristocrat Lord Harlech, became addicted too. She later said she spent those years scoring heroin for him so he would not have to face it himself. His only real public appearance was at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh in New York in August 1971. He was in withdrawal before the show and passed out on stage, was revived and finished his set. He later said his poor playing that night showed how far into heroin he had fallen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Friends refused to give up on him. Pete Townshend of the Who organised a comeback concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London on the thirteenth of January 1973, with Steve Winwood, Ronnie Wood and Jim Capaldi in the band. That night Clapton first played Blackie, a Stratocaster built from the best parts of three cheap 1950s guitars he had bought in a Nashville shop. Real recovery came in 1974, after an intervention involving Alice's father, Lord Harlech, and treatment by the Scottish surgeon Meg Patterson with her unusual electrical therapy. He then worked on a farm, listened to old blues records and started writing again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robert Stigwood sent him to Miami, paid for a rented house at 461 Ocean Boulevard in Golden Beach, and put him back in Criteria Studios with Tom Dowd and a new band led by his loyal bassist Carl Radle. The album, named after the house, came out in July 1974 and was all about songs rather than long solos. Its cover of Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff became Clapton's only number one single in America and helped carry reggae to a mass audience. Clapton liked the house so much that he recommended it to the Bee Gees, who moved in to record Main Course.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That same year Pattie Boyd finally left George Harrison and moved in with Clapton. He was off heroin, but he was now drinking heavily. The hits kept coming, and in 1977 the album Slowhand, produced by Glyn Johns, gave him Lay Down Sally, his version of J.J. Cale's Cocaine, and Wonderful Tonight, which he wrote on the seventh of September 1976 while waiting for Pattie to get ready for Paul and Linda McCartney's Buddy Holly party. Clapton and Pattie married on the twenty seventh of March 1979 in Tucson, Arizona, and Harrison, remarkably, was among the Beatles who played at the party afterwards.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The darkest moment of the decade came on the fifth of August 1976 at the Birmingham Odeon. A visibly drunk Clapton told the audience he backed Enoch Powell, the anti immigration politician, ranted that Britain was becoming overcrowded and used racial slurs, repeating the far right National Front slogan Keep Britain White. It was shocking coming from a man whose career was built on Black music, and who had just had a hit with a Bob Marley song. A furious letter to the music press asked who shot the sheriff, if not him, and it launched the movement Rock Against Racism. Years later Clapton said he was disgusted and ashamed of himself.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The bottle, Hazelden and the eighties

In 1979 Clapton fired his whole backing band by telegram, including Carl Radle, the bassist who had stood by him through the heroin years. Radle died at his home in Oklahoma in May 1980, from the effects of alcohol and drugs, at the age of thirty seven. Clapton later said Radle was like a brother, regretted never seeing him again, and felt partly responsible. At his worst, he later admitted, he was drinking at least two bottles of vodka a day. He had also nearly died in a crash in his Ferrari after a tour of Australia, and he put a photo of the wrecked car inside the Slowhand sleeve.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His manager Roger Forrester was the only person willing to tell him he had a problem. In January 1982 Clapton admitted he was an alcoholic and flew to the Hazelden treatment centre in Minnesota, drinking heavily all the way because he feared he would never drink again. At the clinic, asked to name his significant other, he wrote down his manager rather than his wife. He later wrote that in his lowest moments the only reason he did not kill himself was that he would not be able to drink if he were dead. He relapsed, went back to Hazelden in November 1987, and has stayed sober ever since.[1] [2]

His marriage was falling apart. Clapton later admitted in a 1999 interview with the Sunday Times that as a full blown alcoholic he had abused and raped Pattie Boyd while they were married, and she has spoken of his drinking and repeated infidelity. The couple tried for children, including through IVF, but suffered miscarriages. In 1984, while recording in Montserrat, Clapton had an affair with the studio manager Yvonne Kelly, and their daughter Ruth was born in January 1985 and kept secret from the public until 1991. He also had a son, Conor, with the Italian model Lory Del Santo, born on the twenty first of August 1986. Pattie left in 1987 and divorced him in 1989.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Musically, the eighties brought a slick new sound. Phil Collins produced Behind the Sun in 1985 and August in 1986, adding big drums and horns, and August became Clapton's best selling album in Britain up to then. Clapton played Live Aid in Philadelphia in July 1985, and he began a long partnership with bassist Nathan East. There was darkness here too. In June 1983, the former Dominos drummer Jim Gordon, suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia and hearing voices, killed his seventy one year old mother with a hammer and a knife. He was sentenced to sixteen years to life, and died in a prison medical facility in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sober and focused, Clapton released Journeyman in 1989, an album mixing blues, soul and pop with guests including George Harrison, Phil Collins, Chaka Khan and Robert Cray. Its single Bad Love won a Grammy, and Clapton has called it one of his favourite records. He also became a fixture at the Royal Albert Hall. In early 1990 and again in 1991 he played long runs of concerts there, released as the live album 24 Nights, switching between a rock band, a blues band and a full orchestra. The man who had nearly drunk himself to death was, for the first time in years, playing at his best.[1] [2] [3]

Loss, Tears in Heaven and Unplugged

On the twenty seventh of August 1990, after an all star encore jam at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, the Texas guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan boarded a helicopter back to Chicago. It crashed into a ski hill in fog shortly after takeoff. Vaughan died, along with the pilot and three members of the touring party, the agent Bobby Brooks, the bodyguard Nigel Browne and the tour manager Colin Smythe. Investigators blamed pilot error. It was a terrible blow for Clapton, who had shared the bill with Vaughan that night. Worse was to come a few months later.[1] [2]

On the twentieth of March 1991, Clapton's four year old son Conor fell from an open window on the fifty third floor of an apartment building on East Fifty Seventh Street in Manhattan, where he was staying with his mother Lory Del Santo. Clapton was at a nearby hotel, getting ready to take him to lunch and the Central Park Zoo. The day before, he had taken Conor to the circus. Lory called him in hysterics. Clapton said it felt like walking into someone else's life. The first person to call with condolences was Keith Richards, who had lost a baby son himself. Conor was buried in the churchyard at Ripley.[1] [2] [3]

Clapton stayed sober and went back to work, scoring the film Rush for his friend Lili Fini Zanuck. With the lyricist Will Jennings he wrote Tears in Heaven about Conor. Clapton wrote the first verse and asked Jennings to finish it. Jennings said it was the most personal and saddest song he had ever worked on. Clapton said he used music as a healing agent, and that it worked. The song reached number two in America, his best selling single there. He received so much mail from grieving strangers, about one hundred and fifty letters a day, that he decided to turn the tragedy into something positive.[1] [2] [3]

On the sixteenth of January 1992, Clapton recorded an acoustic set for MTV Unplugged in front of a small audience at Bray Studios near Windsor. He didn't even want it released at first. It included Tears in Heaven and a slowed down, jazzy Layla, which he introduced by daring the crowd to spot it. Unplugged went to number one in America, and together with Tears in Heaven it won six Grammys, and became the best selling live album ever, with about twenty six million copies sold. In 1994 he followed it with From the Cradle, an album of raw electric blues covers, and his 1996 soft soul single Change the World went on to win the Grammy for Song of the Year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Crossroads, a new family and old heroes

Having survived addiction, Clapton wanted to help others do the same. In 1998 he co founded the Crossroads Centre in Antigua, a treatment centre for drugs and alcohol with a twelve step programme, and he has raised money for it ever since. In 1999 he sold part of his guitar collection for more than five million dollars. In 2004 a second auction at Christie's raised over seven million dollars, including nine hundred and fifty nine thousand five hundred dollars for Blackie, briefly the most expensive guitar ever sold. From 1999 he also hosted the Crossroads Guitar Festival, a showcase of players he personally admires.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1998, at a party after a show in Columbus, Ohio, Clapton met Melia McEnery, a twenty two year old administrative assistant. He was fifty three. They kept things quiet for a year, then married on the first of January 2002 at the church in Ripley, and they have three daughters. His musical life turned back to his heroes. In 2000 he made Riding with the King with B.B. King, who had first jammed with him in 1967, and the video showed Clapton as the chauffeur with King in the back seat. In 2004 he recorded two albums of Robert Johnson songs, the bluesman he calls the most important who ever lived.[1] [2] [3]

George Harrison died of cancer in November 2001. The two men had long since made peace, and Harrison used to joke that Clapton was his husband in law. A year after his death, on the twenty ninth of November 2002, Clapton was musical director of the Concert for George at the Royal Albert Hall, with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Harrison's son Dhani and many old friends. Clapton played the solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the song where their friendship began. Earlier that year he had played it with McCartney at the Queen's Golden Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The honours piled up. Clapton had already become the only artist inducted three times into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a Yardbird, as a member of Cream, and as a solo artist in 2000. In 2004 he was made a CBE, and he called it the icing on the cake, though he admitted his younger rebellious self would have turned it down. In May 2005 Cream reunited for four shows at the Royal Albert Hall and three at Madison Square Garden. In 2006 he finally made a whole album with J.J. Cale, The Road to Escondido, which won a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 2007 Clapton published his autobiography, and that year he finally learned about his father. A Montreal journalist, Michael Woloschuk, dug through Canadian military records and found that Edward Fryer had been a pianist and saxophone player, a lifelong drifter married several times, who died in Ontario in 1985 and apparently never knew he was Eric Clapton's father. Clapton had written about that absence in his 1998 song My Father's Eyes. In the following years he toured with Steve Winwood, played two nights with Jeff Beck at the O2 in 2010, and released the albums Clapton in 2010 and Old Sock in 2013.[1] [2]

Pain, protest and the long goodbye

In 2013 Clapton was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy, nerve damage that causes burning and stabbing pains in the limbs, and he began talking about retirement. The road, he said, had become unbearable. On the twenty first of June 2014 he walked off stage during Cocaine at the Glasgow Hydro, the show ended early and fans booed. Clapton and the venue apologised, blaming a technical problem. In 2015 he celebrated his seventieth birthday with shows at Madison Square Garden, which he has played more than any other American venue, and a seven night run at the Royal Albert Hall. His 2016 album I Still Do reunited him with producer Glyn Johns.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The deaths of his old bandmates kept coming. Jack Bruce died of liver disease in October 2014, and Clapton wrote a gentle acoustic tribute for him. J.J. Cale had died in 2013, and B.B. King in 2015. Ginger Baker died in October 2019, leaving Clapton the last surviving member of Cream. In 2017 the director Lili Fini Zanuck made the documentary Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars. Clapton had agreed only if she directed it, and it did not flinch from the heroin years, the drinking or the 1976 rant, a scene he admitted was hard to watch but chose to keep. In 2018 he released Happy Xmas, a bluesy Christmas album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The pandemic brought fresh controversy. In late 2020 Clapton and Van Morrison released Stand and Deliver, a song against lockdowns. In 2021 Clapton said he had severe reactions to both doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, and announced he would not play any venue that required audiences to be vaccinated. He released an anti lockdown single, This Has Gotta Stop, toured the southern United States, and was reported to have helped fund an anti lockdown group of street musicians. Critics, including Queen's Brian May, pushed back hard. In May 2022 Clapton caught Covid himself and had to postpone some European shows.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In November 2023 Clapton released a song called Voice of a Child, with images of destruction in Gaza, and he played a charity concert for children in Gaza on a guitar painted in the colours of the Palestinian flag. In October 2024 he released Meanwhile, collecting his recent singles, including a version of Moon River recorded with his late friend Jeff Beck, who died in 2023, with physical copies following in January 2025. As of 2026, Clapton is past eighty, still plays when his body allows, and still stands as the man who turned the lead guitarist into a rock star, flaws and all.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd. Clapton fell for Pattie while she was married to George Harrison, and poured that longing into Layla and Bell Bottom Blues. She left George in 1974, married Eric in 1979, and inspired Wonderful Tonight. The marriage was wrecked by his alcoholism, affairs and, as he later admitted, abuse. She left in 1987 and divorced him in 1989, later suggesting that Eric just wanted what George had.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Clapton and George Harrison. They became close in the late sixties, writing Badge together and trading guest spots, with Clapton playing the solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Their friendship survived Clapton taking Harrison's wife. George called Eric his husband in law, played at his wedding party, and toured Japan with him in 1991. After George died, Clapton led the Concert for George.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. Clapton's Cream bandmates were brilliant and at war. Bruce and Baker had fought on stage in earlier bands, and Clapton insisted on having both, then spent Cream's life as peacekeeper. After the 2005 reunion he said they had gone as far as they could without someone getting killed. Clapton attended Bruce's funeral in 2014, and Baker died in 2019.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Clapton and Duane Allman. Tom Dowd introduced them at an Allman Brothers show in Miami in August 1970. They jammed all night and Allman joined the Layla sessions, adding the slide guitar that defines the record. Clapton called him the musical brother he never had. Allman died in a motorcycle crash in October 1971, aged twenty four.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Clapton and Alice Ormsby-Gore. The aristocrat's daughter was Clapton's partner from 1969 to 1974, and they shared a heroin addiction in the years after Layla. She helped push him toward the 1973 Rainbow comeback, and her father helped arrange his treatment. She never fully recovered herself, and died of a heroin overdose in Bournemouth in April 1995.[1] [2]

Eric Clapton and Lory Del Santo. Clapton had an affair with the Italian model and actress while still married to Pattie Boyd, and their son Conor was born in August 1986. He wrote Lady of Verona for her. Conor died in 1991 after falling from an open window in the New York apartment where he was staying with his mother, a loss that inspired Tears in Heaven.[1] [2]

Eric Clapton and Melia McEnery. They met in 1998 at a party in Columbus, Ohio, when she was twenty two and he was fifty three. After a year of keeping it quiet they went public, and married on New Year's Day 2002 in Ripley. They have three daughters, and she has been at his side for his sober later life.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Clapton and J.J. Cale. Clapton made the quiet Oklahoma songwriter famous by covering After Midnight in 1970 and Cocaine in 1977. Cale was broke when he first heard Clapton's version on the radio. They finally made an album together, The Road to Escondido, in 2006, and after Cale died in 2013 Clapton led a tribute album, The Breeze.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood. They first recorded together in 1966 as the Powerhouse, then formed Blind Faith in 1969 in Clapton's basement jams. Winwood played the Rainbow comeback in 1973 and received one of the Nashville Stratocasters. Decades later they toured together again, with shows at Madison Square Garden in 2008 and a tour in 2009.[1] [2] [3]

Eric Clapton and Robert Stigwood. Stigwood managed Cream and kept Clapton under contract through Blind Faith and the Dominos. After the heroin years he sent Clapton to Miami to make 461 Ocean Boulevard on his RSO label, then suggested the same house and studio to the Bee Gees, sparking their disco rebirth.[1] [2]

Eric Clapton and Muddy Waters. Clapton grew up worshipping Muddy Waters and later called him the father figure he never had. They became friends in the seventies, Clapton was best man at Muddy's wedding in 1979, and Muddy's last public performance was sitting in with Clapton's band in Florida in 1982, a year before he died.[1] [2]

Eric Clapton and Van Morrison. The two veterans had long planned to play together, and in 2020 and 2021 they finally teamed up as Slowhand and Van for three songs, including Stand and Deliver and This Has Gotta Stop, which protested Covid lockdowns. The recordings drew heavy criticism and ended up on Clapton's 2024 album Meanwhile.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Eric Clapton

• Clapton first heard the blues on a BBC children's radio show hosted by Uncle Mac. The Saturday morning show mostly played music for kids, but every now and then Uncle Mac slipped in a blues record. Clapton said it was music you did not hear anywhere else, and that it took the pain away.[1]
• His grandmother remembered him playing Big Bill Broonzy at three in the morning. After he bought a guitar, teenage Eric practised at all hours in his grandparents' house in Ripley. His grandmother said she suffered agony at night listening to him.[1]
• Clapton was thrown out of Kingston College of Art after one year. He enrolled in 1961 after leaving school in Surbiton, but spent his time on music instead of art, and the college expelled him at the end of the academic year.[1]
• His first guitar, a German Hoyer, was so hard to play he gave up for two years. He got the cheap steel strung acoustic for his thirteenth birthday. It hurt to play, so he lost interest, then came back to it at fifteen and practised with a tape recorder.[1]
• On the Beano album cover, Clapton read the comic just to be difficult. He wrote in his autobiography that he was feeling uncooperative during the photo shoot near the Old Kent Road, so he picked up a copy of The Beano and refused to put it down.[1]
• Ramblin' on My Mind on the Beano album was Clapton's first recorded solo lead vocal. He had sung backing parts with the Yardbirds, but the Robert Johnson song on Blues Breakers in 1966 was the first time he took a lead vocal on record.[1]
• Before settling on Cream, the band considered calling themselves Sweet and Sour Rock and Roll. They chose Cream instead because Clapton, Bruce and Baker were already seen as the cream of the crop of British blues and jazz players.[1]
• Cream's first American shows put them at the bottom of a six act bill. At New York's RKO Theater in March 1967, promoter Murray the K had acts play three times a day, and Cream were sometimes cut to a single song per set.[1]
• Disraeli Gears got its name from a roadie mangling the words derailleur gears. Clapton was talking about buying a racing bike in the band's car when roadie Mick Turner chimed in with Disraeli gears. The band laughed so hard they made it the album title.[1]
• As You Said, on Wheels of Fire, is the only Cream recording without Clapton. Jack Bruce and Pete Brown wrote the song, and Clapton does not play on it at all.[1]
• Clapton's voice can be heard on a Frank Zappa album. He appears on We're Only in It for the Money by Zappa's Mothers of Invention, on the tracks Are You Hung Up and Nasal Retentive Calliope Music.[1]
• Clapton wanted Blind Faith to play Woodstock, but his bandmates outvoted him. The festival took place during Blind Faith's American tour in August 1969. Clapton was keen, but the rest of the group said no.[1]
• The girl on the banned Blind Faith cover was paid forty pounds. Photographer Bob Seidemann, a former flatmate of Clapton, shot the image with her parents' consent. The American label replaced it with a photo of the band.[1]
• Clapton bought Jimi Hendrix a left handed Stratocaster the day before Hendrix died. He picked it up on the seventeenth of September 1970, planning to give it as a birthday present. Hendrix died the next day in London.[1]
• Blackie, his most famous Stratocaster, was built from three guitars that cost a few hundred dollars each. In 1970 Clapton bought six 1950s Strats in a Nashville shop, gave three away to Harrison, Winwood and Townshend, and had the best parts of the rest assembled into Blackie.[1]
• Clapton wore a fake beard in parts of the film Tommy. Playing the Preacher in Ken Russell's 1975 film, he shaved off his real beard after the first takes, hoping to force the director to drop his scenes.[1]
• There's One in Every Crowd was almost called The World's Greatest Guitar Player. The joke title for the 1975 album was dropped before pressing because the label feared people would miss the irony.[1]
• The Slowhand sleeve includes a photo of the Ferrari Clapton wrecked. He had bought the Ferrari after seeing George Harrison drive the same model, crashed it after an Australian tour and nearly died. He chose the photo himself.[1]
• Muddy Waters' last public performance was sitting in with Clapton's band. It happened at a concert in Florida in the summer of 1982. Clapton had also been best man at Muddy's wedding in 1979.[1]
• Clapton gave a guitar to London's Hard Rock Cafe to mark his favourite bar stool. In 1979 he donated a signed Fender Lead II. Pete Townshend then sent his own Les Paul with a note saying his was as good as Eric's.[1]
• At the Last Waltz, Clapton's guitar strap came loose in the middle of a solo. As he started soloing on Further on Up the Road with the Band in 1976, the strap slipped, and Robbie Robertson picked up the solo without missing a beat.[1]
• Clapton named his manager, not his wife, as his significant other at rehab. When he checked into Hazelden in 1982, he listed Roger Forrester because Forrester was the only person willing to stand up to him about his drinking.[1]
• Clapton recorded charity songs with the Bee Gees in a group called the Bunburys. The Bunburys raised money for a cricket club that plays charity matches. Their song Fight, No Matter How Long appeared on the 1988 Olympics album.[1]
• Clapton won a BAFTA for television music. He wrote the score for the 1985 BBC thriller Edge of Darkness with composer Michael Kamen, and they won a British Academy Television Award for it.[1]
• The Unplugged version of Rollin' and Tumblin' starts mid verse because the cameras were off. During a break Clapton launched into the old Cream song. The crew scrambled to record, and he asked the director afterwards whether they got it.[1]
• Clapton played kazoo on Unplugged. On his cover of San Francisco Bay Blues, recorded at Bray Studios in 1992, he swapped guitar solos for a kazoo.[1]
• After Conor died, Clapton received around one hundred and fifty letters a day from grieving strangers. He said the flood of mail showed him how many people had no tools to deal with death, and convinced him to turn his tragedy into something positive.[1]
• The 1939 Martin acoustic from Unplugged sold for seven hundred and ninety one thousand five hundred dollars. It was expected to fetch around sixty to eighty thousand dollars at the 2004 Christie's auction for the Crossroads Centre.[1] [2]
• Clapton stopped playing Tears in Heaven live for years. In 2004 he dropped it and My Father's Eyes, saying he no longer felt the loss behind them. He brought Tears in Heaven back in 2015 in a lighter arrangement.[1] [2]
• Clapton saved a Piccadilly tailor's shop by buying half of it. In 2003 the owner of Cordings asked his best client for help. Within five minutes Clapton replied that he could not let it close.[1]
• North Korea invited Clapton to play in Pyongyang in 2008. Kim Jong Il's son Kim Jong Chol was said to be a fan. Clapton's spokeswoman said no agreement had ever been made, and the concert never happened.[1] [2]
• Ferrari built Clapton a one off car, the SP12 EC. The special project car was delivered in 2012, and he showed it at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in 2013. George Harrison once gave him a vintage Mini.[1]
• Clapton once sponsored a UEFA Cup match for West Bromwich Albion. A West Brom fan, he sponsored their home game against Galatasaray in the 1978 to 1979 season and put a club scarf on the back of Backless.[1]
• The Old Sock album title came from a note David Bowie sent him. Clapton thanked Bowie for the song Where Are We Now, and Bowie replied thanking him, old sock. The cover is an iPhone selfie Clapton took on holiday in Antigua.[1]
• Eczema forced Clapton to play in fingerless gloves while making I Still Do. His palms were peeling so badly that he wore mittens and plasters, and played a lot of slide guitar on the 2016 album as a result.[1]
• Cream opened the new Madison Square Garden in 1968. By 2015 he had played the Garden forty five times, more than any other venue in America.[1] [2]
• Clapton was among the first eleven stars on the Royal Albert Hall's Walk of Fame. He was inducted in 2018 alongside names such as Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein, having played the hall more than any other venue.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.