Eric Clapton is popping 80 – and nobody’s extra stunned than him | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV | EUROtoday

Eric Clapton is nothing if not a survivor. As he turns 80 tomorrow – with a serious collection of live shows in Japan, Europe and the UK within the offing – “Slowhand”, because the world’s most well-known guitarist is understood, exhibits no signal of slowing down. He claims to seek out touring “unbearable”, referring maybe to the enterprise of trekking between nameless resorts and stadia, moderately than the precise taking part in stay in entrance of tens of hundreds of followers. Either means, like Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart earlier than him, Clapton has now joined the ranks of the 80-club – a outstanding landmark in itself in an trade that worships the younger and, with uncommon exceptions, brutally jettisons middle-aged performers.

As his biographer, I pay tribute to Clapton’s sheer endurance. He’s survived for greater than 60 years and might nonetheless play a imply guitar. This is a person who has all the time been keen to maneuver away from mere rock to embrace blues, nation and even folks influences. He started his profession with bubblegum pop in long-forgotten bands engaged on the London pub circuit, however quickly went on to type the facility trio Cream, alongside the late Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. The group’s trademark mixture of blues and laborious rock was a trailblazer for a brand new wave of bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.

After that, Clapton left to type a brand new group, Derek and the Dominos, who will all the time be remembered for the firework show of searing guitar and soulful piano of their iconic, evergreen hit Layla. Despite being typically erratic and even self-destructive, Clapton has all the time stored the respect of his followers for his virtuoso and creative guitar taking part in. Over the years, his work has been recognised with album gross sales exceeding 100 million, in addition to no fewer than 18 Grammy awards, 4 Ivor Novellos and three separate inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No different dwelling guitar participant comes shut to those achievements.

While a typical Clapton live performance hardly ever touches the heights he as soon as routinely scaled, his sheer professionalism, selection of fabric and intelligent fusion of types exhibits he’s now develop into a musician for all seasons. Having lately launched a well-received new album, Meanwhile – a set of songs written by everybody from Charlie Chaplin to Chuck Berry – he stays acreative power.

However, it additionally options two numbers in collaboration with veteran singer Van Morrison which take up the anti-lockdown and vaccine-hesitant themes each artists espoused through the pandemic. While lockdown in hindsight is more and more seen as a pricey mistake, the anti-vax message stays vastly controversial. But for Clapton, there appears little probability of cancellation at this late-stage in his life and profession. And whereas he sings in regards to the blues, it’s typically been left to others in his life to truly expertise them.

Take, for instance, Alice Ormsby-Gore, a society magnificence who was Clapton’s live-in associate from 1968 to 1974. Just 16 after they met, Alice was a baby of privilege. Her father David was a high-flying Foreign Office minister who grew to become British ambassador to Washington through the John F Kennedy administration. After a childhood which included frequent household holidays with the Kennedys, Alice went on to divide her time between a luxurious London flat and her father’s 1,500-acre ancestral property in Shropshire. But her life with Clapton quickly took a dismal flip. Both of them spent years in seclusion at his Surrey residence, the place their weight loss program consisted virtually completely of alcohol, medicine and junk meals.

The weekly arrival of a 10-gram packet of heroin grew to become the spotlight of the couple’s routine. When Clapton as soon as inadvertently spilt the contents on the ground, he promptly dropped to his knees and commenced snorting the rug. To his credit score, Clapton was ultimately to kick his drug behavior, if not his style for a drink, earlier than occurring to document a brand new album – 1974’s 461 Ocean Boulevard – and embark on a tour of America. It was the beginning of a triumphant skilled comeback for him and of an extended private decline for Alice.

When the couple cut up, Alice’s place as Clapton’s live-in associate was taken by Pattie Boyd, who on the time occurred to be married to Clapton’s finest pal George Harrison. “That whole period was insane,” Boyd has mentioned. “We were all as drunk as each other.” Meanwhile, the delicate Alice appeared to float off right into a 20-year-long misplaced weekend. Her world crumbled after she went to name on her elder brother Julian, who labored as a waiter, and located him lifeless of a self-inflicted gunshot on the ground of his London flat.

Alice’s mom and her favorite uncle had already been killed in separate street accidents. Tragedy struck once more in 1985 when her father died, aged 66, additionally behind the wheel of a automobile. Some of the information media started to discuss with an “Ormsby-Gore curse” when describing the collection of accidents, accidents, suicides and different household misfortunes.

On January 1, 1995, in a transfer broadly applauded by his mates and admirers, Clapton was awarded the OBE for companies to music. His wage for the earlier 12 months was estimated at £15.4million, making him one in all Britain’s highest earners. Just three months later, Alice was discovered lifeless at her residence in a run-down space of Bournemouth. She was 42, and had been dwelling there in a ground-floor bedsit with a sheet haphazardly nailed up over the entrance window as a substitute of curtains.

A neighbour who lived reverse mentioned she had been oblivious to Alice’s background: “I saw her occasionally walking across to the shops. Once I noticed her eyes were closed and she seemed asleep.” She mentioned she heard that Alice had been discovered “with a syringe stuck in her arm”. The varied Clapton-related affairs of the late Nineteen Seventies appeared to contain most of Britain’s rock aristocracy. Essentially, George Harrison – nonetheless married to Pattie Boyd – ran off to Spain with Ronnie Wood’s spouse, Krissy.

Wood, who was then in his hole 12 months between the Faces and the Rolling Stones, in flip took up with Pattie. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin gave the impression to be sleeping with any of the ladies who occurred to be free on a given evening. Then George got here again from Spain and commenced an affair with Ringo Starr’s spouse, Maureen.

Ringo, not surprisingly, flew right into a rage at this act of betrayal by an outdated bandmate. “Nothing is real, nothing is real!” he shouted. At this stage, Clapton persuaded Pattie to go away George and transfer in with him. However, it was not an unique association. One day Pattie got here residence to seek out Clapton sitting aspect by aspect on the couch with a pal of hers named Jenny McLean, who occurred to be a prime vogue mannequin. When Pattie tried to start out a dialog, Eric interrupted her with the phrases: “Can’t you see I’m in love with this girl? Just f*** off.”

Despite this, Clapton and Boyd had been married in March 1979 and remained collectively for a lot of the subsequent 10 years. One evening in 1985, Clapton took his spouse to dinner and introduced over the primary course that he’d had an affair with an Italian lady named Lori Del Santo. Just a few weeks later later, he took Pattie out to dinner a second time and informed her Del Santo was pregnant.

Pattie herself was then 41 and had been unsuccessfully making an attempt tohave a child for 20 years. Conor, Clapton’s son with Del Santo, was born the next August. Tragically, in March 1991, the four-year-old was killed after unintentionally falling from the window of his mom’s 53rd flooring condominium in New York. The press described Conor as Clapton’s solely baby, however this wasn’t the case. When recording in Montserrat in 1984, he had begun an affair with a 28-year-old Anglo-Iraqi lady named Yvonne Kelly, whose husband was serving to to provide Eric’s album.

On January 11, 1985, Kelly gave start in Doncaster maternity hospital to Clapton’s daughter Ruth. In later years, the lady and her mom had been typically seen within the entrance row Clapton’s live shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall, or with him at hisfavourite restaurant. In 2013, the then 28-year-old Ruth gave start to a son – Clapton’s first grandchild – whom she named Eric. Along the way in which, Clapton lastly parted firm together with his long-suffering spouse, Pattie.

He had introduced his determination to her on the morning of her forty third birthday by throwing all her belongings out of the window. A decade of intermittently nice music and finally failed amorous affairs with the likes of Naomi Campbell, Sharon Stone and Sheryl Crow adopted. “I just like the company of beautiful girls. I have a weakness in that department,” Clapton famous dryly.

Perhaps it’s not stunning his relationships with girls had been typically troubled, provided that he grew up believing his grandmother was his mom – and his mom his older sister. Nowadays, Clapton is fortunately married to 49-year-old Melia McEnery, a former Armani gross sales govt from Columbus, Ohio, with whom he has three grown daughters. Like many rock stars of a sure age, he seems to have lastly settled down with a youthful, no-nonsense American.

Despite a checkered private life – having endured the shark-filled waters of the music enterprise, and, as his new album proves, nonetheless sounding contemporary and related – he’s develop into one thing of a nationwide treasure. Anyone shopping for a ticket to one in all his UK live shows shall be seeing an absolute grasp of his craft in motion.

Clapton has already survived on the prime stage for half a century past what he ever thought attainable when he began taking part in the guitar professionally. It’s curiously tempting to wager on him lasting a fewyears longer. But on the eve of his eightieth birthday, maybe we also needs to spare a thought for a few of these left behind alongside the way in which.

• Christopher Sandford is the writer of Clapton: Edge Of Darkness