eric clapton interview

Eric Clapton interview in todays London Sunday Times


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1036968,00.html


At 50, I finally decided to grow up
In his first interview for six years, Eric Clapton tells Robert Sandall about his new wife, new life and why it's taken him so long to beat his demons



Eric Clapton has led a life forever destined to be a headline writer's dream. Nearly 59 years after he was born, the triumphs and tragedies keep on coming.
Take last Christmas. On December 25, Clapton, his new wife Melia and their three-year-old daughter Julie Rose woke up in their Chelsea townhouse to presents and family skylarking. By tea time, Julie Rose was running a sky-high temperature. A doctor diagnosed viral pneumonia; she was rushed to intensive care in Chelsea and Westminster hospital.



By the time the paparazzi had taken up residence in the pub at the end of the road (perhaps ghoulishly anticipating a rerun of the "Tears in Heaven" death of Clapton's son Conor, who plunged 700ft from the window of his Manhattan apartment in 1991), Julie Rose was making a good recovery and attention had shifted to the New Year's honours list.

Clapton had been made a CBE, remarkable since he had received his OBE only nine years earlier. "They got in touch before offering me the CBE because they like to know in advance whether you'll accept. So I said: ?'Do you want me to give back the Obe (as he pronounces it)?' I thought you could only have one medal at a time."

Clapton has "no idea why they chose me. They gave no reasons". Self-effacement is his style these days. With his weatherbeaten, beardy visage, he looks like the sort of regular-guyish dad you would hardly notice in a DIY superstore or a country high street ?- which is why he hangs out in such places and never hires minders.

Since passing 50 he has been focused on sorting his life out. Which has meant coming to terms with the fractured family he grew up in ?- in particular the father he never met ?- and disentangling himself from its legacy in adulthood: addiction, failed personal relationships and an overdependency on therapies and support groups. Most of all it meant not working so hard.

"Being a practising alcoholic I'd handed over the running of my life to a business manager whose main priority was to keep things ticking over and make sure profits were being made. My work was planned out so that there was no room for a personal life at all," says Clapton.

When Roger Forrester began managing him at the end of the 1970s, Clapton was the most notorious casualty of the rock'n'roll lifestyle on the planet, at his lowest ebb both personally and professionally, lucky to be alive. Acupuncture had got rid of his heroin habit in 1974, but drinking had more than filled the gap.

"Roger came into the picture when I was a blithering idiot, drinking three bottles of vodka a day and being carried around," he admits. As well as keeping secret stashes of booze under the mat in his car, Clapton could only perform while drunk.

Marriage in the same year to Patti Harrison (née Boyd), the woman he had wooed away from his close friend George Harrison, didn't help.

Although she had acted as muse for two of his most famous songs, Layla and Wonderful Tonight, by the time Clapton checked into rehab for the first time in 1982 their relationship had been superseded, in his fuddled mind, by another.

"When I went in for treatment, they asked me to write down who my significant other was and without thinking about it, I put Roger. And that's not right." The relationship with his manager was "terribly complicated. He was a father, brother, my best pal. You know how difficult it is when partners go into business together, the strain that places on things".

They split up five years ago. "I miss him. But I needed the separation," says Clapton.

The main thing, though, was that the Forrester connection worked in getting his career back on track. The 1980s saw Clapton's reinstatement as one of the respected elder statesmen of rock.

There was a two-year wobble after he tried a return to drinking, which rapidly escalated into full-blown alcoholism, but since 1987 he has stayed sober ?- and his albums and concerts have carried on selling.

Unfortunately, the virtually non-stop touring and recording schedule, which Forrester erected as a scaffold to stop Clapton from falling back on to the booze, made it all too easy for Clapton to hook up with new people and well-nigh impossible for him to form real attachments to any of them.

In the early 1980s he fathered a child, his elder daughter Ruth, with Yvonne Kelly, a studio assistant he met one night. Two years later he began a dalliance with Lori Del Santo, an Italian actress, whom he bumped into at an after-show party in Milan. This eventually led to the birth of Conor.

"We didn't get married. Didn't even get close," Clapton says, brusquely. This was the last straw for Patti; they divorced in 1988. When I interviewed Clapton at about that time, he told me his private life was "chaotic . . . like something out of a Fellini film". He described himself as an "isolated, cold, rather intimidating, generally selfish person . . . that's what my occupation has done to me. But I wouldn't have it any other way". With that he sloped off for dinner with whichever actress, model or rock chick he happened to be seeing. Sharon Stone, Naomi Campbell and Sheryl Crow were three widely reported dates.

"I used to identify my self- esteem with sex," he now says of that period. "Friends and girlfriends became a way of avoiding being with myself. I don't think you can be any good to anybody unless you're okay on your own."

This realisation dawned during the wake-up years of the 1990s, which began with the appalling, accidental death of his son and ended seven years later when he started seeing the only woman with whom, he says, he has ever enjoyed a properly equal relationship, an American of Korean-Irish parentage called Melia McEnery.

They met in Los Angeles at a party thrown by Giorgio Armani, a partner in the Crossroads rehab centre Clapton had set up in Antigua. As a member of Armani's staff she had been told not to fraternise with any of the guests. "So Melia came straight up to me and said: ?'My uncle's a big fan of yours, can I get your autograph?' And that was that. There was something about her . . . strength. She occupied her space with absolute authority. It was clear she was capable of being an adequate partner for anybody."

Having relinquished his womanising ways, Clapton did not go for a speedy conquest. "I started asking her out, and we became friends." To his amazement, love did not manifest itself as a bad drug. "In the past I'd see a woman in a room and I'd be magnetised and usually that would be dangerous," he says. "This was the first time I found I was able to respond to something good for me."

This more grounded approach to the mating game coincided with some fresh insight into the biggest mystery of his life, the identity of his natural father.

Clapton, whose real name is Eric Clapp, was brought up in Ripley, near Guildford, Surrey, by his grandparents, believing them to be his mum and dad. When he was 12 he discovered his "older sister", Patricia, was his mother. She had been impregnated by a Canadian serviceman, Edward Friar, shortly before he returned to Canada.

Friar was said to be a banker living in Toronto, but Clapton "made a conscious decision when I was young that I didn't want to know anything about him, because it would be too painful, disappointing and disruptive".

Forty or so years later, a Canadian journalist came up with a Ted Friar who fitted part of the Clapps' description. He had been in England at the end of the war with the 14th Canadian Hussars and had ended his days not in a bank, but as a poor musician.

This Ted Friar was married four times, had had three children (not including Clapton), died of leukaemia in 1985 and his ashes ?- and his DNA ?- were scattered at sea. When this story was published, the shell-shocked Clapton felt obliged to accept it as true, "because I always used to feel guilty when people asked about my father and about my not doing any legwork to find out who he was".

Now he had a new half-sister, Eva Jane, who lived in a Florida caravan park and told the world how much she had always loved his music, and a Canadian half-brother, Ted, who sent him tapes.

Everybody said how much Eric looked like his dad. But he isn't sure now that Friar was the right man. The one person who could make a positive identification, his mother, died four years ago. What did she say? Clapton sounds genuinely unsure. "She was non-committal. And much as I loved her, I don't know whether she wanted to tell me the truth."

The eagerness of his supposed half-siblings to get in touch also bothered him. He has not met any of them. "A lot of people were hovering, making themselves available and so I backed off."

The one thing that has sustained Clapton is the blues. His big love was Robert Johnson, the towering blues figure of the 1930s.

"I loved that haunted quality he had, the fact of feeling like an outcast, almost from day one. I identified with Robert as a character, and the shambolic way he led his life."

Successively kicked out of Kingston art college (for not working) and from his first big band, the Yardbirds (for not supporting their move into pop), Clapton found himself, at the age of 20, living in a house in Oxford with a friend.

"I was getting used to the idea that maybe I wasn't going to play again, when the phone went." It was John Mayall, the doyen of the 1960s British blues revival, asking him to join his band, the Bluesbreakers. "It was as if a bell went off in my head. I just felt, ?'This is what you're going to do'."

His transformation ?- from an enthusiastic but unexceptional guitarist to one of the most fluent, improvising blues virtuosos ?- took place over the next year. Living in Mayall's London flat and studying his vinyl collection, Clapton applied what he calls his "microscopic vision" to improving his technique. "I did nothing but play. Girls and friends meant nothing to me for that year."

The blues was becoming big news. As pop began to take itself more seriously and rebranded itself as "rock", Clapton's prowess as a guitar slinger, coupled with his rugged good looks, made him into a cult figure. Graffiti sprang up proclaiming "Clapton is God".

One of the fellow musicians hypnotised by his talent was George Harrison, whom he first met at a Beatles Christmas show. "We had an incredibly complicated relationship that was really charged from day one," says Clapton. "The dynamics were always the same. I had a great respect for him but at the same time I sensed that he didn't really know what was going on."

An informal deal was struck. Harrison "would let me into the inner circle", which meant introducing him to pop luminaries such as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. Clapton, meanwhile, "would show him stuff" ?- like how to bend guitar strings. "And that went on, and the stakes got higher until it got crazy with Patti, and people got hurt."

Somehow, George and Eric never fell out over their overlapping domestic interests. After Harrison got stabbed during a break-in at Friar Park, his Henley home, in 1999, Clapton was one of the first to go round and offer support.

"A lot of George's problems were caused by the fact he'd created a situation that was so secure it was massively tempting," says Clapton. "He'd become very reclusive and I told him that attracts trouble. I said to George: ?'If you'd spent more time cultivating the locals and were less paranoid and suspicious of everyday life, that (the attack) wouldn't have happened'. But I don't think he took it on board."

Clapton has himself been stalked by a few crazies over the years. The most serious incident involved an American woman "who became obsessed with the idea that I was stealing ideas out of her head, song titles, things like that". She was eventually arrested trying to smuggle a gun into one of his shows.

None of which seems to bother him unduly or prompt him to invest in electric fences or guard dogs. He remains deeply attached to English rural life, playing cricket, fishing for trout and even shooting. But he particularly enjoys playing the guitar at Julie Rose's nursery playgroup. "And I wouldn't want to give any of that up. I am a roots man."

Though he owns houses in the south of France, Antigua and London, Clapton spends most of his time in a Surrey village. Two years ago he got married in the parish church he went to as a child. Conor is buried nearby.

Despite 20 or so years of hard drink and drugs and a 40-a-day cigarette habit he is miraculously healthy. "Yes, terrible isn't it?" he grins. "I've got a little bit of a thyroid condition, but otherwise I've recovered pretty well."

The other is his childlike enjoyment of the little things. It seems quite telling that what gets Clapton most excited about his CBE is not the official recognition but all the opportunities for dressing up that come with it. "They sent me a fabulous book this time with all the accessories you can get, like CBE cufflinks. There's a whole merchandise thing going on. And it's such a beautiful medal, much prettier than the Obe. You can wear it on a ribbon round your neck."

So might we see him sporting this prestigious trinket on stage during his forthcoming tour of the UK? "What with a T-shirt?" Clapton, every bit the born-again English gent, sounds horrified. "Nah, that wouldn't look right."


Eric Clapton's new album Me and Mr Johnson is released next week