Patti was a successful model and in 1966 she married Beatle George Harrison. Apart from his music, one of Eric Clapton’s other lifetime passions was Patti Boyd, an icon of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. The following two years were probably the darkest in Eric Clapton’s life as he tried to overcome his heroin addiction, and eventually in 1973 his fellow guitarist Pete Townsend of The Who managed to get Clapton out of his house, back on stage, and eventually back in the recording studio to begin what became a highly successful solo career. The resulting album wasn’t a big hit, but a single from it, ‘Layla’, later became one of Clapton’s best loved pieces. Clapton refused to have his name on the album in a concerted effort to escape his guitar-hero image. Blind Faith soon went the same way as Cream, and in 1970 Clapton fronted a band under the pseudonym of Derek & The Dominoes, Clapton being ‘Derek’. When Cream imploded he toured America with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, before forming another ‘super-group’, Blind Faith, together with Steve Winwood, recently departed from Traffic. In 1966 he formed the first ‘super-group’, Cream, together with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.
Eric (born Eric Clapp in Ripley, Surrey, in 1945) first attracted attention as a guitar-hero in British group The Yardbirds in the mid-1960s, also acquiring the nickname, ‘Slowhand’, before moving to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. *Released in USA as ‘Eric Clapton & His Band’Įric Clapton has had a long and sometimes difficult career, struggling to overcome heroin addiction in the early 1970s, and losing his 4-year-old son Conor in 1991 in a tragic accident in New York that inspired a devastated Clapton to write the song ‘Tears In Heaven’. “To have inspired Eric, and George before him, to write such songs was so flattering”