Selfish junkie, disgraceful drunk, vile racist, stoned dad and a relentless womaniser — new film Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars examines the rock star's darkest moments
A WARTS-and-all documentary about Eric Clapton makes for harrowing viewing – not least for the rock legend himself.
Looking back on the vile racist rant he made during a 1970s gig while off his head on drink and drugs must have had him squirming in his seat.
Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars, which is out today, charts the amazing highs AND shameful lows in the extraordinary life of the 72-year-old guitarist.
It takes a brave man to watch his darkest moments laid bare, and ahead of the film’s release Eric admitted: “When I saw it I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can handle this’ — and I still don’t know if I can.”
Life In 12 Bars does not shy away from anything, or gloss over any past bad behaviour by the guitar hero nicknamed Slow Hand.
Eric confesses to once hating everything — including himself — and spent several years as a virtual recluse in his Surrey mansion getting high.
He also opens up about his heroin abuse, alcoholism, womanising, being rejected by his birth mother, the death of his son Conor and how he tempted model Pattie Boyd away from his best pal George Harrison.
After a special screening of the movie in London on Wednesday, the former Cream and Yardbirds guitarist reflected: “I sabotaged everything I got involved with.”
Yet the 18-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, who has sold more than 130million records worldwide, got clean and is a survivor.
Despite revealing he has health struggles with deafness, tinnitus and back pain from nerve damage, he continues to tour and will headline a British Summer Time concert at London’s Hyde Park on July 8.
Teetotal for nearly three decades, Eric asked his good friend Lili Fini Zanuck to tell his life story without him exerting any editorial control.
She has unearthed some incredible archive footage and assembled amazingly candid interviews.
Her film shows how the once shy “nice guy” had become a raging maniac in the mid 1970s, threatening his fans and screaming at then-girlfriend Pattie.
In a typical day he would down a bottle of cognac before lunch, then snort cocaine from a knife. In some footage he looks totally wasted.
The lowest point came when Eric, a close pal of black blues musicians such as BB King and Jimi Hendrix, bellowed his support for the National Front at a gig in Birmingham in 1976.
He repeated the fascist party’s “Keep Britain White” slogan, praised the controversial Tory MP Enoch Powell and yelled: “Get the foreigners out, get the w**s out, get the c***s out”.
Seeing that four decades on, it is hard for Eric to comprehend just how low he had sunk.
He said: “When I realised what I had said I was just so disgusted with myself. It was shocking and unforgivable. I was becoming not only chauvinistic, but fascistic too.
“I was so ashamed of who I was, a kind of semi-racist, which didn’t make sense. Half of my friends were black, I dated black women and I championed black music.”
Sculptor Ben Palmer, who knew Eric from his first band The Roosters in 1963, sums up his old friend in the film: “Nobody pushed him into the deepest depths and nobody else got him out. That’s a very powerful personality. It must be there for him to have survived.”
Eric believes it was being rejected — first by his mum and then by George’s wife Pattie — that triggered his self-destructive urges. Until he was nine, he believed his grandparents Rose and Jack Clapp were his mother and father, and his mum Patricia his sister. When he learned the truth, Patricia did not want to know.
He said: “I felt hurt, I was a mess. It seemed my life had been a lie.”
Later in life he got another big knock when model Pattie refused to leave George for him.
Eric said: “I knew it was wrong. George was my best friend. But I felt the compulsion towards her.
“She was the most incredible woman I had ever met. Even though they were married I wanted her, even though she was unavailable.”
After he slept with Pattie for the first time, George gave her a him-or-me ultimatum. She chose to stay — even after Eric told her he’d written the 1970 hit Layla about her. The rejection hit him hard. He spent several years avoiding the limelight, hiding at home and taking drugs.
By this time he had moved on from dabbling in LSD and cocaine to heroin. Yet when he quit that for booze it only made matters worse.
He said: “For me, alcohol was far more dangerous than heroin.”
And when he finally married Pattie in 1979, after she left George over his affairs, he was no longer the fun guy she had first met.
Photographer Pattie, 73, said: “He wanted to drink all the time. He was quite scary. He would scream at me across hotel lobbies.”
Looking back at how he was then, Eric said: “In my lowest moments, the only reason I didn’t commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink any more if I was dead.”
Their troubled relationship fell apart for good after he had an unplanned baby with Italian actress Lory Del Santo in 1986.
Son Conor was a shining light in the darkness for Eric but, as Life In 12 Bars shows, not even his arrival sobered up the rocker.
Old footage shows him proclaiming his joy at becoming a dad in a TV interview: “I just want to grow up happily with my son!”
In truth, he was off his head.
Eric confessed: “There is a very sad part when I was doing an interview and the guy is asking how my life is and I am talking about being a father and I am stoned, and that is very disturbing.”
Attempts to kick the habit, including spells in rehab, failed. It took the tragic death of Conor, aged four, to make him give up his bad habits for good.
In August 1991 Eric was on his way to pick up Conor from ex-lover Lory’s New York apartment when she called him, screaming down the phone.
He said: “She said, ‘He’s dead’. I thought, ‘What’s she talking about?’ She said, ‘He fell out of the window’. I felt like I had stepped backwards out of myself. I couldn’t grasp it.”
Little Conor had wandered on to the ledge of the window on the 53rd floor of the Manhattan tower block, left open by cleaners, and plunged to his death.
Bereft and fragile, Eric found himself all alone in his mansion after Conor’s funeral.
Friends feared he would sink further into alcohol addiction, yet he found the strength to resist.
He says finding an old note from Conor saying “I love you. I want to see you again” helped him to find a greater purpose.
He said: “I opened one letter and it was from Conor, it had been posted weeks before from Milan. I realised if I can get through this and stay sober, anyone can.
“I realised there was a way to turn this dreadful tragedy into something positive. That I would consider living my life from this point on to honour the memory of my son.” A year later he released his biggest US hit, Tears In Heaven, which is about Conor’s death, and in 1998 he founded a rehab clinic, the Crossroads Centre, on Antigua.
Since 2002, he has been married to Melia McEnery and they have three daughters, Julie, 16, Ella, 14 and Sophie, 12.
Eric also has a daughter Ruth, 32, from an affair with a married studio manager in 1984. They had a fallout over her posting personal details on social media and have been estranged for two years.
It has been a rocky road to his current place of contentment, but there is little Eric regrets.
As he put it: “It’s everything I did and the mistakes I made that brought me here.”
