Eric Clapton turns 80: The guitar that never falls silent

Can he still? Or can he no longer? That is the question of all questions that arises with Eric Clapton. Can the exceptional musician, who is worshiped as a guitar god by many experts, still play? Doubts must be allowed, especially since he celebrates his 80th birthday on March 30 and deals openly with his health problems.

As early as 2013, he found a nerve disease that makes it increasingly difficult for him to continue to play guitar. In an interview with the “Classic Rock Magazine”, he explained in 2016: “I have often been in pain in recent years. It started on the lower back. It often feels like an electric shocker drives along the body.” He has peripheral neuropathy, painful damage to the peripheral nervous system. It is “difficult to play guitar. I will definitely not be able to improve”.

In addition, Clapton has been struggling with tinnitus and the following hearing loss for some time, which is triggered by stress or excessive volume and often occurs in musicians. And he got a lot on his ears, the vast majority of his life.

At the age of 21, the young man from the southern English county of Surrey was a world star. He plays with the legendary Yardbirds, with John Mayall (1933-2024) and the bluesbreakers, from 1966 he was Frontman of Cream, the best band in the world at the time.

This milk -bearded Eric Clapton is worshiped in London, the Mecca of rock music, as “God” in the 1960s. He owes this to a stupid coincidence. A fan had brushed on a London wall of the house “Clapton is God” (“Clapton is God”). Actually, he wanted to write “Clapton is good”, only he had forgotten the second o.

After the early death of Jimi Hendrix in 1970, who put Clapton in the shade for some time, he can no longer be called “God”. Instead, he is called “Slowhand”, slow hand. Actually no compliments for a guitar star.

The saying comes from Yardbirds times when Eric Clapton in the Crawdaddy Club in Surrey often played covered songs. They took about three minutes, he stretched it to five to six minutes, sometimes a guitar string tore in the middle. Then the audience started clapping until the guitarist had raised a new one. This “Slow Handclap” inspired club owner Giorgio Gomelsky for “Slowhand”.

The myths pave its way. It starts at birth in Ripley in southern England. His father is a married Canadian soldier who has long been with his wife in Canada when Eric Clapton was born on March 30, 1945. The mother is only 16. The child grows up with grandma and grandpa and believes that they are his parents and the true mom his older sister. With nine he learns the truth and gains knowledge: he is different from the others.

At 17, the highly gifted boy gave up his art studies at Kingston University in London and only devotes himself to his guitar. Today he can look back on a unique career: 17-time Grammy winners will be with hits like “Sunshine of your love”, “I Feel Free”, “CrossRoads”, “Lay Down Sally”, “After Midnight”, “I Shot the Sheriff” or “Cocaine” permanent guest in the charts. Clapton sells over 130 million records worldwide, and his assets are estimated at over $ 150 million.

He appears with the crème de la crème of rock music, with John Lennon, Keith Richards, Duane Allman, Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey, Ginger Baker, Chuck Berry, BB King, JJ Cale, Mark Knopfler, Carlos Townshend or John McLaughlin. With the Blues-Wonder Child Steve Winwood, he founds the legendary formation blindly Faith, for which designer Giorgio Armani he writes the music for his fashion shows and for Tom Cruise the soundtrack for “The Color of Money”.

In women, Eric Clapton maintained the principle “one by one”. In his autobiography “Mein Leben” (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) he wrote in 2007: As soon as a “gone, I plunged into a series of one-night stands and behaved outrageously towards every woman who ran into me”.

After countless groupies, he starts a relationship with the American radio and soul singer Betty Davis (1944-2022). Then he spans his best friend, Beatle George Harrison (1943-2001), whose wife Pattie Boyd (81), for whom he writes the world hit “Layla” and whom he marries in 1979. Harrison does not take it any further and calls him his “Husband in Law”, “Sonsal Dean”. During the marriage to Pattie (until 1988), he testifies to Yvonne Kelly and Lory del Santo with Yvonne Kelly and Lory. He has an affair with the Model Carla Bruni (57), which he in turn loses to Mick Jagger (81), follows an intermezzo with Sheryl Crow (63).

Finally, in 1999 he met the 31 -year -old Melia Mcenery (49) in the United States, who works for his friend Giorgio Armani. She asked for an autograph for her uncle – and becomes his second wife and mother of three daughters. There has been calm since then, sometimes “Slowhand” goes on the duck hunt with the wife.

This calm probably saved his life because the time before was a single act of self -destruction. In the early 1970s, he spent almost three years without interruption in heroin frenzy, Clapton writes in his autobiography “My Life”. After Heroin came alcohol, cocaine and tablets until he was finally on the abyss in the 1980s.

Suicide only prevented him from being able to drink as a dead man. To do this, he smoked the 80 cigarettes every day. He later tells the “Sunday Times” that as a “genuine alcoholic” he had become violent towards his first wife Pattie Boyd.

Only several withdrawal cures and electrotherapy bring him back on track, the musician and friend Pete Townshend (79) helps him with musical comeback. “I don’t know how I survived,” he says to the “Classic Rock Magazine”.

He is dry and addicted again when he has to experience the cruel low point of his life: the death of his son Conor on March 20, 1991. The four -year -old child, the Italian actress Lory del Santo, was visiting New York. Both lived in an apartment house on the 53rd floor. The housekeeper had cleaned the windows and left one of them open to ventilate the room. The child fell through this open window. Eric Clapton processed his grief a year later in the song “Tears in Heaven”, which became a moving classic.

So now he will be 80, an age he did not intend. He himself finds it “incredible that I’m still here”. He can no longer play with most of his friends: Stevie Ray Vaughan has been dead since 1990. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, the companions of Cream, died 2014 and 2019. Mayall 2024.

Regardless of his nerve disease, Clapton plans concert appearances in Japan, the USA, France, Nottingham and London for this year. Everyone should be sold out, because everyone wants to see and hear the legend that the American actor and rock musician: “Eric Clapton is the most important and most influential guitarist who has ever lived, will still live and ever live.”