CityLife

Hail the return of Eric 'Slowhand' Clapton

GUITAR SLINGER EXTRAORDINAIRE: Clapton

DRAW up a list of masters of the six-string and most people will name Eric Clapton in the top five.  

He has indisputably pioneered a playing style that hundreds of guitarists have tried to emulate, and he’s widely credited for masterminding the distinctive blues-rock and psych-rock sounds that dominated the music of the 1960s.

But it’s not just Clapton’s professional life that has made him an engaging topic for the last 40 years.

His life story is just as fascinating as his professional one: the result of a fling between his mother and a married Canadian soldier, Clapton was raised by his grandparents believing his mother to be his sister.

He’s known tragedy – his half-brother was killed in a road accident when he was 26 and his own son, Conor, famously fell to his death from a New York apartment window in 1991, aged just four, an experience Clapton documented in one of most loved songs, Tears In Heaven (the track won him six Grammys) – and he’s battled drug and drink problems.

But, music has also brought Clapton immeasurable joy. His great grandparents and surrogate parents were musically gifted and Eric showed an early interest, too.

So much so, in fact, that he was eventually kicked off a scholarship to a London art school because he was too busy learning blues chords in his bedroom.

Pub circuit

His reputation on the pub circuit got him drafted by one of the 1960s best blues-rock bands, The Yardbirds, and Clapton himself would go on to form the Bluesbreakers and the band for which he is now most fondly remembered, Cream, within three years. 

Since going solo in the early 1970s, he’s earned a reputation as an incessant gigger and flawless performer, and become the only musician able to boast three entries in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame.

For his Mancunian outing, Clapton brings Arc Angels with him, a kind of Texas supergroup featuring Eric’s long-time sideman guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, guitarist Charlie Sexton and drummer Chris Layton, who famously kept the beat in the late Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble.

After Vaughan’s death in 1990, Layton and Double Trouble bassist, Tommy Shannon, joined forces with Sexton and Bramhall to form Arc Angels, releasing a self-titled album of raw rock’n’roll in 1992.

The band fell apart amidst creative differences, the rigours of life on the road and Bramhall’s descent into heroin addiction.

Years later, three of the Arc Angels are back together, planning to record new music and release a live DVD and CD.

It’s not every day a whole bunch of rock ’n’ roll legends set up stall on your doorstep. You’d probably be mad to miss it.

Eric Clapton plays the M.E.N. Arena on Thursday, May 14. £45 and £55. Call 0844 847 8000.