Clapton, Eric

Incendiary blues from the man once apocryphally called ‘God’

“It’s unrecordable.” That was the verdict of a shellshocked engineer in March 1966, as a 21-year-old Eric Clapton plugged a 1960 Les Paul into a 1962 Marshall 2x12 combo, Tgr267.steal.fig03.musx dialled up the volume and File detonated Date: 16:57 Decca Studios. 13/04/2015 “I thought the obvious solution Page 1 of 1 was to get an amp and play it as loud Notes: as it would go,” the guitarist reasoned of his approach to the trailblazing Blues-breakers album with John Mayall. “Until it was just about to burst.” It’s fair to say that history has proved the engineer wrong. The guitarist was not only recordable, but revolutionary, lighting the fuse on the British blues boom, jostling with Jimi Hendrix as the era’s ultimate guitar hero and reaffirming his status as guitar legend ever since.