ERIC COMES CLEAN
The musician bares his soul in a brand-new documentary
Drunken violence, racist abuse, flagrant drugtaking and “disgusting” behaviour. Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars is not your usual brand-bolstering music movie.
In one of many shocking confessions in the film, Eric admits, “The only reason I didn’t commit suicide was the fact that I wouldn’t be able to drink any more if I was dead.” Anyone expecting a whitewash should look away now.
Stripped of the customary talking heads and cosy in-studio reminiscing, the feature-length documentary simply tells the superstar’s shadow-strewn story, often in Eric’s own gruff voice, and in doing so may have forged a new movie genre: rock-star noir.
The unflinching film examines the dark and turbulent times of the legendary British guitarist and it goes deep. Rarely has a national institution been so fearlessly explored and all with the musician’s full cooperation.
Director Lili Fini Zanuck,
Eric’s friend of 25 years, has created such a frank account of her subject’s drinking, drug abuse, grief, deceit, fear and confusion that her film could almost be a blues song.
“I think it was a deeply cathartic process for Eric,” says Lili, who conducted hours of “extraordinary, exhilarating” audio interviews with the legend. “He is a very private person, but part of his nature is that he’s also extremely interested in the truth and has no problems in exposing his own foibles.
“Eric had to put a lot of trust in me,” adds the Oscar-winning producer of Driving Miss Daisy. “He knew I wasn’t going to sugar-coat anything.” Fans will be enchanted by the quality of the footage unearthed but Life in 12 Bars also shines a light on the sadness at the heart of the man and his music.
Eric was born with the blues, his troubles starting with his own mother. He grew up in “a house of secrets”, believing his grandparents Rose and
Jack Clapp, Eric’s birth surname, were his mum and dad and that his real mother, Pat, was his older sister.
This would ultimately affect all his future relationships, from wives to girlfriends – Eric famously stole Beatle George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd – and his own family.
Life in 12 Bars delves into the rocker’s addiction, insecurity and jealousy – even his brief flirtation with racist buffoonery
in the mid-70s, flaws that would have had most controlling musicians frantically fumbling for the edit button.
Not Eric. For all his failings as a man, his achievements as a professional are inarguable – Jimi Hendrix called him “the fairest soul brother in England” – and it’s hard to question his courage in endorsing such a raw and revelatory project.
But this clear-eyed study of the 72-year-old virtuoso begs one big question: how the hell is Eric Clapton still alive?
As Lili notes, “This man was doing everything he could to kill himself.”
I once asked the reclusive bluesman how he’d managed to avoid such a grim finale.
“The mystery is, why haven’t I died?” he chuckled and in person, Eric is remarkably cheery company. “I’ve certainly walked through a lot of fire.” Later he added, “By rights, I should have kicked the bucket a long time ago. For some reason,
I was plucked from the jaws of hell and given another chance.”
Eric’s sound has spoken to successive generations since his discovery as a 17-year-old electric guitar prodigy in 1963. He was a legend by the age of 20, having forged a reputation as a fearsome player and a surly blues purist to boot. “I was very scholarly about the music,” he recalls of his early days. At 25, he made what is widely considered the best blues-rock album of all time as Derek and The Dominoes, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
Eric is the only three-time inductee to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, as a solo artist and as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream, and is estimated to be worth in the region of $280 million.
Having overcome some serious health scares, firstly with peripheral neuropathy, a condition that causes shooting pain and numbness in the extremities, then a chronic skin condition that required him to wear cotton gloves (“it’s all part of getting old, man”), Eric has recently returned to live performance and is planning a homecoming show at London’s Hyde Park later this year.
It is little wonder that the excitable slogan “Clapton is God”, daubed on walls in the capital during the late ‘60s, has begun to re-appear.
When I met him in the mid-90s for a lengthy interview, he expressed a preference for the nickname Slowhand. The conversation veered between hilarious and harrowing.
He’d then been sober for six years (“because one drink is too many and a thousand isn’t enough”) and off the cigarettes for three months, which he had quit using hypnotherapy.
Eric and wife Pattie had split in 1988 after a short-lived marriage and since then he’d had so many glamorous girlfriends, including models Naomi Campbell, Carla Bruni and Marie Helvin, it was difficult to keep up.
“The one thing that was always glaringly obvious to everyone else apart from me is that I don’t do very well in relationships,” he said.
It was also just three years after the death of his four-yearold son Conor, who had fallen from the window of a Manhattan skyscraper in 1991 and the subject was still too raw to dwell on. “When I lost my son, I didn't run off and hide,” Eric said softly. “I wrote a song [ Tears in Heaven]
and gave it to the world, and I think people respected that.
“It’s like a prayer. I wrote three or four lines of prose and I knew that other people would immediately recognise the feeling within those lines.”
The segment of Life in 12 Bars that covers the tragedy is devastating. “I felt as if I had stepped backwards out of myself,” says Eric in voiceover. “I could not grasp it.” Had he lived, Conor Clapton would have been 32 this year.
In a curious twist of fate, Eric’s 1992 Unplugged
album, which featured Tears in Heaven, went on to sell 26 million copies and receive three Grammys, becoming his most commercially successful recording and the best-selling live album ever, making him a global superstar all over again.
“But once you find out that money and fame and success doesn’t do it, where do you go then?” Eric pondered that afternoon.
Life in 12 Bars moves briskly through the depressed drinking days. Eric guesses that he was consuming up to three bottles of brandy a day, holed up in his Hurtwood Edge mansion in Surrey, but can’t remember much other than “being in that alcoholic tunnel”.
I once had the good fortune to travel on Concorde alongside a non-drinking Eric as he returned from an awards show in New York in the late ’80s.
While jetting in supersonic splendour, the thrifty riff-meister made a surprise purchase of
400 duty-free cigarettes. “Kind of sums me up, doesn’t it?” he hooted when reminded of the money-saving move years later. “I was probably in between my working-class bloke and international playboy phases.
“All those years when I was being a drunk, I wore secondhand clothes, and ate fish and chips and baked beans. So right up until my 40s, I was living out this phoney working-class ethic. It was part of that drunken prejudice, like a hardline bigot.”
This might partially explain Eric’s notorious speech at a Birmingham concert on his 1976 UK tour. Using unacceptable language, the guitarist declared his support for controversial former minister Enoch Powell and insulted immigrants, stating that Britain had become “a black colony”.
Eric agonised over including printed excerpts from the racist rant in Life in 12 Bars, before deciding to take full ownership of his past behaviour.
“When I realised what I had said,” Clapton confesses in the film, “I was just so disgusted with myself. It was shocking and unforgivable, and I was so ashamed of who I was, a kind of semi-racist, which didn’t make sense.”
“The racism thing was very hard for him,” adds Lili, “because he doesn’t even know who that person is.
It was the only part he even mentioned to me, but he didn’t ask me to take it out.
“He says in the movie that even listening back to some of his old music is tough, ‘because I can hear how drunk I am’. But he has also said to me that when you’re an alcoholic or drug addict, that the addiction is just suppressing something. That a**hole is in there somewhere.”
Eric cleaned up his act, got sober and lived to tell the tale, invariably through his eloquent guitar playing. His influence can still be heard today. At the time of writing this, the musician is about to perform a rendition of
Layla on TV alongside longtime Clapton devotee and Perfect hitmaker Ed Sheeran, in whom he has taken an interest. The two sang together on Eric’s
I Will Be There last year.
Life in 12 Bars ends on an upbeat note. We join Eric, the contented husband
and father, larking around with “my soulmate” Melia McEnery (41) – his wife of 16 years – and their three daughters, Julie, Ella and Sophie. “I finally found the family I always wanted and always needed, and now here they are and I’m one of them. My life is completely full,” Eric says, revealing that the man we called God was only human after all.