Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
ERIC CLAPTON: MY LIFE IN 12 BARS
Cert 15 Running time 128 minutes ★★
Wallow in the blues with this music documentary, which exhaustively covers the career of noodling guitar hero Eric ‘slowhand’ Clapton.
Technically accomplished, humourless, introverted and rife with musical snobbery, it’s an overlong riff on his life.
Following a blissful childhood in Surrey, the axe man popularised blues music for a white mass audience.
Filled with family photos and home videos, it frames his life as an X Factor-style journey of redemption following his struggles with drug addiction, alcoholism and unpleasant political posturing.
The entire middle section is spent justifying his pursuit of Patti Boyd, for whom he wrote his signature tune, Layla. She was at the time the wife of his friend and neighbour George Harrison.
Bringing The Beatles to a music doc is like introducing a gun to a knife fight, and even in his own film Clapton plays second fiddle to the Fab Four. Far from being Wonderful Tonight, this is one for the completists.