Eric Clapton has recorded
a new single called Blue Eyes Blue, a gentle pop ditty composed by Diane
Warren, bespoke songwriter to the stars. It's released on Monday. "Is
it?" Clapton says, uncertainly. "Good."
Will it be a hit? "No," he says, emphatically.
"I don't think I've got that kind of following here."
He also has a "new" album in the shops called Clapton Chronicles - The Best
of Eric Clapton (Reprise), featuring the better-known songs from his recorded
repertoire since 1985. But is it really the best of Eric Clapton?
"No, of course not. Don't be ridiculous," he says.
"It's a way of marketing a couple of new songs that I've
written for film soundtracks by packaging them with some older songs. It's not
meant to be a serious study of my legacy."
It is rare to come across such frankness in the vainglorious world of rock'n'roll,
where every project is the biggest and most groundbreaking yet, and the safeguarding
of status and reputation is more precious than preservation of life and limb
itself. But Clapton is a man for whom the old priorities no longer hold sway.
"I was watching a TV show not long ago which listed the
100 most important records made. It was a long programme and it went all the
way through the hundred, and I wasn't in there. And I've had to accept that
I don't really have a very significant role in the history of music. If I can
live with that I can get a deal of contentment in my life. If I was to fight
against it - Where's my record? Don't these people know who I am? - I would
be in a state of anxiety pretty well all the time. Everyone's dust in the end."
Lest we forget, amid all this calm reasoning and rigorous self-effacement, Clapton
is probably the most important instrumentalist in the history of English pop.
In the 1960s, as a member of the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and
Cream, he elevated the role of guitarist from sideman to superman. In the 1970s
he wrote Layla, a rock classic which has endured alongside a raft of
other Clapton recordings - I Shot the Sheriff, Wonderful Tonight, Cocaine
and more - that make up a pillar of the mainstream rock heritage. And although
he may have grown old and unfashionable in the 1990s, it has been during this
decade that he has enjoyed his greatest commercial successes, firstly with Unplugged,
his bestselling album, and then with From the Cradle, an album of unreconstructed
blues songs which topped the charts in both Britain and America.
While doing all this he also contributed in no small part to establishing the
cliché of the rock star as both perpetrator and victim of extravagant
extremes of self-indulgence. Having carelessly shackled his charmed career to
the doomed lifestyle of a man perpetually drowning his sorrows in hard drugs
and alcohol, he should, by rights, have died years ago.
But Clapton didn't die. He reformed, and now follows a code of abstinence with
a quiet fervour that is little short of religious. "I've
always prayed, and now, at the end of the day, I'll get down on my knees and
say 'Thank you'. I ask to stay sober and to be of service in whatever it is
I'm supposed to be doing."
His conversion to this new faith of personal responsibility has taken him beyond
concern for his own wellbeing to the point where he is now dedicating large
chunks of his time, energy and money to projects designed to help others in
a similar plight.
There has never been a less anonymous member of Alcoholics Anonymous than Clapton,
although he now says that experience has taught him to play down the extent
of his involvement with the organisation. And he continues to work at and finance
the Crossroads Centre, the rehabilitation clinic which he established last year
on the Caribbean island of Antigua, recently donating another $5 million which
he raised from an auction of his guitars last summer.
Most extraordinary of all, he seems finally to have discovered a sense of humility.
"My life has evened out in the past five years, and that's
a lot to do with working towards a different set of goals," he says. "It's not
success-orientated. It's about doing something - like the treatment centre -
that has some kind of value in itself that's not to do with me. My legacy will
be in things like that, more than my music."
If the man who used to be known to his fans as "God" seems to have turned into
something of a saint, then it is easy to pinpoint his road-to-Damascus moment
of revelation. That came in March 1991, when his four-year-old son Conor fell
to his death from the window of his 53rd-storey home in New York.
"I was shaken to the roots," Clapton says, the lines on
his face etched starkly by the late afternoon light. "I had to change the way
I lived. I had to find out what I could do to help other people's lives, which
would in turn make mine more tolerable."
Such a soul-searching change in the direction and tempo of his life leads inevitably
to the question of whether Eric Clapton is now a musician or a professional
rehab person. He has given up his annual residency at the Albert Hall and cheerfully
admits that he now goes for weeks without even picking up a guitar. Earlier
this year he parted company with Roger Forrester, his manager of many years
- a split that couldn't symbolise more clearly Clapton's desire to break with
the working habits of the past. "I wanted to spend as much time as possible
working with recovering people. He wanted me to stay just being a musician."
It's a dilemma which is not easily resolved. The world may have gained another
wealthy benefactor and Clapton may have found some overdue peace of mind. But
in the meantime one of the greatest artists of his generation has quietly left
the building.
