A sentimental journey

"I’ve now got a young family to support so I’ve got to go out and make my living again," he says. The immediate reaction to this has to be ‘pull the other one, Eric’. Now 58, Clapton took his place on the ‘rich list’ of Britain’s 200 wealthiest citizens a decade ago and is one of the country’s 10 most affluent rock stars, in company such as Paul McCartney, Sting, Elton, Mick Jagger and Phil Collins. There’s little prospect of his two young daughters, three-year-old Julie Rose and one-year-old Emma May ever having to dress from the local thrift store.

And yet here he is about to take to the road again as a travelling salesman making his living, with a tour that opens in Glasgow and culminates in a week of dates at the Royal Albert Hall next month. Despite his protestations, he doesn’t have to do it. But his fans are clearly grateful that he does. Tickets sold out within an hour of going on sale. Last month his new album, Me & Mr Johnson, went straight into the Top Ten in its week of release.

It’s a record that finds him returning full circle to the music that first inspired him to pick up a guitar. Only the second all-blues album in his solo career, Me & Mr Johnson pays tribute to Robert Johnson, the legendary ‘King of the Delta Blues’, who sang of the hell-hound on his trail, reputedly sold his soul to the devil and was murdered by a jealous husband in a Mississippi juke joint, years before Clapton was even born.

Clapton has covered the Johnson songbook throughout his career, most famously in ‘Crossroads’, his barnstorming showstopper when he was in Cream more than 30 years ago. An entire album of Johnson’s spooky, doom-laden songs seems like a Grammy-winner that has just been waiting to happen.

What took him so long? "I’d always wanted to do it because I’ve been driven and influenced by him all my life. But I needed to become an old man first," Clapton says. "For years I never felt mature enough. I was intimidated. He’s always been the landmark I’ve navigated by whenever I’ve felt I’m going adrift."

Some might take a covers album to suggest that the songwriting skills of the man who penned ‘Layla’, ‘Wonderful Tonight’ and ‘Tears In Heaven’ have indeed gone adrift. Clapton began recording an album of his own compositions at the same time but eventually put the project on one side to concentrate on the blues songs. "I struggled writing about my present identity," he admits. "I spend two hours every morning with two babies. I give my energy to that and it has changed me incredibly. So it’s difficult for me to write anything that isn’t directly related to them. And it’s hard to figure out how to make that not too trite or sentimental."

Yet nobody could doubt Clapton’s qualifications to sing the blues. Today we may be sitting in the comfort of his elegant Georgian townhouse in Chelsea. But he’s survived trauma and tragedy in his career and personal life to arrive here.

On the surface, Clapton grew up in a safe and unexceptional suburban family in Surrey. Yet behind the lace curtains and gentility, his upbringing was anything but ordinary. His mother was 16 when he was born illegitimately and she soon gave him up for adoption to her own mother and step-father. Clapton was unaware of his real mother’s existence until she turned up again when he was about nine. To satisfy the mores of 1950s middle-class respectability, he was required to pass her off as his older sister.

This strange childhood always made him feel like an outsider and music and art were his dual forms of escape. By the end of the 1960s, he was one of the biggest rock stars on the planet, having graduated from the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to Cream and then to Blind Faith, the world’s first ‘supergroup’.

Yet by the early 1970s, it had all gone horribly wrong. He fell in love with Patti Boyd, the wife of his best friend, George Harrison. After writing ‘Layla’ as an expression of his then still unrequited love for her, he descended into heroin addiction. He spent three years sitting around his rock star mansion in Surrey taking narcotics and watching TV. Music lost its importance and he even sold some of his guitars to pay for his habit.

"I wasn’t interested at all," he says. "I was disillusioned and bitter and scared of the outside world and what people wanted from me."

His closet friends, such as Pete Townshend, feared he was about to follow Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison as the next rock’n’roll casualty. In an effort to help, Townshend set about organising a much-hyped ‘comeback’ concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1973.

"He was trying to save my life," Clapton says. "His motive was to get me to acknowledge I had some value and that people cared about me. But it had absolutely no effect on me. I continued to take those drugs and showed up and did the gig at the Rainbow and it meant absolutely nothing. I look back and I have feelings of remorse about that. I was responsible in that I had started taking the drug. But after that, the drug takes its own course."

He eventually took a cure in the mid-1970s. Not that it did much good. "As much as that was a success in helping with the withdrawal symptoms of heroin addiction, it didn’t treat the root cause - which is that I have an addictive personality. So I went straight on to hard liquor. From the devil to the deep blue sea."

He found that he could at least function while he was drinking and he returned successfully to making music. He spent the next dozen years making records and playing concerts in an alcoholic haze, drinking a bottle of brandy a day. "But it felt better, because with heroin I couldn’t leave the room. I’d take the phone of the hook and it would just be me and the TV," he says. "With alcohol, I could be very gregarious. I thought I’d woken up and come back to life. And in a way I had. But it was a weird life and eventually it led back to the same place."

Some ill-chosen and drunken comments in support of the repatriation policies of Enoch Powell in 1976 at the start of his first British tour in six years sullied his reputation and turned him into a hate figure in punk rock circles.Yet he refuses to blame the booze and remains surprisingly unrepentant. "There’s no way I could be a racist. It would make no sense," he insists. But he still says that his view on the matter "hasn’t changed" and believes that Powell was "outrageously brave" and misunderstood.

Yet by the 1980s, his career was on the slide for other reasons. When he recorded the album Behind The Sun in Montserrat in 1985, Warners rejected it as substandard and told him to try again. "They said it had no singles and no relevance to anything else that was out there and I needed to wake up and get with what’s going on," he recalls. It was a major blow to his ego. But after his manager told him the record company might drop him if he didn’t start selling some records again, he agreed to their demands and recut a far more overtly commercial album.

"Instead of getting arrogant and outraged, I did the shrewd thing," he claims. It heralded a new, more middle-of-the-road style that was not to the taste of many of his old blues friends. Clapton, too, is honest enough to admit to his own reservations. "It was the beginning of a very conflicting period for me. I felt like I was selling out," he concedes.

Around the same time, he finally quit drinking. He’d already had several health scares and been hospitalised. Yet he always slid back. This time it was more serious. "I needed a total internal collapse before I could stop," he recalls. "That moment they call ‘the grace of despair’. It came and in a flash of clarity I saw I was going to die. I didn’t want to die, so I picked up a phone and asked for help. Bob’s your uncle, I was in treatment."

That was in 1987 and although he still refers to himself as "an addict and an alcoholic", he hasn’t had a drink since. "That’s when I grabbed on to the notion of one day at a time and that’s been my programme ever since. Sixteen years of one day at a time."

Yet in his new-found sobriety there was worse to come. In March 1991, immediately after he had completed a record-breaking run of 24 nights at the Royal Albert Hall, Conor, his four-year-old son by the actress Lori Del Santo, fell to his death from the window of a 53rd floor apartment in Manhattan. Clapton was traumatised and the old Eric would have resorted to heroin or brandy. Instead he sought solace in the healing power of music and drew strength from his recent battles conquering the demons of his addiction.

"There’s a lot of shared grief in the fellowship of that recovery programme because there are a lot of people who have suffered extraordinary disasters and have not resorted to drugs or alcohol again," he says. "They lent a certain spiritual support that is hard to find anywhere else. There’s no reticence among people in recovery to confront these feelings because it’s part of what they have to do on a daily basis."

When he wasn’t sharing his pain with sympathetic fellow addicts in recovery, he cradled his guitar. "I knew intuitively that if I played it would medicate me and calm me. The biggest problem was that I didn’t know what to think or feel and I went into a numb zone, which is the body defending itself because madness beckons in these situations. The only way to keep myself afloat was to play, I had a guitar in my hands all day until I went to sleep."

Out of this therapy came some of his most moving songs, including ‘My Father’s Eyes’ and ‘Tears In Heaven’. "They just grew out of my hands. I didn’t stop them. I just played them over and over again. And it healed me and brought me back to life over a period of about a year," he recalls.

Once Clapton felt he was ready to face the world again, he decided to devote himself to voluntary work in a well-known rehabilitation centre. "The death of my son brought home to me how magnificent it was to be able to stay sober and journey through something like that. I’d sit in rooms and talk to other people in recovery and say, ‘I’m OK. I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs and I’m quite happy. I know that’s hard to believe given what has just happened. But you can take it from me and this is how it happens’.

"That gave me a good deal of self-esteem and self-respect. It made me realise I had something to give that had come out of my experience that could help other people, outside of music."

He also built his own rehabilitation centre in Antigua, called Crossroads, a project that led to him losing his manager of many years standing, who resigned in protest. "He thought it would swallow up all my time and money and maybe my career, too," Clapton says. "I felt abandoned and very scared. But sharing my recovery with other people had given me a strength and I felt I had to honour my commitment. I set myself the goal of building the place and thinking if I can just get one person sober then I will have done something worthwhile."

The centre is now up and running and can list many success stories. Clapton, too, is grateful for another chance of happiness with his young family, enjoying a contentment he has seldom known in his life. "It’s one of my character defects that the best party is always down the road. When I get what I want, I just don’t want it any more. I’m getting a lot better now. But it’s marked my whole career," he admits.

Perhaps it is because of, rather than despite, this restless attitude and his often troubled life that he has made so much memorable music. It’s a mighty legacy. With John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers he recorded the album that defined the 1960s British blues boom. As part of Cream he invented heavy rock and the power trio. He was one of the first white musicians to embrace reggae when he recorded Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot The Sheriff’. And he has blossomed as a songwriter to pen such modern classics as ‘Layla’, ‘Wonderful Tonight’ and ‘Tears In Heaven’.

Now he’s back where he started, singing and playing the blues. What gave a white middle-class boy from the leafy suburbs of post-war Surrey such an affinity with the music of poor, black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta in the early decades of the last century remains a mystery. Not least to Clapton.

"On occasions in the past I’ve said it was something in my soul that recognised the sadness of the music," he says. "Yet I don’t think that can be true because I equally identify with a lot of classical music. But I think there was something about the solo bluesman and the knowledge that this guy was probably uneducated and a self-taught musician and was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. I saw something of real value in that. I still don’t really know why. I’d like to say it was something to do with my upbringing. But it would be very hard to find a tangible cause."

Yet whatever the explanation, there is no doubt Clapton’s feel for the blues is profound and genuine. When he walked out on the Yardbirds in 1965, he claimed he’d quit because he wanted to play "pure, sincere and uncorrupted music". Over the years he admits he has at times strayed from that lofty ideal. "But at heart I still feel that way."

Me and Mr Johnson is available now. Eric Clapton plays SECC, Glasgow, on April 26