"No more tequila for me boy,” I wrote in my diary on November 28, 1978. “Woke up with all the clobber on – I am in love again and it hurts.”

The woman in question was a young girl called Jenny McLean, and the unforgivable thing I did was to allow Nell – as I called Pattie Boyd, my girlfriend - to catch us together at Hurtwood, my Surrey home. She left the house in floods of tears, having packed her bags and phoned her sister to come and collect her.

Roger Forrester, my personal manager, saved the day for me and Nell. He told me I should be discreet in my meetings with Jenny or it would be all over the papers. I ended up drunkenly betting him the ridiculous sum of £10,000 that he couldn’t get my picture in the papers.

The following morning, to my amazement and horror, Nigel Dempster’s column in the Daily Mail announced: “Rock star Eric Clapton will marry Pattie Boyd.”

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BACKGROUND

• I’ve hit rock bottom

• Tears in heaven

• The Autobiography by Eric Clapton

• Living in the shadow of a missing mother

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When I’d calmed down a bit, Roger asked me if it wasn’t time to decide whether I wanted to stay with Nell or break with her for ever. “How do I get her back?” I replied. He said she wouldn’t have seen the story yet, as she was in LA, so I should call her and ask her to marry me.

I swore to her that I had given up Jenny, and proposed. She burst into tears and accepted.

But, however much I might have thought I loved Pattie at the time, the truth is that the only thing I couldn’t live without was alcohol. This really made my need or ability to commit to anything, even marriage, pretty inconsequential.

Over the next two years, my drinking brought me to rock bottom. I was drinking at least two bottles a day of anything I could get my hands on. My normal day became just sitting in front of the TV, and responding very aggressively to anybody who came to the door or who wanted me to do any work. I just wanted to stay at home and get drunk, with Pattie as a slave-cum-partner.

I was drinking copious amounts of Special Brew, which I was secretly topping up with vodka. Then I would take coke on top of this, which was the only point at which Pattie would join in with me, as she liked to do cocaine without the booze.

It wasn’t long before she was having to tell people not to offer me drinks if we were out. I was hiding booze everywhere, smuggling it in and out and concealing it in places I thought no one would look. I’d usually, for example, have a half bottle of vodka underneath the mat where the pedals are in the car.

Roger warned me repeatedly: “You’re an alcoholic.” Of course, I refused to accept it.

Pattie and I had lots of people staying at Hurtwood for Christmas 1981 – close friends and family of all ages. I had asked Santa for some special thermal underwear for fishing, and on Christmas Eve, after everyone was asleep, I decided to open my presents. There I was, blind drunk, in the middle of the night, sitting under the tree opening parcels, the kind of thing I would have done when I was five.

I found my precious bright green thermal underwear and put it on and went wandering. When I came to, hours later, I was lying in the cellar in my new thermals, looking like Kermit the Frog, with torches shining in my face. It was Christmas morning. I was laughing and crying at the same time. I remember seeing fear in their eyes.

Pattie put me to bed, saying: “We’re going to enjoy Christmas without you.” She left the room, locking the door behind her.

Early in the morning a few days later, wearing my new thermal underwear, I crept out of the house to go fishing on the River Wey. I had some new equipment, including two rods.

On the opposite bank were a couple of professional fishermen, with a tent and everything beautifully laid out. They were watching me. I was drunk, and I had just about managed to get my gear set up when I lost my balance and fell onto one of the new rods, breaking it clean off at the handle. I saw the fishermen look away in embarrassment.

That was it for me. The last vestige of my self-respect had been ripped away. Being a good fisherman was the one place where I still had some self-esteem. I called Roger and told him: “You’re right. I’m in trouble. I need help.”

He had already booked me into Hazelden, a clinic in Minnesota that was said to be the best treatment centre for alcoholics in the world. On the flight over with him, I drank the plane dry, so terrified was I that I might never be able to drink again.

In the lowest moments of my life, the only reason that I didn’t commit suicide was the fact that I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink any more if I was dead. It was the only thing that I thought was worth living for, and the idea that people were about to try to remove me from alcohol was really terrible. I drank and drank and drank, and they had to practically carry me into the clinic.

AMONG the hardest things I had to face on my return - apart from not knowing what to do with all the time I used to spend drinking - was attempting to reenter my relationship with Pattie.

I came back with no real idea of how to open the door of intimacy again. It had been so long since I had done anything without booze, I just didn’t know where to start. It was heartbreaking, for both of us. Pattie had been so looking forward to having this clean young man coming home to her, and here I was, partially broken, like a Vietnam vet. I would go to bed with her, and just curl up beside her in the foetal position. I was ashamed and didn’t want to talk about it, because for me, the foundations of our relationship had been built on sex, and I’d just assumed that it would all just fall into place the minute I got home.

I started to blame Pattie for everything. Hadn’t I got sober forher? Where was her gratitude? That was how I was beginning to think. She, meanwhile, was perfectly capable of drinking wine and doing coke in moderation, and, to a certain extent, wanted to carry on with our old life-style, and who could blame her?

I had to practise abstinence, and for me sobriety was becoming a drudge. I missed drinking and was jealous of her for being able to do all that stuff in moderation. I had not really accepted the truth about myself.

The cracks in our relationship caused me to withdraw into myself. I began to spend a lot of time fishing. For the first time in a long time, I was doing something very normal and fairly mundane, and it was really important to me. The fact that it increased Pattie’s sense of isolation passed me by.

Believing that work would also be one of my greatest therapies, I went on tour. The first time I stood on stage, I thought to myself: “This sounds awful.” Like my problem with sex, I hadn’t played sober for a long time and had been used to hearing everything through a veil of alcohol and drug distortion.

<p>Roger suggested a collaboration with Phil Collins, a good friend. I told Phil I had a few new songs, and we decided to go and work on them in George Martin’s Air Studios in Montserrat. We were soon having a great time there. Only one thing jarred: there seemed to be some kind of conspiracy to keep me from knowing that all the guys were boozing and doing a lot of blow. It was as if they didn’t trust me to be able to deal with it. I became very angry.

“Somebody’s been holding out on me,” I told them. “I’m not a kid. I want to know everything that’s going on.” But they just kind of shouted at me in a jokey way and said: “But you don’t do it any more!”

Soon after this row, I went to a club on the far side of the island where I convinced everybody it would be all right for me to have a couple of drinks. I then went back to my chalet and polished off a bottle of rum in one sitting.

As a celebration, the next day I set about seducing the manageress of the studio, Yvonne Kelly, a beautiful lady from Doncaster whose father was a Montserratian guitar player. She was witty and funny, a dark-haired flirta-tious beauty who seemed to be interested, and next thing I knew we were embarked on a passionate and reckless affair, taking no precautions whatsoever.

Like the drinking, my rationale was: “Nobody will know, we’re miles away from anywhere.” At the same time, it’s as if I wanted to get caught doing something that would rock the domestic boat at home. My disillusionment with my marriage was touched on in some of the songs I had written like She’s Waiting, Just Like a Prisoner and Same Old Blues, all very personal numbers about the relationship between me and Pattie.

On my return home, I hid my relapse by not drinking. Fishing helped to keep me calm, but one evening as I was driving home from the river I saw a pub. It was just getting dark and I could see through the windows a throng of people drinking and having fun. I had no resistance.

My selective memory of what drinking was like told me that standing at the bar in a pub, on a summer’s evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.

Suddenly I was at the bar ordering a beer. It would be another five years before I at last stopped drinking. By then my life with Pattie had long since crumbled away.

© Eric Clapton 2007

Extracted from Eric Clapton: The Autobiography, by Eric Clapton with Christopher Simon Sykes, to be published by Century on October 9 at £20. It can be purchased for £18 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585. Click here to buy it

Hear an iTunes audio clip extracted from the Random House Audiobooks edition of “Eric Clapton: The Autobiography” by Eric Clapton with Christopher Simon Sykes © Eric Clapton 2007. Click here to buy the audiobook

Read by Bill Nighy © Random House Audiobooks

Complete Clapton, the definitive collection, is out now to download

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