It is hard to believe that the first book to spill the beans on Eric Clapton should arrive more than 40 years after the graffitied legend “Clapton is God” announced his appointment as one of the original stars of rock.

The ups and downs of Clapton’s life since have provided a bonanza for the gossip pages. The aristocratic 1960s girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore, who eventually died of an overdose; the successful pursuit of Pattie Boyd, the wife of his best friend George Harrison; the serial drink, drug and sex addictions; the surprise on-stage endorsement of the immigration policies of Enoch Powell; the fatal plunge from a New York apartment of his four-and-a-half-year-old son Conor; the discovery of the identity of the dead father he never knew – for services to the tabloid media, as much as to music, Clapton has earned that CBE.

So where are the books? There have been a few scrappy cuttings jobs, but the only writer to try to make sense of the chaotic drama up to now has been the veteran pop hack Ray Coleman. His 1985 book, Survivor, did what it said on the cover, but could neither nail a life which at that point was still in its boozy womanising phase, nor plumb the motivations of an unusually complicated character.

Whereas most rock stars are fairly ordinary people purporting to be special, or perhaps a teeny bit mad, Clapton is the opposite. He has spent most of his 62 years covering up and, through his music, creatively manipulating a sense of profound otherness. Unlike most of the white boys who took up the blues in the 1960s out of a sense of excitement and curiosity, Clapton felt a direct affinity that derived from his being born illegitimate at a time when such matters were the object of shame and concealment.

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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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• Find out more about Pattie Boyd in our special feature

At the start of his autobiography Clapton movingly describes overhearing, aged seven, his aunt ask the woman he believed to be his mother (but who was, in fact, his grandmother), “Have you heard from his mum?” The mystery as to whom Rose Clapton had been consorting with before she emigrated to Canada has never been conclusively solved, and, along with the subterfuge with the grandparents, it left her sensitive, firstborn son feeling like a stranger to himself.

In Clapton’s telling, this early sense of alienation has its upside: when he encountered Hellhound on My Trail by the great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, it “seemed to echo things I had always felt”, and he was off. The downside entailed a perpetual restlessness and self-distrust. After he eventually acquired an electric guitar, for which he had saved for months, “I suddenly didn’t want it any more.” This, he notes with unblinking candour, “was a phenomenon which was to rear its head throughout my life.”

The principal victims of the phenomenon have been women. No sooner had he finally dislodged Pattie Boyd from her marriage to Beatle George and installed her in Hurtwood Edge, his baronial pad in the Surrey rockbroker belt, than he was back on the road “having one-night stands and behaving outrageously with any woman who happened to come my way”. The affair with Lori del Santo, an Italian actress, which resulted in the birth of Conor, began straight after Clapton had persuaded Pattie to give their marriage one last chance.

Unlike his ex-wife’s recent autobiography, which glosses over uncomfortable or unflattering memories, Clapton’s account is packed with them. The early musical moves are handled in depth, but as his career skyrockets he prefers to dwell on the drink and drug binges that led to car crashes, fishing accidents and perforated ulcers. He repents the callous dismissal of loyal band members, and owns up to the emotional blockage which meant that for many years his manager Roger Forrester was “the most important person in my life”.

The sense that Clapton is speaking out here with the practised self-effacement of a long-term member of both Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous can become wearing as he obsesses, victim-like, about his tendency “only to choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done, all those years ago”.

How nice for the beta male reader, though, that a man with so much to brag about – not least a fleet of Ferraris and, at last, a happy marriage with three adorable children – chooses to down-play his A-list conquests. There is no mention of Naomi Campbell, Marie Helvin and the rest. Instead, Clapton confides at length his dismay after Carla, a 21-year-old Italian he identifies as “the love of my life”, jumps for Mick Jagger instead. It is a pity that more autobiographers don’t have Clapton’s grounding in the blues.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Eric Clapton
Century £20 pp392

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