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London in 1967 was buzzing – an extraordinary melting pot of fashion, music, art and intellect. I lived on the top floor of the Pheasantry in the King’s Road. George Harrison used to drop by on the way home. Sometimes we’d play together and take acid, and bit by bit a friendship began to form.

I was a member of Cream, the shortlived band described as the first “supergroup” – that dreaded word. Soon after our farewell performance Ginger Baker, our drummer, warned me I was on “Pilcher’s List”.

Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher was a notorious London copper who had busted a number of famous rock stars including George, John Lennon, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. Ginger heard on the grapevine that if I got out of town, Pilcher wouldn’t bother me.

For the first time in my life I had some money, and I realised I could buy a house. I wanted to be near Ripley, the Surrey village where I had spent my boyhood.Looking through Country Life I saw what looked like an Italian villa, surrounded by woodland. It was called Hurtwood Edge, and it cost me £30,000, by far the biggest amount of money I had ever heard of.

George and his wife Pattie lived about half an hour’s drive away. We started to hang out a lot together. I remember them indulging in a bit of matchmaking, trying to get me off with different pretty ladies. I wasn’t really interested, because something unexpected was happening. I was falling in love with Pattie. I think initially I was motivated by a mixture of lust and envy, but it all changed once I got to know her.

I had first set eyes on her after a Cream concert, and had thought then that she was unusually beautiful. It wasn’t just the way she looked, although she was definitely the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. It was deeper. It came from within her too. It was her entire being, and the way she carried herself, that captivated me. I had never met a woman who was so complete, and I was overwhelmed. I realised I would have to stop seeing her and George or give in to my emotions and tell her how I felt.

I also coveted Pattie because she belonged to a powerful man who seemed to have everything I wanted: amazing cars, an incredible career and a beautiful wife. This was not an emotion that was new to me. I remember that when my mum came home from Canada with her new family – she was an unmarried teenager when I was born in 1945, and had gone there to start a new life – I wanted my half-brother’s toys because they seemed more expensive and better than mine. It was a feeling that had never gone away, and it was definitely part of the way I felt toward Pattie; but for the time being I kept all these emotions strictly under lock and key.

Another extraordinary girl came into my life: Alice Ormsby-Gore. She was barely 16 and hauntingly beautiful, with thick curly brown hair and huge eyes.

At around this time in London there was a group of people who could be best described as aristocratic hippies, members of the upper classes who had dropped out and were living a kind of gipsy life. Among them were Jane, Julian and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, the older children of David Harlech, who had been British ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy era. Alice was their little sister.

She had an enigmatic smile and an infectious giggle. I thought she was astonishing, but though I was very taken with her it never occurred to me then that anything could come from it. The age gap seemed enormous – I was 24 – and she seemed very fragile and slightly other-worldly.

David Mlinaric, the interior designer who had been working on Hurtwood for me, brought her down to the house. She asked me to go to a party in London with her, which kind of surprised me. I went and she ignored me all evening.

For some reason, in spite of myself, for we didn’t seem remotely compatible, I found her compelling. With her wistful quality and Arabic clothes, she seemed to have stepped straight out of a fairy story. I have no idea what she saw in me; maybe it was because I was an outsider to her group, and she saw me as a means to spite them. After a few days of clumsy courting she moved in with me, and the madness began.

From the beginning it was a very stiff, uncomfortable situation. I wasn’t in love with Alice; my heart, and a good deal of everything else, being with Pattie. I also felt very ill at ease about the age difference, especially since she had told me she was still a virgin. In fact sex played very little part in our lives. We were more like brother and sister, although I was hoping that eventually it would blossom into a normal relationship.

Something extraordinary struck me later on. When I was a kid my friend Guy and I would fall about laughing over the most ridiculous names we could think of, and the silliest we came up with was Ormsby-Gore. When things began to go badly wrong between me and Alice, I had a terrible fear that getting attached to an upper-class girl like her was part of a childhood resentment, connected to my feelings about my mother, to bring down women, and that deep inside I was thinking, “Here’s an Ormsby-Gore, and I’m going to make her suffer.”

It was always something of an on/off affair, mostly because of my continuing obsession with Pattie. However hard I tried, I could not get her out of my mind. Even though I didn’t consider I really had any chance of ever being with her, I still thought of all other affairs with women as being merely temporary.

I was totally distracted by the idea that I could never love another woman as much as I loved Pattie. In fact, to get closer to her, I even took up with her sister Paula.

George and I were both playing at Liverpool Empire, and Pattie showed up with Paula. George, who was motivated just as much by the flesh as he was by the spirit, took me aside and suggested that I should spend the night with Pattie so that he could sleep with Paula. The suggestion didn’t shock me, because the prevailing morality of the time was that you just went for whatever you could get; but at the last moment he lost his nerve and nothing happened. I ended up spending the night with Paula.

In the spring of 1970, Alice and I had a bust-up and she went off to Glin, her Welsh family home. In her absence Paula, a surrogate Pattie, moved into Hurtwood. It was a stopgap relationship, and I think we both knew that; but she reminded me a lot of Pattie, and for the moment I had no qualms about that.

George was a frequent caller. He had recently moved to a mansion in Henley called Friar Park, and his visits gave me plenty of opportunity to flirt with Pattie behind Paula’s back. One night I called her up and told her it was her I really wanted.

In spite of her protests that she was married to George and that what I was suggesting was impossible, she agreed to me coming over to talk to her. I drove over there, and we talked about it over a bottle of red wine, and ended up kissing. I sensed for the first time that there was some kind of hope for me. I knew then what I had suspected for some time, that all was not well in her marriage.

I began to get into the habit of dropping into Friar Park in the hope that George might be away and I might catch a few moments with Pattie. One evening I went over there and found the two of them together with John Hurt, the actor. I was slightly taken aback, but George took over the situation. He gave me a guitar and we started playing.

There was a roaring fire going, candles burning, and, as the intensity of our playing increased, John sat there with a rapturous look on his face as if he was privy to some fantastic meeting of the giants, or a battle of the sorcerers. With his actor’s imagination, I could see him creating this scenario that we were engaged in a musical duel for Pattie, who wafted in from time to time bringing us tea and cakes. The truth is we were just jamming, although the mythical rumour of that night may have passed around a few din-ing-room tables.

George was working on his first solo album, All Things Must Pass, and he asked if I would play on it. Phil Spector was producing for him. I thought he was a really sweet guy, but the rumour was that he carried a gun, so I was a little bit wary. Most of the time he was hilariously funny.

There were a lot of drugs around, and I think this was when heroin first came into my life. There was a particular dealer whose deal was that you could buy as much coke as you wanted on condition you took a certain amount of smack at the same time. I would snort the coke and store all the smack in the drawer of an antique desk at Hurtwood.

Around this time I had a weird meeting with a legendary figure called Dr John. He’s a wonderful man and an incredible musician. Whether or not he really was a practising voodoo doctor I don’t know, but for my own purposes, at that time, I chose to believe he was. I told him I I needed a remedy.

“What kind of remedy?” “A love potion.” I told him I was in love with the wife of another man, and that she was no longer happy with him but wouldn’t leave him. He gave me a little box of woven straw and instructions as to what to do with it. I’ve forgotten them but I do remember that I did exactly as I was told.

A few weeks later, purely by chance, or so it seemed, I ran into Pattie and we just kind of collided, to the point where there was no turning back. A little while later I saw George at a party and blurted out to him, “I’m in love with your wife.”

The ensuing conversation bordered on the absurd. Although I think he was deeply hurt, I could see that in his eyes he preferred to make light of it, turning it into a Monty Python situation. In a way I think he was relieved, because I’m sure he knew what had been going on and now I was finally owning up.

This was the beginning of a semi-clandestine affair with Pattie. But however much I tried to persuade her, it was quite clear that she had no intention of leaving George.

Tormented by my feelings, I threw myself into working with my new band, Derek and the Dominos. All the songs I wrote for the Dominos’ first album are really about her and our relationship. Layla was the key song and was a conscious attempt to speak to her about the fact that she was holding off and wouldn’t move in with me: “What’ll you do when you get lonely?”

I had convinced myself that when she heard the completed Layla album, with all its references to our situation, she would be so overcome by my cry of love that she would finally leave George and come away with me for good. So I called her up one afternoon and asked her if she’d like to come over for tea and listen to the new record. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

I blindly kept on trying, but I was getting nowhere. Until one day, after another session of fruitless pleading, I told her that if she didn’t leave him I would start taking heroin full time. She smiled sadly at me, and I knew the game was over. It was the start of my lost years.

In truth, I had been taking heroin almost full time for quite a while. Threatening Pattie was all bluff and had nothing to do with me actually becoming addicted. It just doesn’t work that way. I have known and met many people who took just as many drugs and drank just as much booze as I did, but who never became addicted to anything. It’s a mysterious phenomenon.

Besides that, I would never have deliberately set about going down this road, because since my days with Cream I had had a healthy regard for the perils of smack. Over the years, on and off, Ginger Baker had had sporadic clashes with heroin. He would go through periods when he was using, then he would be clean for a while. He often lectured me like an older brother, threatening that if he ever found out I was using heroin he would have my balls, and I believed him. When I first met him I had been rather frightened of him because he was an angry-looking guy who gave the impression that he would take anybody on. In truth, Ginger is a very shy and gentle man, thoughtful and full of compassion.

I assumed I was in some way immune to heroin and that I wouldn’t get hooked. But addiction doesn’t negotiate, and it gradually crept up on me, like a fog. For a year or so I thoroughly enjoyed it, taking it pretty infrequently while indulging in lots of coke and other drugs as well as drinking. Then suddenly, from taking it every two weeks, it was once, twice or three times a week, then once a day. It took over my life without my really noticing.

All the time I was taking heroin I thought I knew exactly what I was doing. In no way was I the helpless victim. I did it mostly because I loved the high, but on reflection also partly to forget both the pain of my unrequited love for Pattie and the recent death of my grandfather (who with my grandmother had brought me up).

The first time I realised I was completely hooked was when I had promised Alice that I would drive up to see her in Wales. It suddenly occurred to me that driving stoned 200 miles in a Ferrari would be impossible. I told her I would come in about three days, because I knew that was the amount of time it would take to come off the drug.

I remember the first 24 hours of cold turkey as being absolute hell. Every nerve and muscle in my body went into cramp spasms, I curled up and howled with agony. And the worst thing was that being drug-free and clean felt terrible. My skin felt raw, and my nerves were stood on end. I couldn’t wait to take some more, to slip back into comfort. I kept my promise to Alice, but from then on my frequency of using began to increase again, and I didn’t come off very often. It was just too difficult and painful.

Alice came back to live with me, and she started using too and took the role as the runner, going to score for us. It never crossed my mind it was wrong to bring her into my nightmare; my logic determined that if you wanted in, you were in, simple as that.

In the summer of 1971, over a year into my self-imposed exile, George called me one day to ask if I’d fly to New York to play in a show to raise money for the victims of the Bangladesh famine. He was only too aware of my drug problems and may have seen this as some kind of rescue mission. I told him I could only go if he could guarantee that they could keep me supplied.

The journey got off to a very bad start. When Alice and I got to the airport, Pattie was there to see me off. It was wonderful and disastrous all at the same time. Alice was furious, and came to the conclusion that I was secretly still seeing Pattie, which wasn’t true, but who could blame her for thinking that?

There was a good supply of stuff waiting in my hotel room when I reached New York, but it was street-cut – about a tenth as strong as I was used to. The result was that I went into cold turkey for the first two or three days and missed all the rehearsals. I just lay on the bed in our hotel room, shaking and mumbling like a madman, while Alice ran around town tirelessly trying to find me the real thing. I have a vague memory of playing the show, but I wasn’t really there.

When we returned home, we retreated to Hurtwood and closed the door. For a long time I didn’t go out at all, leaving Alice to do all the shopping and cooking and, more importantly, the scoring.

The best heroin looked like brown sugar. It was in little nuggets, which had the colour and consistency of rock candy, and it came in clear plastic bags with a red paper label that had Chinese writing and a little white elephant on it. We’d get a pestle and mortar and grind it up, and we’d be left with about an ounce of the stuff, which ought to have lasted us about a week. But we were wasteful junkies and chose to snort it like you snort cocaine rather than inject it.

I was terrified of needles, a fear that went back to primary school. Without warning we had all been herded up from the classroom for our diphtheria jabs. It was frightening and painful, and I can remember the smell of the chemicals they were cooking the needles in. As a result I have never injected drugs, and for that I am very, very grateful. But that meant we got through about five or 10 times what a person injecting would use. Not only that, but within minutes of taking our initial snort I would think, “I need some more”, and top up, even though the effect of what I had originally snorted would have lasted at least another five or six hours. It was a very expensive way of getting stoned.

During those lost years I scarcely saw my family. I was no support to my grandmother, who was deep in mourning for my grandfather, and who certainly must have known that something was going on even if she wasn’t aware that it was drugs. I later learnt that she had decided to stand back, hoping and praying that whatever was wrong would eventually run its course and everything come out all right in the end.

The phone went unanswered and I avoided even my oldest friends. The front gates of Hurtwood were open, so from time to time people would visit me, knock on the door and then leave when there was no reply. One friend drove down all the way from Wales, but I hid upstairs and watched him from the top window, waiting for him to go away. Ginger came once with a plan to kidnap me and take me off to the Sahara in his Land Rover, reasoning that that was one place where I really wouldn’t be able to score.

Inside, I would sleep most of the day and get up in the late afternoon. I played the guitar for hours, recording songs on to cassettes, most of them pretty dreadful. I also drew a lot. My only other pastime was making model aeroplanes and cars.

One of the few people I did see was Pete Townshend who, during a rare period of my wanting to work, I had asked over to help me finish off some tracks I had recorded with Derek and the Dominos. By the time he arrived I had lost interest in the project and in an effort to explain my total inertia I confessed I had a problem. I was horrified when he told me that he had known for sometime. It turned out that he had been to the house several times to talk to Alice. I felt embarrassed when he told me he was keen to help me, because I’d begun to hate myself for dragging Alice down with me.

Pete told me he and Alice’s father had devised a plan to help me get back on my feet: a comeback concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London, as part of Fanfare for Europe, celebrating Britain’s entry into the Common Market. On the night of the show, January 13, 1973, Alice had to let out the waist of my white suit because I had taken to eating so much chocolate that I couldn’t get the trousers on any more. Alice and I, stoned out of our heads, turned up late to find Pete tearing his hair out.

The welcome I was given by the audience was very moving, but afterwards I went back into hiding and sank to new lows, with Alice following close behind. I was soon taking vast quantities of heroin every day, and my cravings had become so powerful that Alice was giving me virtually everything that she was able to score, compensating for the heroin she was missing by drinking neat vodka, up to two bottles a day.

She too had now become a recluse, unwilling to connect with anyone who was going to obstruct us in what we were up to. The doors remained closed. The post went unopened, and we existed on a diet that consisted for the most part of chocolate and junk food. I soon became not only overweight, but spotty and unfit. Heroin completely took away my libido, and I became chronically constipated.

The cost of our lifestyle was not just high in human terms, it was beginning to cripple me financially. Each week I was spending about £1,000 on heroin, the equivalent of £8,000 today. For a while I managed to hide this from Robert Stigwood, my manager, but eventually I received a message from his office that funds were running low and I would soon have to start selling things to pay for my habit.

If that gave me something to think about, then so did a letter from Alice’s father in which he told me in no uncertain terms that he was quite happy to turn us both over to the police if I wasn’t prepared to stop what I was doing to myself and, more importantly, to his daughter.

“I love you both so much,” he wrote, “that I cannot bear to see what you are doing to yourselves.”

David Harlech was an extraordinary figure – tall, with a prominent nose and a rather languid voice. From the moment I had first met him we had got on very well, and my relationship with him was loving and respectful. He was very understanding and became a kind of stepfather to me. All of which served to heighten my sense of shame about what was going on between me and his daughter.

I knew deep down that I was inflicting serious damage on an unsuspecting innocent, somebody that I had no right to meddle with. I realised that I had to put the brakes on, if not for my sake, then for hers.

David had come across an extraordinary woman called Dr Meg Patterson, a Scottish neurosurgeon who had worked for years in Hong Kong, where she had developed a method of treating opiate withdrawal symptoms with “neuroelectric therapy”. She had recently set up a clinic in Harley Street with her husband George. Their cure was a form of acupuncture, using a small black box with wires radiating out of it, attached to small clips holding tiny needles that were applied to various points within the ear.

Alice and I had to live apart for our treatment. I did make a kind of recovery, and I believe that Meg and George did the best they could. But it wasn’t enough.

Their idea of rehabilitation, planned with the help of David, was to send me to live on the Ormsby-Gore farm outside Oswestry, Shropshire, run by his youngest son Frank. The idea was that I should get physically well and sort myself out. The reality was I simply traded one substance for another.

I was soon up at dawn, working like a maniac, baling hay, chopping logs, sawing trees and mucking out the cows. It was the kind of manual labour I hadn’t done since working with my grandfather on a building site, and I really loved it.

Around five or six o’clock we’d hit the pubs, where we’d drink until we could hardly stand up. Sometimes we’d make complete arses of ourselves, but we were doing it in public, and after the reclusive way I’d been living that seemed healthy. Then we’d go back to the cottage and Frank would fix us some dinner, and we’d drink some more.

As my senses began to come back to life, so did thoughts of Pattie. They were rekindled when she and George turned up, quite out of the blue, to see how I was getting on. I got the impression that she was looking at me with more than just friendly concern. All the old feelings came flooding back.

I made the painful decision to split with Alice for good. There was nothing left in that relationship but dependence. Now my thoughts were only of Pattie. THROUGHOUT the course of my addiction, Robert Stigwood had always had faith I would come through. Now he had a studio ready in Miami for me to make a record if I wanted to. One of the musicians he brought in was Yvonne Elliman, a brilliant young singer who had played Mary Magdalene in the movie of Jesus Christ Superstar. Of Irish and Hawaiian descent, she was incredibly pretty and exotic-looking, with long dark hair. Since I had had virtually no sex life in the past few years, it is not hard to imagine what happened.

Yvonne and I fell in lust with each other and were soon enjoying a passionate affair. But after a month I returned to England to make another move towards Pattie. I knew through go-betweens that she and George were living in virtual open warfare, but the general advice from my friends was “Bide your time and she’ll leave him.”

One night I suddenly had this urge to go and see her. I managed to persuade Pete Townshend to drive me down to Henley under the pretext that George was very keen to meet him. When we got there, George took Pete into his studio while I spent the time canoodling with Pattie and trying to talk her into finally leaving. She still did not make a decision, but it turned out to have been a seminal moment in our relationship.

The album I had made in Miami – 461 Ocean Boulevard – led to a tour of America in mid1974. I was drunk most of the time and having fun, fooling around and playing with the guys. I drank round the clock, and it didn’t matter to me whether or not there was a show that night, because I was always convinced that I could handle it. There were many times when I couldn’t.

I’d wander off the stage and somebody would have to try to persuade me to go back on. There seemed to be a postpsychedelia drunkenness that swept over everybody in the entertainment business during the early Seventies. To be on stage, you were almost expected to be drunk. I remember doing one entire show lying down on the stage with the microphone stand lying beside me, and nobody batted an eyelid.

Stigwood appointed someone to look after me full time – Roger Forrester, a sharp, humorous northerner with big, tinted glasses, natty suits, kipper ties and a combover haircut. He became my enabler, making sure I had everything that I wanted, playing the party animal and making me laugh. I began to look upon him as a father figure.

Roger’s coup was to produce Pattie while I was touring America. He heard that she had at last left George and gone to stay in LA with her sister Jenny. He suggested I call her up and get her to come and join me on the tour. I summoned up the courage, and she said yes.

She joined us in Buffalo where we were playing to a crowd of 45,000. It was not an auspicious start. I was almost blind from a severe bout of conjunctivitis, caught from Yvonne Elliman, with whom I was still carrying on, and so drunk from nerves that I managed to crash into a huge potted plant on the stage. But that night, when I played Have You Ever Loved a Woman?, the words had a very special meaning.

My relationship with Pattie, now that we could actually be together, was not the incredibly romantic affair that it has been portrayed as being. Rather than being a mature, grounded relationship, it was built on drunken forays into the unknown.

With what I know now about my condition, I don’t know if we ever really had a chance for anything better, even if we had got together earlier, because there was always going to be my addiction in the way. We were having a lot of fun, and we were really in love with each other; but we were on the road. Although it was great to be together without having to hide, reality would have to be faced sooner or later.

© 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

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A girl at every gig

There were girls everywhere when I was touring Britain in the early days, which meant I was having a pretty extraordinary sex life, dating and picking up anyone I could get my hands on. Most of the time it was just innocent groping, and only rarely did it go all the way.

You hardly ever had a dressing room, like bands do today. You just got on and off the stage from the audience. There might be someone I’d met while I was walking about before the show or someone I’d noticed while I was on stage, and I’d just get talking to them and go off with them. I remember there was a particular girl that I’d always meet in Basingstoke. The band would do two sets, with a half hour interval, and I’d meet this girl after the first set and go off with her somewhere backstage, and come back on stage with the knees of my jeans covered in dust from the floor.

This was quite normal, part of the geography of touring being which girls were where; Bishop’s Stortford, Sheffield, Windsor, Birmingham . . . for us it wasn’t a girl in every port, it was a girl at every gig, and the girls themselves seemed to be quite happy to have that kind of relationship, seeing me only occasionally. I can’t say I blame them.

Going to Newcastle then was, for me, like going to New York. It seemed like another world. I didn’t understand a word people said, and the women were really fast and quite scary.

Wonderful Tonight: a song in anger

I wrote the words for Wonderful Tonight at Hurtwood while I was waiting for Nell to get dressed to go out to dinner. We had a busy social life at that time, and she was invariably late getting ready. I was downstairs waiting, and was playing the guitar to kill time. Eventually I got fed up and went upstairs to the bedroom, where she was still deciding what to wear.

I remember telling her, “Look, you look wonderful, okay? Please don’t change again. We must go, or we’ll be late.” It was the classic domestic situation between a couple; I was ready and she wasn’t.

I went back downstairs to my guitar and the words of the song just came out very quickly. They were written in about 10 minutes, and actually written in anger and frustration.

I wasn’t that enamoured with it as a song. It was just a ditty as far as I was concerned, that I could just as easily have thrown away.

The first time I played it was round the camp fire at Ronnie Lane’s. Formerly of the Small Faces, he had taken up with a woman who was into a gipsy lifestyle. I was playing it for Nell, and playing it for Ronnie too, and he liked it. I remember thinking, “I suppose I’d better keep this.”

A scary message on the wall

In 1965, people began to talk about me as if I was some kind of genius, and I heard that someone had written the slogan “Clapton is God” on the wall of Islington Underground station. Then it started to spring up all over London, like graffiti. I was a bit mystified by this, and part of me ran a mile from it; I didn’t really want that kind of notoriety, and I knew it would bring some kind of trouble. Another part of me really liked the idea that what I had been fostering all these years was finally getting some recognition.

Part of my denial about what was going on in my life encompassed the way I needed to identify her. Calling her Pattie really meant acknowledging that she was still George’s wife, so as a kind of subconscious sidestep I nicknamed her “Nell” or “Nelly”. She didn’t seem to mind. I suppose I may have been paying homage to my favourite great-aunt or just trying to relegate her to a sort of barmaid status so that I wasn’t so much in awe of her. Difficult to say. Back then, my thoughts and actions were never easy to interpret, even for me.

Nell stayed till the end of the first leg of the American tour and then went home. The minute she left I was off having one-night stands and behaving outrageously with any woman who happened to come my way. It seemed like I was already trying to sabotage our relationship – as if, now that I had her, I didn’t want her any more.

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