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The dedication in Eric Clapton’s autobiography is to what you might imagine were all the most important women in his life: his grandmother Rose, his wife Melia and his children Ruth, Julie, Ella and Sophie. Missing is his mother. He clears his throat of discomfort when I point that out.

The book is in fact all about his mother, or the lack of her, and his attempts to replace her with other women.

He grew up believing that his grandmother was his mother. His world fell apart when he realised his sister was his mother, and that she did not know how to be his mother. Everything else that happened to him seems to have spiralled from that rejection. Despite his huge talent and success, he hated himself.

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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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For the first moments of our meeting he is detached from himself, analytical, as he is in his book. Then somewhere in his head, a door opens, and he wants to answer questions very directly: “My mother is missing from the dedication because we didn’t really hit it off that well.

“The best period of our life was when we were drinking together [as adults]. I loved her but she was a difficult woman. If she hadn’t been my mother we would have got on better because it would have been a simpler relationship. Our relationship developed as friends really; we became friends. Whenever I needed a mother figure she wouldn’t be the person I’d go to. Intuitively it felt correct to do that, but it wasn’t working.”

He was born on March 30, 1945, in the village of Ripley, Surrey – long before the area became one of the most affluent in Britain. He lived with his parents, or so he thought, and his brother Adrian, who was actually his uncle. It was a tiny house with two bedrooms and no electricity. Eric slept on a little camp bed downstairs.

The first half of his childhood was cosy, idyllic, spent fishing and playing in the countryside when he thought he was simply an only child who had much older parents. But he was aware of something unspoken, something wrong.

He writes: “It was a house full of secrets. But . . . I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on and to understand that the secrets were usually to do with me. One day I heard one of my aunties ask, ‘Have you heard from his mum?’ and the truth dawned on me, that when Adrian jokingly called me ‘a little bastard’, he was telling the truth.”

His real mother, Pat, had got pregnant with him when she was 16. It was during the war and it was assumed his father was a Canadian soldier, although she never confirmed this. She married another Canadian and went to live in Canada.

When Eric was nine, Pat and her husband and their two children came for a visit. He went to greet the boat at Southampton. She looked glamorous but in a cold, sharp way. He describes the moment of absolute abandonment when he blurted out to her: “Can I call you mummy now?” She said that she thought it was best he kept on calling his grandparents Mum and Dad. He says: “I think it must be like being on The X Factor and told you’re f****** useless, clear off. I can’t watch that programme. I can’t watch it because it brings up that feeling of rejection.”

He put his pain into his playing and became one of the world’s most renowned guitarists. On stage he was super-sexy, charismatic, cool. In reality he was shy, introverted, insecure, fearful. Despite his success, he never seemed to believe in himself much as a human being. He feared rejection and yet at the same time kept putting himself up for it by seeking women who were somehow unavailable or unempathetic. Lots of women.

He used sex as a way of garnering self-esteem and then destroying it. Why did he keep putting himself up for rejection? “There’s an adrenaline thing going, about keeping yourself in a state of fear, becoming comfortable with fear.”

Was his mother the prototype of women that he was attracted to, with her beautiful but cold looks? “I think it set up certain practises. The unavailable thing is the bottom line. As long as I was aware at some deep level that this person wasn’t really interested in the relationship then I was comfortable or could become obsessed. It was a necessary component of any commitment I would get involved with, because it also gave me carte blanche to go whenever I wanted.”

He added: “The idea was that I would find a woman like my mother, then make her love me because I got rejected by the first one.” But he would then reject her. “That was because another thing came into play: I’m not worthy of them. It’s a kind of paradox. If the object of my affection rejects me it’s because I’m not good enough, but if they do show love towards me they can’t be good enough because they’re settling for less. Does that make sense? There must be something wrong with them if they like me.

“But even the 1990s, when I was sober, was a very troubled period. The map of my life had changed but I was still being led by my old parameters in terms of who I wanted to be with. I was retraining myself but the thing that always confused me and got me in the worse situations was falling in love.

“You know, you’d meet someone and there’d be a kind of rush. That’s a socially acceptable principle, but that would lead me into a cul de sac every time because once that wears off you are left with another frail human being. It was still all about finding another mother, someone to fix me.

He added: “My mother passed away at the beginning of the millennium. It took a couple of years while she was dying and I went through a very funny period during that time. She had trouble accepting it and . . . through all of that period my ability to be around members of the opposite sex was absolutely ruined. I kept trying to start things with people but I couldn’t have sex, couldn’t do anything.”

He says that she “really tried hard to become a mother but I think . . . it was a lot to do with her view of herself which dictated how she related to other people. I’m guessing her own sense of guilt limited her”.

Did she tell you that she loved you? “Yes, of course.” So you felt loved by her? “No, because love isn’t what people say, it’s what they do. Love is an action; it’s not an emotion.”

Eric Clapton: The Autobiography, by Eric Clapton with Christopher Simon Sykes is 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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