(It’s worth noting here that Donovan’s 1968 hit ‘Jennifer Juniper’ was about Patti’s younger sister, Jenny Boyd) To have inspired Eric, and George before him, to write such songs was so flattering – ‘Wonderful Tonight’ was the most poignant reminder of all that was good in our relationship, and when things went wrong it was a torture to hear it”. In her autobiography, Wonderful Tonight (Harmony Books, 2007) for which she apparently received a £950,000 advance, Ms Boyd recalls, “It was such a simple song but so beautiful and for years it tore at me. In a five minute flash of inspiration Eric Clapton had written his most popular song, and Patti Boyd found herself in the unique position of having three international hit songs written just about her. The song, of course, was ‘Wonderful Tonight’ (the first track recorded for the Slowhand album), as concise a love song as one could hope for. The opening verse of the song “It’s late in the evening, she’s wondering what clothes to wear she puts on her make-up, and brushes her long blonde hair ” describe the circumstances exactly as they were.
One evening in 1976 while Eric, in a fury, was waiting for Patti to get ready to go to a party (they were two hours late – she was trying on dresses!) he went back downstairs to the lounge, and within five minutes had written what he still calls, “the most perfect love song.” Clapton’s own ‘Layla’ was also written as a plea to Patti in 1970, and although George was one of his best friends, Eric Clapton continued to pursue Patti until eventually, in 1974, he managed to steal her away from George, and ultimately marry her himself. George Harrison had already written the Beatles big hit, ‘Something’, from Abbey Road for Patti, taking the opening line, “Something in the way she moves”, from a James Taylor song of the that title. The two also co-wrote one of Creams’ last hits ‘Badge’ (with some drunken participation from Ringo Starr) in George Harrison’s back garden while Harrison wrote Abbey Road’s ‘Here Comes The Sun’ the same year in Clapton’s garden! Unfortunately, Clapton fell for Patti in a BIG way. (Her sister Jenny later married Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac) Eric and George were good mates, Eric playing guitar on George’s ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ on the Beatles double ‘White’ album – Clapton got no credit on the record for contractual reasons, but his contribution was an open secret. Patti was a successful model and in 1966 she married Beatle George Harrison. Apart from his music, one of Eric Clapton’s other lifetime passions was Patti Boyd, an icon of the ‘Swinging Sixties’. The following two years were probably the darkest in Eric Clapton’s life as he tried to overcome his heroin addiction, and eventually in 1973 his fellow guitarist Pete Townsend of The Who managed to get Clapton out of his house, back on stage, and eventually back in the recording studio to begin what became a highly successful solo career. The resulting album wasn’t a big hit, but a single from it, ‘Layla’, later became one of Clapton’s best loved pieces. Clapton refused to have his name on the album in a concerted effort to escape his guitar-hero image. Blind Faith soon went the same way as Cream, and in 1970 Clapton fronted a band under the pseudonym of Derek & The Dominoes, Clapton being ‘Derek’.
When Cream imploded he toured America with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, before forming another ‘super-group’, Blind Faith, together with Steve Winwood, recently departed from Traffic. In 1966 he formed the first ‘super-group’, Cream, together with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. Eric (born Eric Clapp in Ripley, Surrey, in 1945) first attracted attention as a guitar-hero in British group The Yardbirds in the mid-1960s, also acquiring the nickname, ‘Slowhand’, before moving to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. *Released in USA as ‘Eric Clapton & His Band’Įric Clapton has had a long and sometimes difficult career, struggling to overcome heroin addiction in the early 1970s, and losing his 4-year-old son Conor in 1991 in a tragic accident in New York that inspired a devastated Clapton to write the song ‘Tears In Heaven’. “To have inspired Eric, and George before him, to write such songs was so flattering”
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