Eric Clapton lost his virginity to ‘a girl called Lucy who was older than me, and whose boyfriend was out of town’. Lucky chap, you immediately think, and indeed, he seems to have lived a charmed life, which he hasn’t enjoyed one bit. ‘Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon as I got it, I suddenly didn’t want it any more. This was a phenomenon which was to rear its head throughout my life, and cause many difficulties in the future.’ He first saw the Beatles in the audience at the Crawdaddy club in Richmond: ‘I suppose that it was only natural that I would be jealous, and think of them as a bunch of w***ers.’ He explains himself with reference to his grandfather Jack: ‘Like me in later years, he was slightly unpopular and was a bit of an outcast.’ By temperament alone, Clapton is certainly qualified to play the blues.
He is, of course, one of the greatest of all rock guitarists. As Steve van Zandt once wrote, ‘He had seven years of the most extraordinary, historic guitar-playing ever — and 35 years of doing good work.’ Clapton’s autobiography bears this out. It is fascinating on the early years — the ‘Clapton Is God’ phase — and rather less gripping thereafter. When Cream were going to America for the first time
we were all so excited…. The first thing I did when I knew we were going was to make a short list of all the things I had fantasised about doing if I ever went there. I was going to buy a fringed cowboy jacket, for example, and some cowboy boots. I was going to have a milkshake and a hamburger.
Clapton remembers his innocence, a useful skill in an autobiographer. And although he was clearly wilful and self-centred, you believe him when he says he was driven by love of the music rather than by personal ambition.
But then, in the early 1970s, Clapton discovered heroin. It wasn’t pretty. ‘I soon became not only overweight, but spotty and generally unfit. Heroin also completely took away my libido, so there was no sexual activity of any kind, and I became chronically constipated.’ Having weaned himself off this, he became a chronic drunk. ‘There was always this madman inside of me trying to get out, and drink gave him permission.’ He knows that he was a monster for much of this time, but the drinking tales become repetitive and dull, as coincidentally did the music. ‘Like most alcoholics I have met since, I didn’t like the taste of alcohol.’ He comes over as a sad, rather ordinary man who had an astonishing gift but no means of dealing with the ensuing pressure whatsoever. His book, efficiently ghosted by Christopher Simon Sykes, is a surprisingly serious attempt to make sense of it all — which may, now I come to think of it, be why he has relatively little to say about the one genuine tragedy in his life, the accidental death of his four-year-old son Conor in 1991. There’s no making sense of something like that.
Clapton looks bruised and slightly battered on his front cover, while Ronnie Wood looks as though he has just come back from an amazing party. Which in one sense, I suppose, he has, for his book is a tale of an almost completely frivolous life, relished to the full. When Ronnie’s dad first met his mum, he had just won the pub raffle, ‘a hamper of food and booze’. The chat-up line: ‘You’ve won the leg of pork.’ The man who now lives in Wood’s childhood home ‘dug up the back garden one day and found 1,700 Guinness bottles’. When Ronnie was 17 his girlfriend died in a car crash. ‘I was unable to accept what had happened to Stephanie; but in the bottle I had discovered a way not to think about it.’ This is a rare lapse into seriousness: generally Ronnie is out to entertain and amuse, much as you suspect he would be in real life. Eric Clapton was an only child; Ronnie was the youngest of three brothers, who talks blithely of his ‘uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time’, but for 30 years has been happy to play the youngest brother to those perennially rivalrous siblings Mick and Keith. To do what he does, as well as he does it, you have to be either very calculating or superhumanly easygoing:
Keith said to me, ‘You’re in the band.’ I told him, ‘Yeah, I know.’ Keith added, ‘We’re not going to tell anyone for years,’ and I said, ‘That’s fine with me.’
He is not entirely without ego, though: the book is littered with black-and-white prints of the dreaded paintings, and at least twice he tells us that hotshot jazz bassist Stanley Clarke was inspired to pick up the instrument on hearing Ron’s basswork for the Jeff Beck Group. Both times he misspells Clarke’s name. In fact this is a pretty shambolic book. Maybe his publishers thought that all his readers would be as out of it as Ronnie used to be. He is clean now, of course: his drug hell and rehab chapters are mercifully shorter than Clapton’s, but that only gives him more room to tell you about all the amazing parties: ‘all our kids, all the Stones’ kids, my best mate Jimmy White …Cilla Black, Tracey Emin, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Tom Stoppard …Michael Owen and Kate Moss, to name just a few’. You almost wish you’d been there.
Eric Clapton mentions Ronnie Wood twice in passing. Ronnie mentions Eric many, many times. Neither mentions Jools Holland, but Jools mentions absolutely everyone and is photographed having a laugh with nearly all of them. Conceived after a Humphrey Lyttelton gig — many years later, when he met the venerable trumpeter, he shook his hand and thanked him heartily — the former Squeeze keyboardist grew up in south-east London without a television, ‘so I was quickly exposed to other, more interesting activities’. A dozen years younger than Eric and Ronnie, he is in some ways a more old-fashioned figure than either. (He likes a good roast well cooked. ‘Still now, when I see things like pasta or rice, I’m rather suspicious of them.’) He is also incredibly cheerful. Barefaced Lies and Boogie-Woogie Boasts shows the awesome power of pure optimism: it could easily function as self-help book as well as showbiz autobiography. However you approach it, though, it’s wonderfully readable. Although he hasn’t written it alone — Harriet Vyner is co-credited — Holland appears to have the soul of a proper writer. A distinctive deadpan wit seeps through the narrative, and there’s an almost Wodehousian relish for language. His book is so much the best of the three that I’m only relieved I read the other two first. He has enjoyed his life, and you might too.
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