Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [103]
Part of her disappointment was bound up with the fact that a few months previously, Pattie and I had visited a fertility clinic after she had told me she was desperate to have a child. Pattie’s problems in getting pregnant stemmed from a blockage in her fallopian tubes, which had made conceiving a child difficult if not impossible during her marriage to George, in the days before IVF.
During the first years of our marriage it was not discussed, as we were too busy racing through life at breakneck speed. Then on February 8, 1984, I noted in my diary, “Nell showed me all the bumph she got from the fertility Doctor…it seems she is suddenly quite keen to have a child…” I had realized that having children was the last thing we had to pursue to hold us together, but I was secretly hoping that it wouldn’t work, because as much as I loved her, I was feeling the need to roam again. I had kind of lost heart.
I now set off on a path of attempting controlled social drinking in the way I saw other people do it. I studied them, and for a while my life consisted of going up to the Windmill for lunch and having one or two lagers, and then in the evening maybe a glass of wine with dinner or a scotch after eating. The reality was that, as much as I may have been trying to establish some kind of normal day like other people, what it really amounted to was these two drinking sessions with me desperately trying to kill the time in between them, often by sleeping all through the afternoon. This schedule was purely alcoholic in its development and focus, and our life just crumbled as a result.
On our return from Montserrat, with most of the songs recorded and mixed, Roger, who was happy with the material, sent it off to the record company, Warner Bros., while I set about working on a film score for a new John Hurt movie, The Hit. One of the musicians who helped me with this and played on it was Roger Waters, whom I had known from my youth and whose wife, Carolyn, was a close friend of Pattie’s. He played me a cassette of a new album he was working on, called The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking. It had some great players on it, and since I enjoyed his company so much and hanging out with him, I ended up going into the studio with him and working on the album. It was a lot of fun, and at one point I said jokingly, “You should really take this on the road.” He then asked me if I’d go with him, and since it was the perfect excuse to run away from my problems at home, I said yes.
Roger Forrester was not happy about this, since he didn’t like the idea of me being a sideman to anybody, but he reluctantly agreed to let Roger have me on loan. I was after all Forrester’s property, and I would have to be given back after the tour. The situation between these two was quite funny in that Roger Waters was very suspicious of Roger Forrester, who in turn thought he had Roger Waters figured out, so there was always a lot of sporting banter bouncing back and forth between them, which I think they quite enjoyed.
The tour took place in Europe and America during June and July. Roger was working very much to a format, which was multimedia, a combination of visuals and music, both meant to emphasize the story he was telling. I had to wear headphones, as a lot of the music had to be in sync with video on the screen, so I needed to follow a click track, which I’d never done before onstage. I thought it was all pretty interesting, although from where I was standing, I never actually saw any of the video stuff. Probably just as well, as from what I gathered, some very weird stuff was being shown up there. The first night was in Stockholm, on June 16. “The gig was great,