Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [147]
I talked to him a lot, whispering in his ear, telling him that I loved and missed him, and that we all wanted him to get well and come back to us, but I have to admit that I thought it was a lost cause. I don’t have much experience of these things, but it seemed that he had already left us. For that reason, I said my good-byes to him before I left to come home. It may have been premature if he recovered, but I needed to do it for both of us, as I really didn’t believe that I would see him again in this life.
The year ended with a sad but sober program at the leisure center, with Brian’s image projected above the stage. He was well loved and would be sadly missed by the Guildford recovering community, and we gave him a splendid sendoff. His children, Cathy and Nick, attended, and his good friend Pat made a heart-wrenching speech. I, for one, will never forget him, and what he did, so selflessly, for so many of us.
The year of the world tour began quietly enough. Although we had a lot of preparations to make, we chose to get on the boat and have a short cruise around the Caribbean before the workload took me away. The sea around Antigua and the neighboring islands was a lot rougher than the Mediterranean, and the kids sometimes had a tough time of it, but it was great for me to be able to show my family around places I had been before, many years ago. Ruth and her boyfriend Derek came out to join us for a week, and it was good to see Ruth, who was born in Montserrat, back in her element. Not much had changed in the Caribbean. New designer boutiques had sprung up here and there, but for the most part many of the islands were just as they had been thirty years ago.
We spent the first part of the holiday in the house that I had built on Antigua. It has had so many additions over the years, guest cottages for the most part, that it now actually resembles a small village. It is a beautiful house, made entirely of local stone, and totally hurricane-proof, but because it was planned and built in my bachelor days, I have had to do a lot of work to make it safe for the family. For a start, it stands at the top of a cliff overlooking a breathtaking view of Indian Creek, and the drop is terrifying, so I am always a little bit apprehensive when I’m there with my children. I long to spend more time there, and I know we will one day, but it is a harsh environment, and the girls will have to grow up a bit more before I can feel completely assured about their safety there.
In April, I went off to France to begin rehearsals for the tour. The new band was very exciting, fresh and strong, and in some respects very reminiscent of the Dominos, perhaps because of Derek Trucks’s presence. We began the tour in Europe, playing as many songs from Back Home as we could, including a sit-down section where we picked up acoustic instruments. For the first time ever, I played “I Am Yours” from the Layla album. Maybe it was this in itself that awoke in me a new love for the old Dominos stuff, but it was certainly helped on by Derek and Doyle’s insistence that we give those songs another airing.
Over the course of the year, the set changed to the point where the whole of the first half was entirely from Layla, and then it broke down into tunes from different eras, ending up with the song “Layla” itself. It felt like a great show, and when we played to audiences who were old enough to remember the original album, we went down very well. In fact, even when we played to crowds who weren’t so familiar with the songs, it didn’t really matter, as we were having such a good time playing them.
Halfway through the European tour, we had a break to avoid the World Cup. We had seen the preparations for it building in Germany, where it was