Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [86]
The film, by BBC producer Rex Pyke, famous for his documentary Akenfield, was luckily never released. It showed me in an extremely unflattering light, as I was intoxicated and deranged in most of the footage. It includes a sequence shot in Paris, during a visit to one of the shows by Stigwood, in which, fueled by drink, I grabbed the camera, aimed it at him, and started to aggressively question him on the subject of an old chestnut of mine, namely my suspicion that he had “creamed” off most of the profits from Cream to finance his other acts like the Bee Gees. Robert remained quite unfazed by this and quietly replied, in his phony posh English accent, “This is not the right time to speak about this. We should talk about this another time,” while I shouted manically, “This is my film, and I want it in.”
I remember we had a great promoter on the tour, a Danish guy named Erik Thomsen, who was a friend of Roger’s and in Stiggy’s league when it came to pulling pranks. He would bait me or Roger, hurling pathetic insults at us in a very strong Danish accent, until we would finally have to do something about it. Usually it would be something fairly mild, like throwing his shoe out the window of a traveling coach or running over his precious aluminum briefcase with a truck. But on one occasion we went too far, cutting off all his hair, painting his head with blue ink, cutting the legs off his trousers, and throwing him off the train in Hamburg in the middle of the night with no money, knowing full well that he was supposed to have a business meeting with Sammy Davis Jr. the following morning. Sadly, he is no longer with us. He passed away quite recently and I miss him. He was a great character and an incredible sport, and we will not see his like again.
The album we were promoting on this tour was the follow-up to Slowhand, which we had named Backless, a title suggested after we played a gig with Dylan at Blackbushe Airport. It referred to the fact that I thought he had eyes in the back of his head and knew exactly what was going on around him all the time. It had been a difficult album to cut, with drugs and alcohol taking center stage, which Glyn found hard to cope with, and there was bad blood building up everywhere. The only song on the album that I really rated was “Golden Ring,” written about the situation between me, Nell, and George. It referred in part to her response to the news that George was getting married again. She took it quite hard, and I, in my arrogance, found that hard to understand. So I wrote this song about the peculiarity of our triangle, which finishes with the words
If I gave to you a golden ring,
Would I make you happy, would I make you sing?
The fact is that at this time, for whatever reason, Nell and I were not particularly happy. My diary for September 6, 1978, reads, “Sex life is pretty barren at the moment, we don’t seem to be getting on too well, there’s nothing in particular to blame, unless it’s the stars, we just seem to be heading in different directions.” Nor did my often chauvinistic behavior improve the situation. For example, I noted on October 16, “In the evening Nell…was giving advice to Simon’s ex-girlfriend in the kitchen for two hours, so my dinner was taken out of the oven and popped back in again, by the time I got it, it was burnt and dried up, so I shouted at her good loud and long, but she didn’t seem very repentant, and I got a sore throat.”
I was also picking up girls for sex as soon as I got on the road, aided and abetted by Roger. “Roger started to wind me up,” I wrote in Madrid on November 5, “about some incredible looking bird who he says has turned up at the gig.” Later that day I continued, “I have got a hundred quid bet with Roger that he can’t pull a nice clean normal bird for me…. He had better, cause there was nothing under fifty years old in sight.