After the visionary highs of the 1960s, Eric Clapton kicked off the 70s mired in a professional, personal and pharmaceutical nightmare. His semi-anonymous supergroup Derek And The Dominos had been largely ignored by the public – their signature song Layla, a thinly disguised wail of anguish inspired by Clapton’s unrequited love for model Pattie Boyd, wife of his friend George Harrison, had failed to chart. The guitarist’s woes were compounded when another friend, Jimi Hendrix, died in September 1970.
Mentally battered, Clapton and his socialite girlfriend Alice Ormsby-Gore gradually retreated from the limelight – and into a twilight world of heroin addiction from which he would not emerge until three years later.
