“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It was like seeing an instrument from outer space. I said to myself, ‘That’s the future – that’s what I want’": The story of Eric Clapton’s Cream guitars

Cream perform during their farewell concert, with Eric Clapton playing a Gibson ES-335.

When Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton were putting together Cream in summer 1966, Eric had with him his Les Paul. This was the guitar that we now know as the ‘Beano’ ’Burst.

He’d bought it the previous year when he was a member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but now he plugged it in for Cream’s early rehearsals at a church hall in north-west London.