“Knowing that I had the other one, Eric starts calling me and asking if I would sell it. He was offering me £200 for it, more than twice what I’d paid for it”: The history and mysteries of Eric Clapton’s Cream guitars

Eric Clapton, pictured in 1967, playing with Cream, playing his infamous Beano Les Paul Standard.

We know the guitars Eric Clapton played in Cream. All of them Gibson: the ‘Beano’ Les Paul, the ‘Fool’ SG, the cherry red ES-335 and the sunburst Firebird I.

While that list is, of course, correct, dig a little deeper and a few oddities and anomalies poke their heads above the parapet. But as with anything musically historical, evidence is often vague or contradictory, so what follows here is as close as we can get with the sources available.