Eric Clap­ton: Life in 12 Bars

If you’re a slather­ing Eric Clap­ton super­fan – one of those mer­ry pranksters who scrawled the words ​“Clap­ton is God” on the wall of some provin­cial bus garage way back when – then there’s prob­a­bly lit­tle to be learned from this new hagiog­ra­phy which takes a swift, autho­rised trawl through the axe hero’s life and times.

The title offers a neat dou­ble mean­ing, con­nect­ing Slowhand’s fond­ness for the clas­sic 12 bar chord sequence of the blues (which he chan­neled into much of his musi­cal out­put), and his near-debil­i­tat­ing fond­ness for alco­hol. Would that he were so refined to con­sume his hooch in a bar­room set­ting: one pho­to­graph from the ear­ly ​’70s depicts him down-and-out in the gut­ter next to an unmarked bot­tle of gut rot.

The film is direct­ed and devised by Clap­ton friend Lili Fini Zanuck, who worked with him way back in 1991 on the film Rush, which fea­tured his dev­as­tat­ing come­back sin­gle ​‘Tears in Heav­en’ on its sound­track. The nar­ra­tive here is dri­ven by Clapton’s own rem­i­nisces, anec­dotes and con­tem­pla­tions, though they sound like they were record­ed off-the-record on a cheap dic­ta­phone and repur­posed for the project. Jump­ing from ear­ly dad­dy issues to a for­ma­tive love of gui­tar music and join­ing bands such as Cream and The Yard­birds, the film offers over most of its time to the ear­ly years, all but skip­ping past his sober lat­er life.

Deploy­ing the usu­al grainy archive mate­r­i­al and slow-zooms into still pho­tographs tech­nique, the form of this thing is strict­ly stan­dard issue – none of the super­flu­ous, drug­gy noodling of the type that helped Clap­ton cement his name as the gold stan­dard of head-bob­bing dino rock. There’s an ambi­gu­i­ty as to whether Clap­ton is a gar­den vari­ety moody bug­ger, or an angu­lar genius who remains in con­stant per­son­al dia­logue with his Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er. Try as the mak­ers might, they do find it tough to make him appear and an excit­ing subject.

Though he is pre­sent­ed as a very seri­ous man, there are pas­sages here that lapse into the com­ic, with a few scenes feel­ing like they’ve been ripped from a belat­ed sequel to Spinal Tap. There’s a sequence in which Clap­ton forms Derek and the Domi­nos (mak­ers of the clas­sic sin­gle ​‘Lay­la’) which sees a group of pasty-faced ses­sion musos con­gre­gat­ing around a moun­tain of hard drugs while casu­al­ly boast­ing that, ​“We just spent all day jam­ming in the key of E!”

There’s often a sense with the film that it is being open about Clapton’s many laps­es of judge­ment through­out his life­time, but is always ready and wait­ing with the fire-buck­et to make swift amends. The pro­longed episode in which he repeat­ed­ly attempt­ed to coax George Harrison’s wife Pat­tie Boyd into his arms focus­es more on Clapton’s pup­py love over­tures than any pain he caused to either party.

His infa­mous ​“wogs out” tirade at a 1976 con­cert in Birm­ing­ham is skimmed over silent­ly and chalked up to his then-rabid drink­ing prob­lem. (Even though he has gone on the record numer­ous times since re-stat­ing his sup­port for nation­al­ist politi­cian Enoch Pow­ell.) A sequence deal­ing with a lat­er-life tragedy involv­ing the acci­den­tal death of his four-year-old son is care­ful­ly han­dled and tees up the con­text for a cre­ative turn­around in the ​’90s. In all, the film offers a handy if hard­ly essen­tial biog­ra­phy, help­ful main­ly for those lack­ing the patience to click through Clapton’s Wikipedia profile.