Eric Clapton

During a long and winding career that has seen him moving from bluesman to guitar hero to chart-topping rocker to balladeer and back, Eric Clapton has done his best to live up to his early reputation, one that saw him feted as a god by his devotees. Early stints with the Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers found the young guitarist sticking firmly to the tradition of the blues, to the point where he left the former group when they decided to go pop. By the time he formed the very influential trio Cream in the late '60s, he had a much wider scope that accounted for psychedelia and hard rock. After splitting that band and taking a short detour with the supergroup Blind Faith, he regrouped under the name Derek and the Dominos and had his first smash hit with the long version of "Layla" in 1972 . The rest of the decade saw him scoring multiple hits and becoming a staple of FM radio and arenas across the world. After some commercial downtime and personal tragedy, Clapton mounted a comeback that saw him topping the charts in 1992 with the poignant ballad "Tears in Heaven" and the MTV Unplugged album. After this high point he continued doing what he did best, playing the blues, both solo and with other artists like B.B. King (on 2000's Riding with the King), J.J. Cale (2006's The Road to Escondido), and Wynton Marsalis (2011's Play the Blues: Live from Jazz at Lincoln Center.) After setting up his own label, Bushbranch, Clapton continued to make a series of album in the 2010s filled with the blues, easygoing soft rock, and plenty of collaborations. He worked with a crew including Willie Nelson and Tom Petty on 2016's The Breeze: An Appreciation of J.J. Cale, and joined Van Morrison for a series of singles in the early 2020s; these appeared on his 2025 album Meanwhile, which also featured a duet with the late Jeff Beck.

From 🇬🇧 United Kingdom