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Tumblers of brandy before breakfast. A £10,000-a-week heroin habit. And a love life as outrageous as it was tragic... As Eric Clapton turns 80 his biographer PHILIP NORMAN reveals what star's wild life is REALLY like up close
In Clapton's 60-year career he has survived the double whammy of heroin addiction and alcoholism that often left him incapable of doing anything on stage other than lie flat on his back.
Yet blessed with extraordinary good luck, he somehow avoided rock stardom’s other perils: the drug busts, crooked managers, swindling record companies, car and plane crashes, giant divorce settlements and shaming kiss-and-tell memoirs by disenchanted ex-lovers. His creative high in the mid-1960s was the power trio Cream, an enthralling mix of blues, rock and jazz with wild-man drummer Ginger Baker and vocalist/bass-player Jack Bruce augmenting his guitar to create thunderous magic. She represented yet another amazing piece of luck for Clapton, being tolerant of his drinking and the self-destructiveness that resulted (such as an anti-immigrant rant from the stage in racially-sensitive Birmingham) not to mention his obsessive jealousy, despite his own affairs, and multitude of eccentricities and neuroses.
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