Eric Clapton has offered an intriguing insight into his addictions and troubled sexual psychology in his new autobiography.
Extracts from 'Eric Clapton: The Autobiography' were published in a UK newspaper over the weekend, with the guitar great suggesting that his obsession with cold, unavailable women stemmed from the rejection he felt from his mother.Clapton's mother, Pat, was just 16 when she fell pregnant, and he grew up being told that she was his older sister. He writes in the book of his feelings of abandonment and rejection when, as a boy, he discovered the truth by chance.
As a man, Clapton would go on to form a mutually destructive, heroin-fuelled relationship with another 16-year-old, Alice Ormsby-Gore. "We lived on chocolate and junk food," he writes. "Heroin completely took away my libido, and I became chronically constipated."
Ormsby-Gore, the daughter of a British diplomat, never recovered and died from an overdose in 1995.
In an interview with 'The Sunday Times' newspaper, Clapton was asked whether his maternal relationship had governed his relationships with female partners as an adult. "I think it set up certain practises," he said. "The unavailable thing is the bottom line. As long as I was aware at some deep level that this person wasn't really interested in the relationship then I was comfortable or could become obsessed. It was a necessary component of any commitment I would get involved with, because it also gave me carte blanche to go whenever I wanted."
This perverse need for unattainability is recounted with the story of his obsession with George Harrison's former wife, Pattie Boyd. She was the woman who inspired 'Layla', and Clapton's infatuation developed whilst she was still married to the Beatle.
He writes, "[she] belonged to a powerful man who seemed to have everything I wanted: amazing cars, an incredible career and a beautiful wife". After Clapton began dating Boyd's sister, Paula, Harrison suggested that he spend the night with his wife.
"George, who was motivated just as much by the flesh as he was by the spirit, took me aside and suggested that I should spend the night with Pattie so that he could sleep with Paula," Clapton writes, though they never followed through with the plan.
'Eric Clapton: The Autobiography' is published next week.
