The day commenced with hibernation weather although here on the coast it was dark and cold with bursts of sleet which did not become settling snow. Elsewhere there were blizzards with at one point one hundred vehicles, the majority lorries trapped behind a blocked main road, so that the police and local authority services had to reach them, turn them around and take them to places of safety until the roadway could be cleared. The fear was of iced roads as temperatures dropped with the fall of night. This morning some homes in Yorkshire were without electricity and 130 vehicles remained trapped along the A66 route in Durham over the Pennines to Cumbria and Lakeland.
One outcome of staying home, battening down the hatches and keeping warm and well fed is that I was able to commence turning previous work concerning he family history of my mother and factual information available about her life, together with photographs and memorabilia about her 100th birthday into project sets, with more to do over the weekend.
I experienced an interesting play, The Good Citizen part of the UK Drama afternoon series and featuring Hugh Quarshie creating his own environmentally friendly Passport to Pimlico by declaring a piece of earth in the English Country a separate territory in which he opts out from the Government of UK. The play is a vehicle for its author to display his prejudices about how governments and the media operates although the overall way in which any government would respond to such action, especially if it has European Legal precedent, is valid. What the author does not understand is how such an operation would be conducted in practice. In the play the government and the media are too open about their methodology and involvement whereas in real life it is all done at arms length by agents who can never be traced. Another approach is to bury the truth under a plethora of possibilities with the most far fetched deliberately planted in order to discredit everything else raised, including what actually happened. In the final scene of the play a High Court Judge decides that the hero should not be detained in a psychiatric hospital because of a threat to his own life and to others, after his estranged wife has agreed to sign committal papers after being threatened to have her children removed to places of safety and being bribed with a highly paid celebrity photoshoot. The substance of the plot, the motivation of the hero and the issues which the play raises merit greater writing. Any episodes of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister has greater effectiveness in revealing how the Civil Services and Government Ministers have interacted in the past, and one suspects, to this day.
However it was an enjoyable hour in which I was able to also work.
I was initially disappointed that the daily catch up of series three Lost as the penultimate and final double episode of the series were to come with the new series commencing on Sunday. Then I discovered that the missing episodes are to be shown on Saturday between 1 and 4 pm with the Liverpool versus Sunderland game at 5.15 on Satanta. What a great afternoon in prospect. The sum total of series three is to confirm the belief that the island exists as an interactive dream state, a prolonged dimension between life and death in which we confront our sins and gain the opportunity to show remorse and atone or damn ourselves for eternity. I am reminded of films such as What Dreams may come and Vanilla Sky and also Groundhog Day as some individuals appear wedded to repeating bad choices, despite all the knowledge of inevitable outcomes I eat food which I know will put on weight and I put on weight so I eat more of the wrong food.
In the evening I gave my full attention to a programme about the life of Eric Clapton the only individual to be entered into the Music Hall of Fame three times, through the Yardbirds, through Cream and as an individual soloist. Eric is illegitimate, readily admitting to sense of being an outsider throughout his life, regardless of the loving care he was shown in childhood by his grandparents believing his mother was his older sister. She was only 16 when giving birth through a Canadian serviceman eight years her senior, who after the war returned to his homeland. He only discovered the truth after his mother had married a different Canadian and returned home with his half brother and this had an adverse effect on Eric and his schoolwork. As if to try and make up for the deception his grandparents supported his attempts to play the guitar and a marimba which were given on his 13th birthday. He found learning very difficult and nearly gave up but he had a drive which matched his lifelong sadness which is apparent in much of his music
Like many young men of this era we were greatly affected by American Blues music which expressed our deepest feelings, but Clapton took the interest further than anyone, recording tracks on a Grundig tape recorder and listening and attempting to copy. I used to try and do similar on my clarinet in a cupboard in out flat much to horror of the aunties and neighbours. This was during a time when my windows were covered with Anti Apartheid, War on Want and CND posters. I gave up, he did not, he survived only one year at the Kingston School of Art but that year provided him with the freedom and sufficient self confidence to pursue his need to express himself through music and to establish friends and contacts. He commenced to busk around Kingston, Richmond and the West End. He was able to join a rhythm and blues group The Roosters, at the age of 17 years. He then spent two years with the Yardbirds, leaving before their first commercial hit, but having an established a good reputation among fellow musicians. In 1965 Eric Clapton still committed to playing blues music and hostile to adapting for popular and commercial requirements joining the legendry John Mayall and the Blues Breakers.
In 1966 Eric joined musicians of similar ability for the first time in what became one of the first world super groups Cream and where the extending solo and ensemble jamming became its trade mark. It is a feature of the work of Eric Clapton that he became the authentic rolling stone, involved for a short time in the creation of great music and then needing to move on to new work with new people. Clapton performed with Cream for 28 months, during which time Crossroads was created in honour of Robert Johnson's Crossroads, the blues guitarist acclaimed to this day as the greatest, whose records Eric put on his tape recorder and learnt to try and reproduce chord by note. In the late sixties Eric developed a friendship with George Harrison and they co wrote and played together and guested at each other's concerts. Eric organised and was the music director for the tribute concert at the Royal Albert Hall following the death of George in 2001. With Ginger Baker and Steve Winwood there was an attempt to create a second super group which appeared before 100000 people in Hyde Park in 1969 Blind Faith but it was in the early seventies with a new group Derek, Eric mispronounced and the Dominoes that he helped created what has become his best known single recorded and performance work Layla. At this time he had become infatuated with the wife of George Harrison Pattie Boyd, although she rejected his advances at the time. It was during the 1970's that Clapton readily admits that his life became dominated by drugs and alcohol. The Dominos drummer was found to be an undetected schizophrenic, murdered his mother and was confined to a mental institution where he remains today.
Patti Harrison then responded to Eric's interest and they commenced to live together, marrying in 1979, but although he controlled drug misuse he remained dependent on alcohol. Eric has always been a figure of controversy, especially when he support Enoch Powell's call for control over immigration, explaining his reasons as nothing to do with racism but concern over the tendency of the establishment to invite people to come into the country to undertake badly paid jobs which existing citizens do not wish to do because they can live just as well on state benefits and then concentrating in ghetto's to which I would add, denying until recently, full political and social participation to those who wished o do so. Although he worked primarily as a soloist he continued with collaborations with Jeff Beck and the Secret Policeman's Ball for Amnesty International with other interests included the Countryside Alliance and the Tsunami Relief Appeal, and with Phil Collins, and in more recent times Sheryl Crow (my Favourite Mistake-they remain friends). I had watched the final Phil Collins concert on film before the film on Eric Clapton. I have Phil Collins records and saw him in concert at Newcastle City Hall.
While still married to Patti Boyd he had a year long relationship with another and with whom they had a daughter, a relationship which he had kept secret from his wife, paying maintenance, and from the public until the child died in an accident in 1991. His mistress had been the Managing Director of the Sir George Martin and John Burgess recording studio on Montserrat. After the divorce with Patti Boyd, in 1999 aged 54 he met Melia aged 23 while working on an album with BB King and they married in Surrey in 2002 and have three daughters. In 2005 Cream was reformed performing in London and New York. He wrote music for many films and TV shows. Layla was played in the film Goodfellas and Opel used part of the tune in its advertising throughout the 1990's
Eric acquired some of the world's great collection, if not the greatest collection, of guitars. One of these sold at auction achieved $791,599, another $847500 dollars and a third $959,500. He used some $12 million dollars from guitar sales in 1999 and 2004 to create and maintain the Crossroads treatment and rehabilitation centre in the Caribbean. In the film shown last night he talked of retiring from performances for a time but he is now scheduled for performances in New York in February and a Hyde Park concert in the Summer, park of Hard Rock 2008.
Eric never met and knew little of his father and in 1998 wrote a song My Father's Eyes. A Canadian journalist undertook research and eventually tracked down several members of the family and from these discovered that the man had died in 1985 and that he had been a musician, piano and saxophone, and someone who could never settle. Like father, like son.
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