(Credits: Far Out / General Artists Corporation)
Mon 16 June 2025 7:00, UK
Leaving The Yardbirds only two years after joining as lead guitarist, Eric Clapton‘s unwavering love of the blues pulled him away from the band’s veer toward swinging pop rock and briefly standing as one of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to stave off the lysergic trends of the era. Clapton’s disregard for the charts wouldn’t last long, however.
Forming Cream a year later with The Graham Bond Organisation’s respective drummer and bassist, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Clapton would be thrust to the fore as London’s psychedelic vanguard while at odds with the era’s kaleidoscopic excesses.
Clapton’s guitar helped their counterculture cache – wielding his iconic Gibson SG slapped with fantastical designs from The Fool Dutch art collective – but Cream pursued a more raucous and heavy interpretation of psych, stirring jazzy flashes and fuzzed-out pedals that jumped into acid rock more than the baroque pop or studio trickery that smattered the records of their UK peers.
Cream would stand as one of the era’s essential acts, despite their guitarist’s diffident relationship with hippy idyll’s soundtrack of the day.
A handful of collaborators formed vital features of the power trio’s creative process. Mountain bassist and frontman Felix Pappalardi produced three of their records as well as contributed everything from the viola to the Mellotron across their work, and The Beatles’ George Harrison would co-write their final 1969 single ‘Badge’ as well as lend a rhythm guitar line under the pseudonymous L’Angelo Misterioso credit. Forming just as close a relationship with the band, however, was poet and artist Pete Brown.
Having written Beat-inspired poetry since his teens, Brown began organising shows with future Poetry Olympics founder Michael Horovitz and eventually built a following off their national spoken word events, amounting to a residency in London’s Marquee Club in 1963. Off the back of 1965’s International Poetry Incarnation in the Royal Albert Hall, Brown’s literary reputation grew and began melding his poetry with live jazz performances. Becoming acquainted with The Graham Bond Organisation’s saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, Brown was introduced to Baker and Bruce.
A year later, Brown received a call from Baker requesting lyrical assistance on a number they were working on. Heading to Chalk Farm’s Rayik studio, Brown penned the lyrics to Cream’s first single ‘Wrapping Paper’, a number exploring lost love and the painful obsession with photographs of the old flame. Initially more of a band effort, Brown would develop a sturdy songwriting partnership with Bruce, winning a hit with follow-up ‘I Feel Free’ and penning the band’s most enduring cuts with ‘White Room‘ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.
“In a way, that’s where we got that kind of inspiration to not just do tissues, to do stuff that somehow was built in that the stuff that we were doing was inspired by stuff that lasted,” Brown told Psychedelic Scene, illustrating the depth he tried to pour into the pop medium. “It wasn’t that conscious, but, on the other hand, we weren’t thinking of it as pop frippery. It was more serious than that, so it turned out that a lot of it lasted, which is great. It’s really good. I’m happy about it. Well, it’s the reason I live in a house.”
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