(Credit: Alamy)
Tue 1 July 2025 18:08, UK
Making an album will always be a new experience for anyone walking into the studio. Although it’s easy for seasoned veterans to know the lay of the land if they’re going into their favourite recording booth with the right hooks behind them, there are bound to be a few slip-ups or learning experiences where they realise they are still a student of music. Eric Clapton was already one of the biggest guitarists in the world before the 1960s were even over, but he knew that some albums had a slim amount of tunes worth keeping around.
But for a while, everything coming out of ‘Slowhand’s amplifier may as well have been blessed by a musical god. A lot of what he did may have been an extension of what the blues artists of old had done before him, but he was never afraid to pull out something that no one thought he was capable of, either, like making his solo songwriting debut on ‘Presence of the Lord’ with Blind Faith.
Derek and the Dominos may have given him an emotional incubator in between his solo years and his emotional turmoil trying to woo Patti Boyd, but once Clapton reaches the 1970s, some parts of his sound take a nose dive. 461 Ocean Boulevard is a fine album for what it is, but if someone had told you it was done by a guitarist who many considered to be the musical incarnation of God, it would be a little bit underwhelming hearing him play soft-spoken blues music.
You can’t really blame him, though. For one thing, he was the first to admit that he was out of mind on substances when making most of those records, and can even recall what drugs he was on by listening to his voice at the time, but by Clapton’s metric, there was never an album that seemed as disappointing as Backless.
The record may have scored some decent reviews in its time, but despite still having Carl Radle onhand from Derek and the Dominos, Clapton felt that the only thing that had any grit behind it was ‘Golden Ring’, saying, “I got away with one song on there, ‘Golden Ring’, which I think is the strongest song on the album, because I wrote it because I was fed up with the general sort of apathy of everyone involved, and I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll take a song in there and whether they like it or not, we’ll do it, they’ll learn it and record it and we’ll put it on the record and that’s that!’”
And it’s not hard to see why many of Clapton’s peers eventually saw something in the track. Slowhand had been an oasis in the middle of the musical wasteland Clapton was working in, but the rest of the record feels too much like a retread of what he was doing, whether that’s coming out with some of his traditional covers or making the kind of downtempo rock and roll that would satisfy everyone who jumped on the hype train with ‘Wonderful Tonight’.
That’s not to say that Clapton can’t pull off soft-spoken material all that well. His Unplugged appearance is still one of the highlights of his career for a reason, but considering how much time and pain had to go into making ‘Tears in Heaven’ or the downtempo version of ‘Layla’, it was clearly something that he had to grow into over time.
But considering how cheesy some of Backless sounded, records like Behind the Sun couldn’t have come fast enough. That didn’t necessarily put Clapton back in the same ‘God’ status as he was in the late 1960s, but it was much easier to see when he was having a lot more fun behind the scenes.
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