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It’s easy to be envious of the talents of Eric Clapton, but a session guitarist, famed for his time working with Roger Waters, says the Pink Floyd bass player was “resentful” of Slowhand.
The comments come from Tim Renwick’s new interview with Guitar Player. The guitarist, who has also starred in Elton John’s band, was part of the group Waters assembled for his 1984 The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking album and tour, with Clapton and Pink Floyd collaborator Michael Kamen also part of the picture. Indeed, Clapton’s guitar solo exploits litter the concept album.
Like Kamen, who helped arrange orchestras for The Wall and played on its succeeding tour, Renwick arrived on the scene having already had previous experience with Pink Floyd. He’d toured A Momentary Lapse of Reason for two years with the group – and would record on The Division Bell a decade later – and he says that Waters didn’t take kindly to how the audience reacted to Clapton’s playing.
“It wasn’t as lighthearted as it could have been,” Renwick says of the tour, with Waters running a tight ship. “He took everything very seriously and tended to want everything to sound exactly the same as the record; he was very vigilant.”
“Roger was a bit resentful of the fact that whenever Eric Clapton got up and played a solo, the place would erupt,” he adds. “People would get their lighters out, and there would be a tremendous outpouring of applause.
“And that annoyed Roger quite a lot because, rightly or wrongly, he felt that the audience weren’t actually listening to the songs. They were just watching out for what Eric was doing. So there was a certain amount of resentment there.”
Waters, however, surely knew what he was letting himself in for by welcoming the guitarist into his band. Nearly 20 years earlier, one superfan had graffitied “Clapton is God” onto a London wall – an honor Clapton would later tell Guitar World he deserved – and as the years went by, that hype around him never diminished. The reaction of the audience should have come as no surprise.
In related news, the acoustic guitar that Eric Clapton and George Harrison both wrote hits on went to auction late last year, just months after it was listed on Reverb for a cool $1 million.