(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 9 December 2025 12:00, UK
With age often comes perspective – ideally, a chance to reflect, take accountability, and grow. For Eric Clapton, that’s been true in some areas of his life, but in others, not so much.
When the history books have noted down your every move, it must be tough having your bad behaviour locked in and immortal now. Especially for the most famous musicians around, their every fight and fall-out is noted down. Fans and music historians make that their business to archive artists’ lowest moments and analyse them year on year to understand what went wrong with a certain act or how a particular event came to be.
It’s easy to forget that at the heart of it all are simply real people. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a snappy comment thrown out on a bad day be captured forever in history, but for the biggest rockers around, they can, as grouchy spats are noted into timelines.
As the years went on, Clapton has reflected on that more and more, reconsidering how he behaved back in his youth and coming to regret it. Now an old man, he looks back on his early days in his 20s, a time when his career was just beginning to boom, and feels embarrassed.
He’s not embarrassed by the music; instead, it falls on the version of the man who was making it, as Clapton’s impression of his 20-something self isn’t the one he wishes he could have. Rather than pride, he looks back with remorse that even sent him reuniting with his old bandmates to make it better.
“I went through all those things very quickly,” he said, reflecting on how his early career passed in a parade of bands he started and then swiftly quit or collapsed, adding, “I mean, Cream was like a year and a half or something, and even with John Mayall, I was only half there.”
Now, he can not only see his lack of commitment, but can see how unfair and frustrating that must have been for his bandmates – especially Mayall. “I was so unreliable, so irresponsible. I would sometimes just not show up at gigs, and that’s how Peter Green would be asked to play—because I was not there,” he said, now feeling shame at that behaviour.
As he’s matured, Clapton knows it wouldn’t and shouldn’t stand today. He’d never accept that kind of lazy behaviour from any of his collaborators now, and so, in the reflection of that, he’s grown embarrassed that it was ever the impression he gave others of himself, ashamed that he once had the reputation of being careless and unreliable.
The feeling of shame was so intense that he even went to fix it. “I went to see John last year to actually make amends. I’d been looking back and realised how badly I’d behaved,” he said as he went running to John Mayall, apologising to him before the singer passed.
There’s an obvious elephant in the room here. It’s nice to hear of Clapton reflecting on his bad behaviour in bands, but what of his bad behaviour in life? Back in the 1970s, Clapton went on one of the most repugnant racist rants live on stage that the music world has ever seen, even prompting the formation of Rock Against Racism with his musical peers speaking out against him.
In 2018, he seemed to have a similar wave of remorse there, too. “I sabotaged everything I got involved with. I was so ashamed of who I was,” he said, but since his political alignments have remained just as confusing as he now positively throws his influence behind the Palestinian cause, but has also dedicated time to criticising Covid vaccines and trying to defend fox hunting, keeping his moral character as conflicted as ever.
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