(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Eric Clapton)
Sat 27 September 2025 16:40, UK
Guitar virtuoso Eric Clapton really didn’t deserve George Harrison’s friendship.
The pair’s friendship went back to the peak of Beatlemania. Supporting the Fab Four at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in 1964 as support with The Yardbirds, a rock comradeship would develop across the years, leading to Clapton’s invitation to lay down ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ scorching solo, and Harrison co-writing Cream’s final single ‘Badge’ the following year.
Fractures began to emerge, however. As The Beatles were all but dissolved in 1970, Clapton was privately struck with cupid’s arrow toward Harrison’s wife of four years, Pattie Boyd, the subject behind Abbey Road’s immortal ‘Something’ love song. Burning with unrequited passion, Clapton slyly asked Boyd to meet him in secret at a South Kensington flat to hear a recent cut from his latest Derek and the Dominoes project. “He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard,” Boyd recalled in 2007’s Wonderful Today memoir. “It was ‘Layla.’”
Clapton’s passionate howl of a song obviously planted a seed. That night, during a gathering at manager Robert Stigwood’s house, Harrison sought out Boyd, only to find her seemingly in deep conversation with the former Cream guitarist.
“George came over and demanded, ‘What’s going on?’, Boyd recalled. To my horror, Eric said, ‘I have to tell you, man, that I’m in love with your wife.’ I wanted to die. George was furious. He turned to me and said: ‘Well, are you going with him or coming with me?’” Boyd decided to go home with Harrison right then and there.
As the years passed, Boyd and Harrison’s marriage would hit ever-rockier waters. Harrison’s devotion to Indian spirituality began to alienate Boyd, and difficulties in starting a family, as well as mutual affairs with future Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood—as alleged in his Ronnie: The Autobiography—and Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen, began to take their toll. Clapton’s unrequited feelings spelled a period of depression, locking himself away in his Hurtwood Edge mansion in Surrey and snorting heroin most days.
In 1974, Clapton turned up drunk at the couple’s Friar Park estate, lost in his infatuation. Harrison’s response was to engage in a rock battle. “George handed him a guitar and an amp—as an 18th-century gentleman might have handed his rival a sword—and for two hours, without a word, they duelled,” Boyd recalled. “At the end, nothing was said but the general feeling was that Eric had won. He hadn’t allowed himself to get riled or go in for instrumental gymnastics as George had. Even when he was drunk, his guitar-playing was unbeatable”.
Actor John Hurt was also present, stating the clash was “extraordinary… The air was electric. Nobody dare say a word,” but Clapton always minimised the anecdote. Boyd and Clapton would eventually wed in 1979, and his alcoholism, affairs, and admitted instances of abuse would result in her walking away eight years later. With Clapton candidly revealing his brotherly affection for the former Beatle over the years, Boyd has mused whether such desires for her were born from a sibling-like competition, stating in 2006’s Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs book: “Eric just wanted what George had”.
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