(Credits: Far Out / Video Still)
Sat 27 September 2025 14:00, UK
It’s nice for any guitarist to thrive on a healthy sense of competition. Eric Clapton knew that the best credence of any blues guitarist is to keep trying to get better, but even if he was considered a musical god, he knew when the biggest acts in the world were outpacing him with their material.
But for most rock and roll fans, what ‘Slowhand’ was doing at the start of his career was unlike anything they had ever heard. All the great rock and roll started with the blues, but here was a kid who actually managed to track down all of those early records and come back with the kind of music that most people thought was impossible to get under their fingers. And even as far back as The Yardbirds, Clapton knew that he could make tunes that would send any other British invasion act running scared.
At the same time, The Yardbirds were never meant to be one of the biggest acts in the world. They had their fair share of exciting moments, but listening back to their classics, it’s not like their take on pop music wasn’t even going to give the lower-tier British invasion acts like Dave Clark Five a run for their money. If there’s one thing they had a knack for, it was their taste in guitarists.
Clapton was obviously the big frontrunner, but even after he left, bringing in Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck was a match made in musical heaven. All of them may have been friends with each other around this time, but if Clapton wanted the chance to become a legend, he knew that he needed to jump ship and not get caught in the same pop bubble that his bandmates were stuck in with tracks like ‘For Your Love’.
That’s not to say that Clapton wasn’t a big fan of pop music, either. He liked the idea of working with The Beatles whenever they asked for a guitarist back in the day, but in terms of the true blues titans, The Rolling Stones were everything the genre could be. They didn’t sacrifice their credentials for the sake of having pop tunes, and even as early as hits like ‘Satisfaction’, Clapton figured that it was better for him to find a new gig.
Because as far as he was concerned, The Stones were hitting the nail on the head for what The Yardbirds were supposed to be, saying, “The Stones were a bit older than us and a little bit further down the road in terms of confidence and experience. So The Yardbirds followed on. We were never going to catch up.” And, really, it was for the best to hear Clapton find his own trip outside of The Yardbirds.
John Mayall helped him hone his chops as a blues player, but once he started working with Cream, no one was going to mistake him for being a discount version of Brian Jones or Mick Taylor. He had found his muse by making elongated jams, and even when he started incorporating singer-songwriter elements into his solo work, he never wanted to feel like he was cribbing from The Stones in any way.
Every British invasion from that time may have seemed like one big musical family at times, but Clapton would rather have gone down playing the craziest music that anyone ever conceived than having to live in The Stones’ shadow. It was hard to hate what they were doing at the time, but Clapton learned a valuable lesson about how the music industry works: if you can’t beat ‘em, you can always go somewhere else.
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