(Credits: Far Out / Showtime Documentary Films)
Sat 18 October 2025 13:00, UK
Admit it: when you go to see a legend, you want to hear the biggest anthems, especially if they’re ones you grew up on or have waited decades to hear live after perhaps accepting that maybe you never will. While there are many feelings it may bring up in the artist, for Eric Clapton, he feels bad.
He’s not alone in that fact, as there are plenty of artists who openly and loudly resent the pressure to play the greatest hits. If you call out for ‘Creep’ at a Radiohead show, prepare to be heckled out of the room by the band themselves. If you’re going to see Bob Dylan, hoping to hear ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, prepare for disappointment as he’s one of the people taking the approach to just straight up deny his own crowd.
It’s a question of risk and a game of boldness, and that’s the dilemma legends have to face. They either have to make a hard and fast break, deciding at one point to once and for all cut a certain track from their set list, or accept that it will be there forever, likely always as the final encore song that everyone is waiting for.
Some people didn’t mind that, though. Take Prince as a perfect example, as the artist never once seemed to get bored of shredding his way through ‘Purple Rain’, always improvising a new bit or another, sometimes even extending it to way beyond ten minutes as if he couldn’t get enough of it even years, decades, after it was released into the world. But for Clapton and his biggest hits, he quickly started to feel exhausted by them.
‘Sunshine of Your Love’ was one of them but in that case, he made the decision to axe it quick. “We only did that a couple of times,” he said in 1975 as he’d quickly tired of playing the 1967 track. Throughout the ‘80s, it was a rare one to hear him play, but it seems that his feelings towards it have loosened again as in recent years, it’s found itself firmly back on the setlist.
His other huge hit is still a rarity, though. “I feel like I’m compromising myself doing ‘Layla’ every night,” he said to Rolling Stone back then, where his relationship towards playing the track live was already complex. It felt like a deal he was annoyingly tied into, and because he didn’t want to play the older Cream song, he had to give the fans ‘Layla’ instead.
Part of the issue is that ‘Layla’ is not an easy one to play live, noting about the stress-inducing experience, “You have to have a good complement of musicians to get all of the ingredients going, but when you’ve got that… It’s difficult to do as a quartet, for instance, because there are some parts you have to play and sing completely opposing lines, which is almost impossible to do.”
But mostly, it’s about the rigmarole of adhering to what fans want, and how they want it delivered, whereby he claimed that “You can’t progress much with the format of that song. It’s locked in there and you have to do it almost the same every night”. Add to that the trickiness of the track, and it becomes a whole mess of difficulty that leaves little to no room for fun or improvisation, which is a sure-fire recipe for boredom or stagnation, especially in a concert setting.
“It’s sort of … disheartening in a way,” he admitted, falling into the curse so many artists know well as he added, “you can only sing a song like that so many times before you run out of passion for it”.
Related Topics