(Credit: Alamy)
Fri 15 August 2025 15:30, UK
The storied and celebrated career of guitar maestro Eric Clapton is littered with a roll call of some of popular music’s titanic characters.
Even before he embarked on his solo career in the early 1970s, Clapton had rubbed shoulders with the era’s greats through his cycle of bands and projects. John Mayall, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Steve Winwood, and forming the venerated guitar alumni of The Yardbirds, along with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. While always harbouring diffidence with the psychedelic pop trends, Clapton and his trusty Gibson SG would stand as the leading forces of the counterculture before the decade was through.
One of his most defining cuts was initially uncredited. Of only a handful of artists to ever enter The Beatles’ creative circle, Clapton was invited to the EMI Studios in early September 1968 to gift the Fab Four with their most electric solo they’d ever commit to record, unleashing the raw and soaring shred that spikes the spiritual ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ from that year’s double album.
Clapton’s invitee was George Harrison. Having befriended each other four years earlier when Cream opened for The Beatles at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, Harrison brought Clapton into the Fab Four’s inner sanctum to boost his songwriting presence amid John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s intimidating songbook, as well as ease the fracturing tensions that spelt the band’s beginning of the end.
A close companionship was forged from then on. Harrison would return the favour and co-write Cream’s final single ‘Badge’ from 1969’s Goodbye, and Clapton played on Harrison’s All Things Must Pass triple-LP and guested on The Concert for Bangladesh benefit show.
Yet, beneath the matiness was a howling yearn for Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd, the subject of Derek and the Dominos’ epic ‘Layla’ dropped in 1970. Ever a zen and magnanimous bloke, Harrison took it well when their marriage dissolved and Boyd became Clapton’s first wife.
The pair took different paths, Harrison following his affinity with Hindu spirituality, and Clapton lost in alcohol, heroin, and domestic abuse, but the two remained friends throughout the 1980s. In 1991, Harrison embarked on the second and final solo tour of his career, playing 12 dates across Japan and bringing Clapton along with him, performing a majority of solo and Beatles numbers with Clapton playing his own material in the middle of the set.
“I always thought of George as being a little like the elder brother that I never had,” Clapton revealed to a Tokyo press conference shortly before the tour’s start. “…so I respect his judgment and his values, and I think he’s a wonderful man…I like the way he bends the strings too”.
More than any other musician who plays a part in the Clapton story, a brotherly bond and comradeship colour his and Harrison’s friendship quite unlike anyone else. It’s a relationship he’d never forget, stepping up as musical director for 2002’s Concert for George show at the Royal Albert Hall, a year after his death.
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