(Credits: Far Out / Chris Hakkens)
Sat 16 August 2025 16:00, UK
Purely based on how busy their schedules are, there’s simply no time to have your finger constantly on the pulse and be discovering new music, and for people like Eric Clapton, you can possibly forgive them for not always knowing what the latest trends are.
When your career begins to slow down, you are then afforded more time to binge-listen to new music and discover things that you may otherwise have missed out on, but that doesn’t always mean that artists find something that tickles their fancy. It’s often the case that they become so enveloped by their own work and the sounds of their contemporaries that anything new simply lacks the same sense of excitement and is perceived as boring.
It’s only when new artists emerge who aren’t too far removed from their comfort zones that the rockers of old tend to keep paying attention, and while there have been exceptions to this rule, such as the ever-knowledgable David Bowie, the general feeling among older stars is that music has drifted away from what they considered to be exciting at the peak of their powers.
Clapton may have been busy from the 1960s onwards, but by the 1990s, his release and touring schedule had begun to calm down considerably, and with that came a newfound appreciation for the contemporary sounds that were emerging in the UK. Granted, he may have expressed a distaste for a large part of the Britpop movement, but alongside that came a handful of acts who were a little more cerebral in their approach to rock music, with Radiohead leading the charge in this regard.
Speaking to journalist Bob Mills in 1998 about his discovery of the band, only a year after they’d released their landmark third album, OK Computer, Clapton praised the band for creating something that felt genuinely exciting for him. “I heard ‘Paranoid Android’,” the guitarist proclaimed, “The structure of that song swept me away. It tuned me into what music is about. It made me think of like great classical music, opera.”
Clapton would go on to praise the unique vocal delivery of Thom Yorke, claiming that it was incomparable to anything else that was happening at the time. “The structure of it, the singing,” he said, “I don’t think he really works very hard, but he’s just got the gift”.
Surprisingly, the guitarist also revealed an appreciation for another alternative ‘90s star in a later interview with Stern, singling out trip-hop pioneer and former Massive Attack contributor Tricky, despite thinking that it was the name of a band rather than an individual.
He may not have appreciated or understood much when it came to other music being released at the time, but Radiohead certainly scratched an itch for him, and one could argue that they were the band that reignited a love of rock in many listeners, young and old, at a time when it had been on the decline.
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