![]() Clapton and Fairweather Low rehearsed for a week in Chelsea and then spent two days with the rest of the band working out how to play the set acoustically. The audience had all been asked to wear dark clothes, to fit in with a set that used drapes to create the feel of a nightclub.Ĭlapton credited guitarist Andy Fairweather Low with restructuring four of his original songs and a range of blues classics so they would work in an acoustic context, calling him the “backbone” of the project. The studio audience of 300 was made up of 100 invited guests and 200 winners of a BBC Radio 1 quiz, and they met in central London on Thursday, 16 January 1992, to be taken in coaches to Bray Studios, in Berkshire, for a concert beginning at 6.15pm. The album was the audio recording of a concert shown as part of the MTV Unplugged series – a show that began in 1989 and which had already featured Sting, Paul McCartney and Mariah Carey – and filming was kept secret. “I was shocked at the sales – and very pleased” Listen to Eric Clapton’s ‘Unplugged’ album here. Released on 25 August 1992, Unplugged became the best-selling live album of all time, with 26 million copies sold worldwide. I mean wouldn’t sell anything,” the guitarist recalled in 2012. “I didn’t really want it to be an album, to be honest, and I bet Roger that it wouldn’t sell. It was in payment of a bet Clapton had with his then manager, Roger Forrester, about whether the Unplugged album would be successful. ![]() They offer their space to you, and that’s also part of being a great human being – orĪ decent human being, anyway.Eric Clapton’s signed cheque for $100 ended up framed in a Warner Records executive office. Playing with great musicians, the best ones have always been very humble. Humility is a big part of being a good musician, that’s been my experience. It makes me feel bad, everybody gets tainted by it, so I try to shut that stuff down. I mean, I could convince myself that it does and make that up as an excuse: “Oh, this stuff is important.” I’m careful enough to know that the minute I’m going down that road towards self-importance – Like, “By the way, what I’m about to do on this guitar doesn’t seem like much, but this is how we all get to live like this, this is how you got that new dress”, all of that – then it’s a pretty disagreeable place to be for everybody. That’s clearly been a positive change in your personal life, but does it have any negative effects on your creativity? I thought, maybe there’s something else? I have to live with another human being and take on what their requirements might be, and give up a lot of my selfish pursuits. When that ran out, I could see I was just doing the same thing again and it wasn’t really fulfilling me as a human being. My goal was excitement and pleasure, and that had a shelf life. I’d meet new people, or have brief affairs with people. I found – especially when I was using and drinking and everything back in the day – that the road didn’t provide the answers anymore, though for a long time it did. I think I’ve been working towards that, and as a human being I’ve been craving that. ![]() Was it difficult in the past to strike a happy balance between life and work? I’m not just a shiftless, wandering idiot anymore. I’ve got a different perspective on the whole thing. What have you got on?” And we just work it out like that. My wife and I sit down at the beginning of each week and say, “What have you got to do?” “Well, I’ve said I’ll do this but I don’t have to do it. Now, I’m a family man, and all this stuff has to work around that. There was a normality probably in the early days, where there was a van, there was equipment, a band, and you’d get one job and the idea was to just keep travelling and working and playing gigs, without any idea of where it was all going to end up. Off the road, do you have a regular routine?Īs a human being, or as a musician – no, I don’t. Used to hate them at one time, but now I love them because – yes, you eventually have to arrive at the point where everyone says, “OK, we better do what we’re supposed to be doing” – but up until that point, we always enter an unknown area where we’re all playing something that has no connection to anything, and that’s magic. I like that atmosphere, if you’ve got a good-sounding venue, big or small, and it just sounds right, and you have a couple of people who can play and you put them together and you don’t really have an idea of what you’re going to do. “Hoochie Coochie Man”, stuff like that.ĭo you regard yourself primarily as a live musician? Just things that are recognisable for the crowd but fairly approachable for me. And a slow blues, “Before You Accuse Me” or something like that, and I’ll do “Layla” acoustic. We’re probably always going to do “Cocaine”, because that’s a great closer, a finishing song. Which songs in your catalogue always deliver the goods onstage?
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