Review: Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars

Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars (15)

UK 2017  128 mins Dir: Lili Fini Zanuck

Lili Fini Zanuck’s workmanlike, mostly chronological rockumentary about the man they used to call God benefits from privileged access to great archive footage and home movies as it works its way through the bullet points of Eric Clapton’s life and his amusing sartorial/tonsorial experiments (including that regrettable perm). But her chosen format – voiceovers, many from beyond the grave, and no talking heads – proves limiting and a huge swathe of his career is glossed over. New insights for those who are familiar with the story, as recounted in Slowhand’s bestselling autobiography? Nada. Nothing. Zilch.

Still, he’s led quite a life and the early part of it is well covered here, beginning with his discovery that the woman he thought of as his absent sister was in fact his mother and he’d actually been raised by his doting grandparents. Zanuck returns to this several times, her thesis being that Clapton’s cruel rejection by his mother explains much of his subsequent travails – especially with women.

Discovering the blues on a children’s radio show (no, really), the young Clapton became obsessed, swiftly mastering the guitar and joining the Yardbirds. He then bailed on them, somewhat snootily, when they “went pop” with For Your Love, subsequently joining forces with one-man British blues factory John Mayall. There’s an amusing early interview in which he dismisses the Beatles as “a bunch of wankers” – with the exception of George Harrison, whose wife, Pattie Boyd, he would subsequently cop off with. Indeed, his love life is covered in more depth than much of his music, though at least the great Duane Allman gets his due for his vital contribution to the lovelorn Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs album.

A highly entertaining lo-fi recording of a stoned conversation with Jimi Hendrix is used to underline the guitar greats’ friendship – though Zanuck does not find room to mention Clapton’s trauma at being knocked off his pedestal when the American interloper got on stage in London to jam with Cream, immediately becoming the talk of the town. Issues of race are tackled in early interviews, with Clapton expressing the hope that white audiences will eventually be persuaded to, in the vernacular of the time, “dig spades singing the blues”, rendering his white boy blueser ilk redundant. It didn’t quite work out that way. Later, he observes sagely that the blues will only be accepted in America when civil rights are accepted. Until then, the likes of B.B. King and Otis Redding depend on their mostly white British disciples to reach a mass audience as supporting artists.

All of which leads up to arguably the darkest moment in Clapton’s career: his baffling, offensive racist outburst (“get the wogs out…get the coons out”) on stage in 1976. It’s not mentioned here, but disgust at Clapton’s rant was the catalyst for the founding of Rock Against Racism. His suitably contrite response is to blame his drug addiction and alcoholism (plenty of visual evidence of this is supplied, including home movies of his powdery snout and drunken abuse of audiences who’d expected a little more than a 30 minute set), while underlining the fact that many of his friends and most of the musicians who inspired him are black. But the limitations of the voiceover format now become painfully apparent, as there’s no one on hand to challenge him or probe more deeply into where this racism came from.

It’s at this point that the documentary also goes seriously off the rails in its consideration of Clapton’s music. Whoah! – did Zanuck really just race through ten studio albums from 461 Ocean Boulevard onwards in 30 seconds flat? Indeed she did. Only the tragic death of his son Conor and subsequent Grammy-winning success with the maudlin Tears in Heaven and accompanying Unplugged album is deemed worthy of mention from the last 43 years. Instead, we get a rather abrupt big warm hug of an ending depicting Clapton as a content elder statesman of rock, feted by his idols, equipped with a nice shiny new family and doing a lot of work for charity, which feels rather like one of those airbrushed record company PR biographies.