Speaking recently, Eric Clapton has revealed how he dealt with the harrowing events of the tragic death of his four year old son Conor in 1991.
Conor Clapton accidentally fell from a window of a 53 foot apartment in New York. This event caused grieving father Eric to isolate himself from the rest of the world. These terrible events also inspired Clapton to write his popular track “Tears In Heaven”.
“sort of a community”
Speaking to BBC Radio, Eric Clapton shared an insight into how he dealt with such a harrowing event. He also explained how “Tears in Heaven” came about.
“I had, I brought him (Clapton’s son) home from New York with the Italian side of his mother’s family, and we went through the process of the funeral, and when they left”, Clapton said.
He also added, “And that I had this little Spanish guitar, I became attached to that. And I went away. I went off to Antigua, and I rented a little cottage there, in a sort of a community”.
“And I just swatted mosquitoes all day and played this guitar and stayed there for almost a whole year without much contact with the outside world”.
On his single “Tears in Heaven”, Eric Clapton also added, “I tried to heal myself, and all I could do was play and write these songs, and I rewrote and re-performed them again and again and again until I felt like I’d made some sort of move towards the surface of my being”.
“And then I was able to come out. It was so deep, and I had thought that I had taken care of it until I saw [the 2018 movie] ‘Life in 12 Bars”.
“And it’s very disturbing for me, but beautiful at the same time, the way it’s handled in the film. The footage I haven’t seen of him before, which is difficult to watch, with the underlying music”.
“And playing ‘Tears in Heaven,’ I mean, it’s overwhelming, and I’ve got to go and do it again in a few days’ time”.
Eric Clapton also recently spoke in a separate interview, where he acussed Rolling Stone Magazine of launching a “slur campaign” against him. More on that here.
