When George Harrison and Pattie Boyd met on the set of A Hard Day’s Night in 1964, it was a dream come true for them. Their enduring friendship is a testament to their deep love for each other. It is clear that Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd have remained close friends despite their tumultuous past. In recent years, they have been seen together at various events, most recently Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2019.

They divorced in 1988, but remained friends. They were married in 1979, but their relationship was plagued by Clapton’s infidelity and addiction problems.

They were instantly attracted to each other and began a whirlwind romance. They met in 1964, when Clapton was a member of the Beatles and Boyd was a model. His 1956 Fender Stratocaster, “Brownie” – with which he wrote his hit “Layla” – sold for a record-breaking $497,500 at Christie’s in New York.Ĭlapton admitted he could lose his entire fortune on the funding of Crossroads but said he “is prepared to go down in flames with this because my heart is in it.”Ĭlapton moved to Antigua in 1991 when his 4-year-old son Conor fell 53 stories to his death from a New York skyscraper.Eric Clapton and Pattie Boyd were one of the most iconic couples of the 20th century. Last week, Clapton auctioned off 150 of his guitars, raising nearly $5 million for the rehab facility. Nowadays, Clapton said he is concentrating on the Crossroads Center, a drug and alcohol-treatment clinic he opened on the Caribbean island of Antigua. “So I slung that away, I got rid of that, and I thought, ‘What am I? What am I, really?'” He said if he needed a drink to write a song, “then perhaps being a musician was not such a great idea. “I had all that stuff, but I still wanted to die most nights,” he said.Ĭlapton said that the pressure of being a musician led to his drinking. The rock legend, who rose to fame during the 1960s as head of the rock trio Cream before embarking on a solo career, said he was plagued with heavy bouts of depression – even at the height of his career. When I’d come back from the pub I could come back happy, or I could come back and smash the place up.”īoyd left ex-Beatle George Harrison to marry Clapton in 1979. They didn’t know if I was going to be angry or whatever. “Everyone used to walk around me on eggshells. I had absolutely no concern for other people,” Clapton said. “There were times when I took sex with my wife by force and thought that was my entitlement.

The Grammy-award winning guitarist tells London’s Sunday Times today that he was such a “full-blown” alcoholic that it had a devastating effect on his marriage to Boyd during the 1980s. Rock superstar Eric Clapton has admitted for the first time that he was so addicted to drugs and alcohol that he beat his first wife, Patti Boyd.

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