Derek and the Dominoes: The Domino effect

Eric Clapton married Pattie Boyd in 1979 after years of angst, much of it expressed in his music. Photo / Supplied

Eric Clapton documented his feelings for Pattie Boyd via his music. Graham Reid looks at the reissue of his best love songs.

The former British model Pattie Boyd - who met her first husband George Harrison during the filming of the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night in 1964 - inspired a remarkable number of songs.

Harrison wrote Something ("in the way she moves") and others about her, and when she later took up with Harrison's best friend Eric Clapton, Clapton wrote about her in the rather vacuous Wonderful Tonight in 1977.

Clapton's most important song about her however was the agonised Layla in 1971 ("you've got me on my knees, I'm beggin' darling, please") into which he poured torn emotions - the unavailable wife of his best friend - while grappling with heroin addiction and the emotional demands of a rapid career from small clubs to Guitar Legend by his mid-20s.

In six years he'd gone through the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Blues Breakers, the supergroup Cream and the short-lived Blind Faith. By the close of the 60s he was worn out so tried to disappear: he played in John and Yoko's informal Plastic Ono Band; became the almost invisible sideman in Delaney and Bonnie and Friends' travelling show; and sat in on Harrison's solo recording sessions.

But proximity to Harrison also meant falling in love with his wife and, rebuffed, he took up with her sister Paula - just to be closer to Pattie. It was complex, not helped by alcohol and drugs.

Then with members of Delaney and Bonnie's now-defunct band - keyboard player/singer Bobby Whitlock, drummer Jim Gordon and bassist Carl Radle - he went to Miami to record.

During these shapeless sessions - lots of jamming, few cohesive songs - Clapton saw the Allman Brothers Band play and invited slide guitarist Duane Allman to join them in the studio. From that session Layla - based on a Persian poem of thwarted love - emerged, with that long coda of Allman's slide over Whitlock's piano.

There were other songs about Pattie Harrison on the subsequent album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs which appeared in 1971 and was attributed to Derek and the Dominos: Bellbottom Blues ("it's all wrong, but it's alright"); I Looked Away; and their versions of Have You Ever Loved a Woman? and I Am Yours.

From heart-clutching blues to free-flowing jams with Allman (the urgent Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?), the album - an emotional and musical breakthrough for Clapton which put him in touch with soulful American R&B - was pivotal in Clapton's career, although it suffered indifferent reviews and poor sales.

Then 18 months later an edited version of Layla took off as a single.

By then heroin and whiskey were taking their toll, Clapton was distraught at the deaths of Hendrix (days after they recorded his Little Wing) then Allman (within months), and Derek and the Dominoes never finished their second album.

Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs now gets the 40th anniversary double-disc reissue/remastered treatment with extra unreleased, live and remixed material, very little repeating what was on the 20th anniversary three-CD edition.

There are the Spector-produced B-sides Roll it Over (with Harrison) and Tell the Truth, with various Dominoes, recorded during Harrison's All Things Must Pass sessions; four songs from Johnny Cash's television show (including Carl Perkins' Matchbox with Perkins on rockabilly guitar); remixed tracks for the unreleased album (the guitar-work on Snake Lake Blues and their version of Willie Dixon's Evil are terrific); and two jams on Got to Get Better in a Little While (the longer version with Whitlock's vocals and keyboards overdubbed last year). But in the ache of Layla and other Pattie-inspired songs you feel Clapton playing from within himself.

The pair married in 1979 and divorced a decade later. But Pattie, now 67, lives on in Something, her 2007 autobiography and, of course, the extraordinary Layla album.

Derek and the Dominoes
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs: 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
Rating: 4.5/5
Verdict: Out of his darkest days Clapton's genius shone, and now the light goes widescreen

- TimeOut