Eric Clapton, The Autobiography, read by Bill Nighy It was an incredible life, and at times I didn't believe it was happening to me. One night, for example, Mike Vernon, who owned Blue Horizon Records, asked me to go down to his studio to do some session work, and I found myself playing with Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, two of my all-time heroes. I was absolutely terrified, not because I felt I couldn't carry my weight musically, but because I just didn't know how to behave around these guys. They were incredible. They had these beautiful baggy silk suits on, and they were so sharp, and they were men, and here I was, a skinny young white boy. But it was fine. We cut a song called Pretty Girls Everywhere I Go, and I played lead over Muddy's rhythm while Otis sang and played piano. I was in heaven, and they seemed to be pretty happy with what I did. At this point, people began to talk about me as if I was some kind of genius, and I heard that someone had written the slogan Clapton is God on the wall of Islington Underground Station. Then it started to spring up all over London. I was a bit mystified by this, and part of me ran a mile from it. I didn't really want that kind of notoriety. I knew it would bring some kind of trouble. Another part of me really liked the idea that what I'd been fostering all these years was finally getting some recognition. The fact is, of course, that through my playing, people were being exposed to another kind of music which was new to them, and I was getting all the credit for it as if I'd invented the blues. Musically, we didn't really have a plan. In my mind, when I had fantasized about it, I had seen myself as Buddy Guy, heading a blues trio with a very good rhythm section. I didn't know how Ginger and Jack saw it in their heads, except that I'm sure it would have been more jazz-orientated. Since Stigwood probably had no idea what we were doing either, it's clear that the whole project was a colossal gamble. The very idea that a guitar, bass, and drum trio could make any headway in the era of the pop group was pretty outrageous. Our next step was to think of a name for the band, and I came up with Cream, for the very simple reason that in all our minds we were the cream of the crop, the elite in our respective domains. I defined the music we would play as blues, ancient and modern. Cream took a while to really take off. From a huge audience at our debut at the Windsor Jazz Festival, we were straight away back on the ballroom and club circuit, starting on the 2nd of August at Kluk's Kleek, an R&B club in West Hampstead, London, working hard to persuade audiences that a trio could be every bit as good as a loud four-piece pop group, and we were also still finding our direction. We felt we needed to play material that was recognisable, but that would also push the boundaries of what the audience would approve. In the end, the solution was often just to jam. I never discussed our musical direction with the others because I didn't then know how to verbalise anything. So most of the conversation-stroke arguments took place between Jack and Ginger, who were both writing their own material, in particular Jack, who was working a lot with the lyricist and poet Peter Brown. Peter had a band called the Battered Ornaments and had a knack of writing quirky song lyrics, which Jack would put music to, songs with titles like She Was Like a Bearded Rainbow and Deserted Cities of the Heart. The only way I had to influence the direction of the group was in the way I played, and by suggesting new cover versions of old blues songs like Howlin' Wolves' Sitting on Top of the World and Outside Woman by Blind Joe Reynolds. The dynamic of playing in a trio greatly influenced my style in that I had to think of ways to make more sound. When I was playing in a quartet, with keyboard, bass and drums, I could just ride on the top of the band, making musical comments coming in and out at will. In a trio, I had to provide a lot more of the sound, and I found that difficult, because I didn't really enjoy having to play so much. My technique altered quite a lot in that I started playing a lot more barre chords and hitting open strings to provide a kind of drone for my lead work. Naturally, Stigwood was keen to get us the hit single that all bands strived for, and we had a few days in August recording at a studio in Chalk Farm which produced one song, Wrapping Paper, written by Jack and Peter, which was eventually to find its way onto the A-side of our first 45 rpm. But it was in September, in Rhymuse Studios, a tiny studio above a chemist's shop in South Moulton Street, that we finally recorded a song that gave an indication of our true potential as a band. Another of Jack and Peter's compositions, I Feel Free, was a faster, rockier song with a driving beat. Recorded on a single Ampex reel-to-reel recorder, Stigwood, assisted by the studio engineer John Timperley, took credit as producer himself, though the truth is that it was an ensemble job. Because Stigwood saw this song as a potential single, he chose to leave it off our first album, Fresh Cream, and both were released simultaneously at the end of December. One day, George Terry came in with an album called Burnin' by Bob Marley and the Wailers, a band I'd never heard of. When he played it to me, I was mesmerised. He especially liked the track I Shot the Sheriff and kept saying to me, You ought to cut this, you ought to cut this, we could make it sound great. But it was hardcore reggae, and I wasn't sure we could do it justice. We did a version of it anyway, but I wasn't that enamoured with the way it turned out. Scar, Blue Beat and reggae were familiar mediums to me. I'd grown up hearing them in the clubs and on the radio because of our growing communities of West Indians, but it was quite new to the Americans, and they weren't as finicky as I was about the way it should be played. Not that I knew myself how to play it, I just knew that we weren't doing it right. When we got to the end of the sessions and started to collate the songs we had, I told them that I didn't think Sheriff should be included, as it didn't do the Wailers version justice. But everyone said, No, no, honestly, this is a hit. And sure enough, when the album was eventually released and the record company chose it as a single, to my utter astonishment, it went straight to number one. Though I didn't meet Bob Marley till much later, he did call me up when the single came out and seemed pretty happy with what we'd done. I tried to ask him what the song was all about, but couldn't understand much of his reply. I was just relieved that he liked it.