‘Layla’: the anthem that almost broke Eric Clapton
“The song got the better of me. I could resist no longer”, that’s what Pattie Boyd said about ‘Layla’, Eric Clapton’s impassioned anthem about his love for her that kick-started their affair. To her, even amidst the terrifying context of realising her husband’s best friend was actively pursuing her and that this song would blow her life up, it was still “the most powerful, moving song” she had ever heard.
Everything about ‘Layla’ feels mythic in a way. You can hear that in the sound as the song feels epic above all other proportions. Not only is Clapton truly playing with his heart, going from the roaring introductory riff to the huge, meandering, cinematic outro, but the desperate lyrics and vocal performance capture a heart so full of emotion it feels like it could burst.
It does burst. Each time I hit play, it’s like being hit with it all over again, as if, even decades later, even after their affair, marriage and divorce, this intense declaration he wrote for Boyd feels just as fizzy and powerful today.
Clapton seems to feel the same, as each time ‘Layla’ comes back around, there’s a slight fear that accompanies it. Obviously, the emotions are a part of that. His love for Boyd was intensely deep as he wrote to her in secret love letters, “If you want me, take me, I am yours. If you don’t want me, please break the spell that binds me”. Add in the future context of their messy relationship, and it makes the core of the track even more tender to revisit.
But there are also more technical issues why the song simply felt like too much for Clapton, leading to him leaving the anthem off his setlists and out of his shows for so long. Maybe it was the power of love that allowed him to do it at first, but as time wore on, Clapton had to essentially admit that he couldn’t keep up with ‘Layla’.
“‘Layla’ is a difficult one because it’s a difficult song to perform live. You have to have a good complement of musicians to get all of the ingredients going, but when you’ve got that… It’s difficult to do as a quartet, for instance, because there are some parts you have to play and sing completely opposing lines, which is almost impossible to do,” he admitted. He kind of wrote himself a trap, clearly being so focused on the emotional power of the song when he crafted it that he didn’t stop to consider how he’d pull it off live on stage.
So, for a long time, he simply didn’t try. Despite the track’s looming success, it didn’t go on tour with him until the 2000s, when he decided to face up to it, along with some other demons.
‘Layla’ was one of many hit songs from the Derek and the Dominos era of Clapton’s life that he’d long since stopped playing. In 2008, when he hit the road with a new band, they encouraged him to confront the past and bring those songs back, including the track that broke him emotionally and musically. “It was the lineup that suggested it, the guitarists. Doyle [Bramhall II] and Derek [Trucks] both expressed so much interest in this stuff that I thought was dead and buried,” he said, admitting that he truly thought the song would never see the light of a stage again.
But it did; ‘Layla’ returned. While still not that often played, Clapton made it clear on that one tour that no anthem would be lost to the doom of time or memory, no song would be too hard for him to dust off, and none of his own creations could ever truly break him.
