Observer in a Black Sea Resort
Wonderful to see the great Eric Clapton, now aged 79, talking about Russia, Gaza, Roger Waters and being anti-Western, while giving concerts each night at the Royal Albert Hall.
https://youtu.be/keBw11UZfEs?si=0vOhd6q1eGKTb2Y6
Fast forward to 20’00 into the interview to hear his political views as the first 20 minutes are not so interesting. I never figured Clapton to be politically conscious but he evidently is; but is careful who he talks to on subjects like Gaza, Russia, China and war.
Clapton says he loves Roger Waters and would like to do concerts in St Petersburg with Roger. He says he has loved Russia his whole life, loves Russian music and Russian culture. He will never hate Russia, and doesn’t approve of the anti-Russian and Russiaphobia that is so dominant and forceful in the UK. He likes Vlad and the Oliver Stone interviews on Vlad. And he recalls his good friend, who is into formula racing, telling him he’d take a bullet for Putin.
I like the bit when Clapton talks about Blinken, and he leans into the camera and says: “He should give up the guitar”. I agree.
Clapton says that in the UK the worst thing anyone can do today is to say anything positive about BRICS.
He supports the pro-Palestinian university student protests, admires the stand students at Columbia University have taken, and has painted his own guitar in the colours of the Palestinian flag. He says his daughters have become very anti-Palestine and anti-Russia because of the Western propaganda taught in British universities. Though he doesn’t share his daughters’ views, he will not try to change them. He allows them to be free in their thinking.
Clapton’s advice to Westerners is: “Don’t believe the propaganda on Russia and China – Just go to Russia and China and experience it for yourself.”
Attachments area
Eric Clapton Interview: On Touring, Gaza, Roger Waters, Retirement and What Keeps Him Going
Interesting.
Never expected him to be drawn into political comment but then that is my misconception !
Lots in what he states though most oldies ( including self !) love to be self opinionated.
While it might be wise for Blinken to give up the guitar, Clapton would be advised to keep his mouth shut about politics. “Discerning” is not a word I would apply to him.
It is not Russophobia to be anti-Putin or to condemn his brutality. Just as it is not anti-Semitic to condemn the actions of the Israeli government. Clapton condemns the west for using force. Does he condemn Ukraine for defending itself? Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around. Is it not force to bomb homes, hospitals and to rape civilians?
I am a little bit younger than Clapton and admired him in the 1960s when he was with the Yardbirds (the band also included Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck), John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and Cream. I saw the mighty Cream live in 1966 when I was at Manchester University. The three members of the band cordially loathed each other. Drummer Ginger Baker was a nasty piece of work. My friend Roger Eagle (who knew everybody in the rock world) told me that Baker had raped a friend of his. Jack Bruce had problems with alcohol and heroin and had a liver transplant. I had a drink with him in the early 70s at Band on the Wall. He was very gracious. Clapton is the only one of the trio to be still alive despite his problems with heroin and brandy.
It is a bit rich for Clapton to call western support for Ukraine “right wing”. Putin runs a fascist state and is very similar to Hitler. Clapton has had his fascist moments. Clapton influenced many of my generation with his musical skill and sartorial style. He also influenced many, myself included, to join the Anti-Nazi League, march with Rock Against Racism and subscribe to Searchlight, the brave Anti-Fascist magazine. David Edgar was one of my contemporaries at Manchester University. He wrote a brilliant play about fascism in England, called Destiny. (David also achieved great success with his adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company.)
There was great concern about neo-Nazis in the England of the 1970s. On 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell made a speech to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham. The immediate trigger for the speech was the proposed Race Relations Act, which made it illegal to refuse housing, employment, or public services to a person on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins. It became known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech. This alludes to a prophecy from Virgil’s Aeneid: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” Powell gave examples of what he claimed his constituents had said to him. These examples gave fuel to the racists. “ “In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”.
Powell told the story of one of his constituents: “She is becoming afraid to go out, windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes out to the shops she is followed by children, charming wide-grinning piccaninnies.”
The Times declared it “an evil speech”, stating, “This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history.” The Times went on to record incidents of racial attacks in the immediate aftermath of Powell’s speech. One such incident, reported under the headline “Coloured family attacked”, took place on 30 April 1968 in Powell’s Wolverhampton constituency. It involved a slashing incident with 14 white youths chanting “Powell” and “Why don’t you go back to your own country?” at West Indians attending a christening party. One of the West Indian victims, Wade Crooks of Lower Villiers Street, was the child’s grandfather. He had to have eight stitches over his left eye. He was reported as saying, “I have been here since 1955 and nothing like this has happened before. I am shattered.”
Sir Learie Constantine was among many who condemned the speech. Upon Powell’s death in 1998, Barbados-born Wilfred Wood, then Bishop of Croydon, stated, “Enoch Powell gave a certificate of respectability to white racist views which otherwise decent people were ashamed to acknowledge” Many shadow cabinet ministers threatened to resign if Powell was not sacked. Margaret Thatcher said the speech was “strong meat.” David Goodheart wrote: “Just when a discussion should have been starting about integration, racial justice, and distinguishing the reasonable from the racist complaints of the white people whose communities were being transformed, he polarised the argument and closed it down.”
Michael Foot of the Labour party charitably interpreted Powell’s “rivers of blood reference” from Virgil’s Aeneid as intended merely to communicate his own sense of foreboding” It is unlikely that London dockers or Eric Clapton are familiar with Virgil or would appreciate such nuances.
Edward Heath did sack Powell. 1,000 London dockers went on strike in protest and marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster carrying placards saying, “we want Enoch Powell!”, “Enoch here, Enoch there, we want Enoch everywhere”, “Don’t knock Enoch” and “Back Britain, not Black Britain”. Three hundred of them went into the palace, 100 to lobby the MP for Stepney, Peter Shore, and 200 to lobby the MP for Poplar, Ian Mikardo. Shore and Mikardo were shouted down and some dockers kicked Mikardo. By 27 April, 4,500 dockers were on strike.
On 5 August 1976, Eric Clapton provoked an uproar when he drunkenly ranted about immigration during a concert in Birmingham. Visibly intoxicated, Clapton voiced his support of Powell’s speech. He began his remarks by asking the audience: “Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight? If so, please put up your hands. So where are you? Well, wherever you are, I think you should all just leave. Not just leave the hall, leave our country. I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country.”
Among other things, Clapton said “Keep Britain white!”, which was at the time a National Front slogan. “Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out,” exclaimed Clapton to his audience. “Get the wogs out. Get the coons out.” This is a man who had made a fortune out of the music of poorly paid black men. He excused himself thus: “Half of my friends were black, I dated a black woman, and I championed black music.”
He has made controversial statements in more recent times. Clapton criticised vaccine passports and said he would cancel his UK tour if they were required by the venues he is set to perform in. He described anti-lockdown UK Tory MP (and proven nut-job) Desmond Swayne as a hero. “I continue to tread the path of passive rebellion and try to tow (sic, I think he meant “toe”) the line in order to be able to actively love my family, but it’s hard to bite my tongue with what I now know,” Clapton wrote. Queen’s Brian May (who is a scientist) responded: “There’s plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps. On the whole they’ve been very safe. There’s always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I’m sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.” In 2022 Clapton had to cancel some concerts after testing positive for Covid. Clapton attempted to make a donation supporting conspiracy theorist (a man with a worm in his brain) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign but his contribution was refunded because it “went way over the legal limit.”
I saw Robert Cray perform many years ago. Cray, one of the great blues guitarists of his generation, a five-time Grammy winner and Black man born in segregated Georgia, was a friend of Clapton. When he heard Clapton’s anti-lockdown song Stand and Deliver, Cray emailed Clapton immediately. Was he comfortable comparing lockdown to slavery? Cray says.
Cray also noted that after a show in Austin, Clapton posed backstage with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott had recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state.
“I’d just rather not associate with somebody who’s on the extreme and being so selfish. We started playing a music that wasn’t particularly popular to start off with at the time we started playing. We’ve gained some notoriety, and I’m fine with that, but I surely don’t need to hang out with Eric Clapton for that to continue.”
Cray was also shocked by Clapton’s stance on fox hunting. Brian May referred to Clapton as someone who kills animals for fun. Clapton is a keen game shooter and joined Roger Waters (another nasty piece of work with few friends) at a gig at Highclere Castle in Berkshire in 2006 in support of the Countryside Alliance’s campaign against the ban on fox hunting.
I will not repeat the misinformation that Eric’s real name was “Clapp” but he does spout a lot of claptrap. His birth mother was Patricia Clapton and his father was a Canadian soldier who went back to Canada and did not return. Eric was brought up thinking Patricia was his sister and his grandmother Rose was his mother. Rose’s first husband was called Clapton and her second was Jack Clapp.
Michael O’Leary’s rant against Eric Clapton cannot go by unchallenged.
For O’Leary to tell Clapton to “keep his mouth shut” is the height of anti-free speech and anti-democracy, the very values O’Leary claims to be defending. Clapton has every right to express his views, as O’Leary does. Don’t tell people to shut their mouths just because their views don’t accord with yours. If you heard Clapton, you would have also heard him say he is very careful as to whom he expresses his views about Russia because he doesn’t want to offend others and he knows it is a contentious issue, so for most of the time he does engage in self-censorship. Why is it so wrong to admire Russian music and Russian culture in the West today?
To be fair to Clapton, he did not openly state his support for Putin, but his words suggest he is not buying into Western hate narratives on Putin.
O’Leary falsely equates Russophobia with anti-Putinism. Putin is not Russia. He is the elected head of Russia. Have you heard his speeches? He is actually intelligent. The Western media demonizes him because Russia will not yield to US security and foreign policy which claims American hegemony and their right to dominate the world and to order every country and every leader what to do. The West shows nothing but utter contempt for international law and international institutions.
Russiaphobia manifests itself in the West when we see Russian music being cancelled from Western concerts, when we see the banning of Russian books and writers, when we see the renaming artworks by famous artists long since dead simply to expunge any reference to Russia from the title of an artwork. We see it in the destruction of WW2 monuments across Europe of Russian war heroes who played an important role in defeating Nazi Germany. We see it in those who try to shut down voices that do not buy into Russiaphobia or the Western hate Russia narrative, as O’Leary does here.
O’Leary assumes his position is superior. It is not. Does he not know of the context of what has occurred in Ukraine since 2009? Does he not know of the war that has been raging since 2014 against people of the Donbass and the numbers of people slaughtered by Ukrainian forces prior to February 2022? Does he not know that Ukrainian far right nationalists burned alive 50 people in the town hall of Odessa by setting the building alight and then preventing them from escaping? Does he not understand that Russia has every right to defend its sovereignty from NATO expansionism into Ukraine, just as the US defended its sovereignty in 1962 when Russia deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba? He should read more about history, and not just from a Western perspective.
Of course, Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Clapton never said otherwise.
I don’t think Clapton’s reference to Western support being “right wing” is unfair. It needs unpacking of course, but it is fair. To claim Putin runs a fascist state is sheer nonsense – blatant western propaganda talking points.
I am sure Clapton has done many things in his life he may have regretted, as all of us have done. He was very much younger in 1976 and many people of that age group (15 to 25) tend to do stupid things. O’Leary’s attempts to drag an incident from 1976, almost 50 years ago, and to weaponize it against Clapton is unfair. And I am not sure O’Leary’s version of the events he refers to are correct as he is clearly prejudiced in his views.
It is clear O’Leary objects to a viewpoint of Russian that does not conform to the Western narrative, and that he is unable to discern the extent to which Western propaganda has infected the whole Russia debate in order to promote Russiaophobia as a means to escalate the war to a world war as we are now seeing.
The rest of O’Leary anti-Clapton text doesn’t merit any further comment, except to say it is appalling, especially his anti-free speech views. Just because people have different views about Russia is not a reason to shut them dow. In fact O’Leary has himself given a fine example of Russophobia. His attack on Clapton is disgraceful and unjustified.
I have only just seen your rant against me. I will respond in detail. Before I do that, I would like to know who you are. I have already been subjected to personal intimidation from the Russian embassy in Colombo. You have the advantage of knowing my real name. I do not have the luxury of knowing who you are. You hide in a cowardly fashion behind a false name. Man up and match your bloviating words with the the wee bit of courage of saying who you are. Are you an agent of the Russian government? Will I find plutonium in my tea?
Russia is a fascist state. Your browser has an automatic translator, you can find many materials in russian, english or even czech about it. You are just lazy. First try to learn how many Russians are in exile now – and you can even try to talk with them. They will tell you more than you would ever want to know.
Clapton is naive and not much clever guy, Waters is liar – first when I noticed that was when he lied about the end of second world war and Red Army; we are quite sensitive in Czechia when somebody repeats russian propaganda, and he did that and does that again and again.
David, it is refreshing to read some good sense here. Too many people in Sri Lanka sympathise with the fascist Putin. I have had the Russian embassy complain about me for writing about Putin’s crimes. This Black Sea fellow seems like a useful idiot. I wonder who he is.