Eric Clapton Announce Never To Sing, write and record music Again...

“I was suddenly aware of the fact that there was a way to turn this dreadful tragedy into something positive”

If there’s one song Eric Clapton probably wished he’d never written, it’s Tears In Heaven. A lament to his deceased son Conor, and also full of Clapton’s own self-loathing, it garnered Grammy Awards, empathy and a good deal of admiration for his guitar-playing skills. All that given, who would really cherish accolades for writing about their dead son?

The story of Tears In Heaven is equally tragic and bizarre. On 20 March 1991, four-year-old Conor Clapton climbed through an open window from a Manhattan hotel apartment and fell 53 floors to his death. The boy was staying with his mother, Clapton’s previous partner, Italian model Lory Del Santo. Clapton and Del Santo were separated, and Clapton was still an alcoholic.

“I was a baby trying to look after a baby, so I just let Lory raise him, which she did brilliantly,” he admitted in his 2007 autobiography. Clapton tried to be as good a father as he could manage, and had taken Conor to the circus the previous day (see Circus from EC’s Pilgrim album).

Tears In Heaven was first recorded as part of Clapton’s soundtrack for the movie Rush (1991). Why such a grief-laden song was submitted for a drug/ police thriller soundtrack, only Clapton knows. His co-lyricist on the Rush project was Will Jennings, who later won an Oscar for penning the lyrics to My Heart Will Go On, the Celine Dion-sung theme for the ’97 movie Titanic.

Tags: Del Santo Eric Clapton

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