From Eric Clapton's short temper to the Clash lesson

You can be a genius at your thing and a fool at everything else. Eric Clapton - whom the

called God - now says that he refuses to perform in concerts that require vaccination or covid testing, joining the antiscientific campaign of another great musician, Van Morrison. We already knew about Clapton's dark side. Everyone's friend guitarist - who played with the Beatles together and separately, the Stones, BB King, Buddy Guy or Dire Straits - was for years a violent junkie and an abusive husband. The British blues figure, master of the sound of the sons of slavery, called from the stage (Birmingham, 1976) for the expulsion of all blacks to defend the “white nation”.

In the

2017

documentary

Clapton apologizes for that outrage and says he is ashamed of who it was, although he judges himself with little harshness when he describes himself as “semi-racist”.

And excuse in his addictions and family traumas —the one that his sister believed turned out to be his mother— his difficult temperament, compatible with excellence on the six strings.

Clapton was not alone on the dark side.

David Bowie and Rod Stewart were other rock stars who cheered the emerging fascism of the seventies, that of the National Front or that of the ultra-conservative leader Enoch Powell, in a United Kingdom mired in economic and social crisis.

The reaction of other very combative musicians is told in another documentary,

from 2019 (on Movistar +).

The punk scene, with The Clash at the fore, replicated Clapton - and

Nazi

-

with a movement called Rock Against Racism, culminating in a massive festival in 1977. This wave embraced the vibrant community Jamaican.

He made reggae and ska his own.

He adopted the black and white chess board as his flag.

He vindicated the miscegenation that made British music great, the same miscegenation that came from Clapton's fingers no matter what nonsense he said.

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