Eric Clapton Once Went On An On-Stage Racist Rant That He Spent His Life Regretting

In August 1976, Eric Clapton took time out of a concert to publicly praise the controversial British politician Enoch Powell. He yelled to the crowd, "Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back." 

Clapton continued:

"Stop Britain from becoming a Black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. F*cking wogs, man. F*cking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back. The Black wogs and coons and Arabs and f*cking Jamaicans and f*cking … don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any Black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don’t want f*cking wogs living next to me with their standards. This is Great Britain, a white country. What is happening to us, for f*ck’s sake?"

Clapton's tirade re-emerged into the public eye when featured in 2018's Life in 12 Bars, a documentary about him. The film's debut prompted Clapton to apologize for being "semi-racist."

Fully understanding the context of what Clapton said, and the political climate in which Powell existed, requires at least cursory information on a political party called National Front (not to be confused with the French party of the same name). 

The National Front formed at some point in the mid-to-late 1960s (some say 1966, others 1967) when a handful of men involved in extreme-right English politics decided to united a number of small groups with similar goals into a political front (hence the name). NF's platform included proposals to ban all immigration to Britain and to send all non-white immigrants back to their ancestral nations. The party was anti-communist and supported white governments in former African colonies settled by Europeans. Richard C. Thurlow, author of Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918 - 1985, calls the formation of the National Front "the most significant event on the radical right and fascist fringe of British politics" in the second half of the 20th century. 

In the 1970s, as the British economy stagnated and countless Britons were out of work, the National Front gained prominence by inflaming fears of immigrants arriving in droves, populating entire towns and cities, and taking what precious little work existed from the locals. As this was happening, a new radical left, associated in part with the burgeoning punk rock scene, also emerged, and violent clashes between the far right and far left, in which the police were also usually involved, erupted in cities throughout Britain. 

It was in this climate that Clapton went on his racist rant. 

Eric Clapton suffered serious substance abuse problems throughout the 1970s. In his 2007 autobiography, he admitted to spending about £8,000, or $16,000, a week on cocaine (Clapton apparently adjusted this figure for inflation). A piece from Rolling Stone on Derek and the Dominoes, Clapton's early 1970s supergroup with Duane Allman, reads: 

“'We weren’t doing a bunch of drugs during our recording. But if you’re drinking whiskey and snorting cocaine and heroin it’s still going to be in your system tomorrow,' recalls former bandmate Bobby Whitlock. The situation was so dire, label boss Ahmet Ertegun tried to intervene. 'He didn’t want Eric to go down that road,” Whitlock says. “But he did, he was already on the way. You can’t stop a junkie. Only death stops a junkie.' Ultimately the band’s partying wasn’t sustainable, and the clip ends with Whitlock describing Derek and the Dominos’ failed attempted to make a follow-up and the drug-induced paranoia that led to the group’s demise."

Even after Clapton kicked hard drugs, he was dependent on alcohol. He purportedly drank two bottles of liquor a day at the height of his alcoholism, and once performed an entire concert lying down because he was too drunk to stand. Looking back on those years, Clapton writes: "The only reason that I didn't commit suicide was the fact that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink any more if I was dead." 

Clapton's racist remarks are particularly startling considered in the context of the music for which he's most well known. Like nearly all British musicians of his generation, Clapton was most heavily inspired by the blues, a form of American folk music created primarily by African American musicians (the history of blues is more racially complicated than most simplistic overviews make it out to be). Over the years, in various bands and solo projects, Clapton has covered a number of blues songs by Black musicians. 

In an interview from 1968, Clapton remarked: "all the Indian musicians I've heard and all the blues musicians I've heard have influenced me." His 1974 hit "I Shot the Sheriff" was a Bob Marley cover. Marley lived in London in the early 1970s and heavily influenced the music scene there. The UK's reggae underground had a major impact on punk bands like The Clash, and is responsible for Led Zeppelin's lilting ditty "D'yer Maker".