It has taken a biographer as perceptive and clear-sighted as Philip Norman to do Clapton justice, revealing him to be a complex, troubled man whose drive to be the best guitarist of all time—and to sleep with as many women as possible—came from a deep-rooted insecurity and sense of abandonment ... Norman, who has written biographies of John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, has captured Clapton’s contradictions in style ... Despite everything, you end up liking Clapton, and feeling as if you know and understand him. It is proof that Norman’s biography has done its work.
It’s a comprehensive and often illuminating account of the life and career of a musician who has had an outsize influence on generations of guitarists ... Norman takes readers on a whirlwind tour of Clapton’s long career ... Norman’s analysis of Clapton’s music, while often insightful, sometimes veers into unfiltered adulation ... Exhaustive as it is, Slowhand might have delved more deeply into why Clapton’s music has resonated so strongly with the public for so long, and how other rock and blues guitarists now view the playing of the man frequently called one of the greatest six-string slingers of all time.
These were rock’n’roll’s Bullingdon years, and there are times in this account when the reader feels that the examples of debauchery are being held up for inspection between the thumb and forefinger of a white-gloved hand. No such close examination is applied to the music, which is described in the most cursory terms, sometimes inaccurately (there is nothing 'atonal' about Cream’s 'As You Said'), and with little attempt to place it in a wider context. This is a pity, since the true value of Clapton’s music remains a subject worthy of debate, but there is a sense that the author can’t wait to get back to the themes that enable him to end a chapter with a sentence such as: 'Pattie could hold out no longer.'
Harrison emerges from Slowhand with his saintly halo as badly dented as the trophy Ferraris that Clapton repeatedly crashed ... [Norman's] analysis of Clapton’s music is cursory and cliched (there is no discography to even mention those London Howlin’ Wolf sessions), and no analysis to justify Clapton’s inclusion in that bogus 'topmost echelon – names that provoke instant, excited reaction in every country and culture', a category for which, say, Bob Marley makes a better fit. Slowhand fails to drive one back to reassess either the highs or lows of Clapton’s career, be it his caustic brilliance with Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the tedious live recordings with Cream, the patchy venture of Blind Faith, dull solo albums like 1989’s Journeyman or the engaging acoustic sessions of 1992’s Unplugged. That’s another book entirely.
... [a] lucid biography ... Mirroring Clapton’s life, the book begins to turn almost to soap opera as the rock star gets embroiled in torrid relationships and hard drugs ... Art has a way of airbrushing actuality. The middle part of Slowhand could act as a #MeToo primer for highlighting the appalling treatment of women during the age of so-called sexual liberation.
Mr. Clapton’s life has been a relentless cycle of traumas and self-inflicted wounds, from maternal abandonment to drug and alcohol and sex addictions to the tragic death of his 4-year-old son, Conor. Mr. Norman...details it all in this well-researched book ... Slowhand...is best appreciated as a complement to the film [documentary about Clapton, Life in 12 Bars]. It makes no attempt to analyze Mr. Clapton’s music or assess its cultural significance, but it does offer an intimate tour of his personal white room with black curtains.
And here, with Slowhand, we have a fat, beautifully designed, unexpectedly lifeless biography of Mr. Clapton, written by the esteemed Philip Norman. I want it to be magisterial. Masterful. Lordly — in keeping with the 'Clapton is God' graffiti of 1966 London. Sadly, it isn’t. It’s mostly dreary, with a phoned-in feel — make that texted-in feel — like Mr. Norman is transcribing all his terribly detailed Clapton notes. One after the other. And some malignant spell-checker steers him off course into a cliched hell of rock-star excess ... Clapton has found himself. And Slowhand finds its own moment of perfect communion with the reader. Almost worth the price of admission.
Slowhand is neither a slavish love letter nor a hatchet job. The subject matter is more complicated than one might expect and thus all the more interesting ... All of [Clapton's story] is told in Slowhand, and told well.
...Norman’s fine biography, both objective and sympathetic, envisions Clapton as 'one of the most thoroughly dissolute rockers of olden times' who became the 'most thoroughly reformed' ... Norman discusses in detail Clapton’s yearslong, devastating addictions to heroin and alcohol and provides countless fascinating stories about his fellow rockers. Extremely knowledgeable about the rock music scene, Norman tells Clapton’s story with verve and insight.
Norman...reveals little that’s unknown about Eric Clapton’s life and music in this straightforward yet enjoyable biography ... Norman does unveil one feature of Clapton’s life that’s not widely known: the guitarist’s deep love of fine fashion ... In this thorough book, Norman hits all the important notes, and Clapton emerges as a person more comfortable with his fretboard than with other people.
