Canterbury Festival 2002

Rock legend Eric Clapton has admitted for the first time that at one point he was so addicted to alcohol and drugs that he abused his wife.  

In an interview with The Sunday Times he describes his descent into addiction.

He says he first took drugs as an art student and that by 1969 he was drinking two bottles of vodka a day. Five years later his heroin addiction was costing him £1,500 a week.

He admits that his years of addiction to both drugs and alcohol had a devastating effect on his nine-year marriage to Patti Boyd.

"I know that when I was a full-blown, practising alcoholic, everyone used to walk around me on eggshells," he says.

"They didn't know if I was going to be angry, sad or whatever. When I'd come back from the pub I could come back happy or I could come back and smash the place to pieces.

"There were times when I just took sex with my wife by force and thought that was my entitlement.

"I had absolutely no concern for other people at all, and I think that what happens in a family is everyone starts to doctor their own roles to make it bearable to live that way."

Clapton, 54, who first sought treatment in 1982 and is now a former addict, adds: "At the end of my drinking I'd have a bottle of vodka, a cassette machine, a guitar and a shotgun as my playthings at bedtime.

"And, you know, everything would be the same next morning, except the bottle would be empty.

"One of the things I used to do was put the shells in the gun and click it shut, and I'd put it in the position with the barrel to my mouth where you could take the top of your head off, and I thought, 'Yeah, but if I did this then I'd not be able to have another drink'. Now that's what I would define as insanity."