I grew up playing in clubs - that's my spiritual stomping ground.

During the pause while I was changing my string, the frenzied audience would often break into a slow handclap, inspiring Giorgio to dream up the nickname of "Slow hand" Clapton.

Just before I record, I go buy a few albums to see what people are doing. Whether they have improved any, or whether anything happened. And nothing's really happened. There's a lot of great guitarists and musicians around, but nothing's happening, you know.

If your music is great, you will have fans, not because you have spent time chatting on social media.

It's just natural, it's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it like it's The End of The Earth. It's only a rock group that split up, it's nothing important. You know, you have all the old records there if you want to reminisce.

When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.