In the autumn of 1967, someone spray-painted "Clapton is God" on a wall at London's Islington Underground station, elevating a guitarist in his early twenties to deity status. The man behind the myth was fractured: born in Surrey in 1945 and raised by grandparents he believed were his parents, Eric Clapton learned that the woman he thought was his older sister was his teenage mother and that his father was a Canadian soldier who had returned home before his birth. At 13 he received a cheap German Hoyer acoustic with punishingly high action, abandoned it for two years, then returned at 15 with obsessive dedication, dissecting blues records on a reel-to-reel tape machine until he was expelled from Kingston College of Art and busking on London streets.

This episode follows his 1963 arrival in the Yardbirds, the true origin of the Slowhand nick ...