Gig review: Eric Clapton joined onstage by Paul Brady at 3Arena, Dublin
A recent image of Eric Clapton, who played 3Arena in Dublin on Thursday night. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
★★★☆☆
I was a bit cynical going into this one, wondering if I should have gone to Cork instead for Springsteen. I saw Eric Clapton in this same building 15 years ago and he nearly bored me to death. Tonight, thankfully, he’s in far better form.
By the second song, ‘Key To the Highway’, which stretches all the way back to Charlie Segar in 1940, the extended band are in the pocket, and Slowhand’s guitar starts to warm up. By the end of Cream’s ‘Badge’, with its magical circular riff, there’s some real soul as the backing singers join him for the coda.
As worthy as the lyrics of ‘Prayer Of A Child’ and the images of Gaza on the screens may be, it’s not much of song because, being honest, Clapton isn’t much of a songwriter. Wisely, he sticks to covers for the most part this evening. There’s no ‘Layla’, despite several calls for it, which is a shame, but there’s no ‘Wonderful Tonight’ either, so swings and roundabouts.
He brings out a smiling Paul Brady, to a huge roar, for an acoustic set and they dedicate ‘Sam Hall’, a folk song about an unrepentant thief sentenced to hang, to the late David Sanborn, with Brady adding some spirited tin whistle. The Irishman sings his own lovely ‘Harvest Time’ and then adds some grit to ‘Tears In Heaven’ as he searches after the chords.
Perhaps the appearance of an old friend has put the fire up Clapton because ‘Got To Get Better In A Little While’, from the Layla period, his only indisputably classic album, is incendiary. There’s dexterous finger work behind his singing and a beautifully fluid solo, buoyed up by rich Hammond organ swells. Clapton then takes a second guitar break just to show equally useful picker Doyle Bramhall II who’s boss.
His voice – hardly the man’s strongest asset – is well used in Blind Faith’s ‘Presence Of The Lord’, and that wah-wah break still kicks like a perturbed mule. He channels Carlos Santana on the intro to a ‘Crossroads’ that’s closer to JJ Cale than Cream, and the sting of his solos would require a case of Savlon to sooth.
A sweet key change in another Robert Johnson number, ‘Little Queen Of Spades’, allows his guitar to head skyward again, and more wah-wah wrangling during the closing ‘Cocaine’ (although he’ll encore with a bit of Jimmy Rogers) would turn Hendrix’s head. He’s almost dancing – to be fair, he recently turned 79 – as his great band cook around him. There’s a bit of God in there still.
