The moment Pattie Boyd first heard ‘Layla’: “The most powerful, moving song I had ever heard”
Shakespeare wrote, “If music be the food of love, play on,” and since the dawn of sound, from the day music began, people have been writing odes to the ones they love, either as declarations of adoration, longing, lust or heartbreak. To be a muse is to be worshipped, so surely everyone dreams of having a song written about them. When it comes to Pattie Boyd, she doesn’t just have any old ditty, she has ‘Layla’.
Actually, she has more than that. The model and photographer is the muse behind plenty of George Harrison’s tracks, including the timelessly beloved ballad ‘Something’, after the pair married in 1966. However, the relationship was made complex by Harrison’s infidelities and his best friend’s infatuation with his wife. The friend in question? Eric Clapton.
“What I wish to ask you is if you still love your husband, or if you have another lover?” Clapton wrote to Boyd in 1970, “All these questions are very impertinent, I know, but if there is still a feeling in your heart for me… you must let me know!” At first, the model thought they were letters from an obsessed fan, and only realised the truth when the musician rang her up to see if she’d got it.
“If you want me, take me, I am yours. If you don’t want me, please break the spell that binds me,” he writes in another letter. Utterly lovestruck and pining, each letter is addressed to a single name; “Layla”.
He’d taken the name from The Story of Layla and Majnun, a 12th-century love story by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, which Clapton was gifted. In the story, Layla is kept from being with her lover as the two long for each other. In the musician’s mind, Boyd was being kept from him by Harrison while the mythical forces of love drew them together. With so much to say, he put it into a tune, translating all that adoration and desire into an anthemic rock number with one of the more well-known riffs in history. It’s the sort of song anyone would love to have written about them.
“We met secretly at a flat in South Kensington,” Boyd recalled in her memoir, “Eric Clapton had asked me to come because he wanted me to listen to a new number he had written.”
“He switched on the tape machine, turned up the volume and played me the most powerful, moving song I had ever heard,” she continued, remembering the first time she heard that roaring intro and hooking chorus. “It was ‘Layla’, about a man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman who loves him but is unavailable.”
But her initial reaction wasn’t awe or flattery, it was a moment of fear. “He played it to me two or three times, all the while watching my face intently for my reaction. My first thought was: ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to know this is about me.’”
At the time, Boyd and Harrison were still married, but the relationship was getting strained. Harrison was delving deeper into drugs and spirituality, devoting more and more of himself to the Hare Krishna movement and becoming more alienated from his wife. But still, she was dedicated to him and didn’t want the song to hurt him. To her, the track felt like a power move from Clapton. “Eric had been making his desire for me clear for months,” she said, “I felt uncomfortable that he was pushing me in a direction in which I wasn’t certain I wanted to go.”
But really, who could resist a song like that? Boyd is only human. She wrote, “The realisation that I had inspired such passion and creativity, the song got the better of me. I could resist no longer.” That was the start of their affair, as one great tune got Clapton the girl.