Eric Clapton Admits He Considered Leaving England And Moving To United States

The Yardbirds and Cream icon Eric Clapton opened up about the challenging effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the music industry during a recent appearance on Oracle Films, and apparently, Clapton seriously considered moving to the United States with his family after the restrictions happening in England.

For those of you who may not know, the coronavirus pandemic affected every single aspect of our lives for the past year and a half, however, it’s fair to say that the entertainment industry got the biggest punch due to the restrictions against any public gathering. While most musicians tried to keep their music alive by doing live stream shows, the biggest majority of people of music ended up losing their jobs.

In addition to criticizing the government on its policy towards the music industry since musicians literary had a year with no live performance at all, Eric Clapton also collaborated with former Them lead singer Van Morrison on an anti-mask, an anti-lockdown track named ‘Stand and Deliver‘ in November 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic which drew major backlash, however, Clapton didn’t step back from his cause.

Recently, the Yardbirds and Cream guitarist opened up about the same matters once again, and this time he genuinely revealed how he felt when his concerts were canceled. Apparently, the 76-year-old musician felt devastated since his age may not allow him to perform ever again one day, and performing live is what he does as an old-school musician.

In addition to this, Eric Clapton also wanted a way out of England’s policy that prevented him from performing and that’s when he considered moving to another country. Due to the fact that his wife Melia McEnery is American, Clapton first thought of moving to the United States, however, soon changed his mind mainly because of former president Donald Trump.

During the interview, Eric Clapton stated:

“I don’t know anything about sociology and science, I’m a musician but I did realize that I was setting out ado to a world tour and I had to cancel a year’s work immediately because there was no leaving it to the last minute tickets that were about to be sold which form a selfish point of view is devastating because I’m of an age now where I don’t know how long my faculties will go on.

So I was really looking at it selfishly to being with then I realized actually there’s a spiritual point to this. We heal proper old-school people, we don’t lip-sync, we play, and we play for that crowd. There’s something that happens when you up a great musician or someone who knows what they’re doing in front of people who need support or just to have pleasure or joy. We figure out what it is and we give it to them and people leave renewed and I need that too.

I was really devastated, then I heard that Van Morrison was trying to do live gigs and he was outwardly speaking against the government policies. I think a lot of things happened in between, we had the summer and I went away and I talked quite strongly about taking my family away from England and we’ll go and live somewhere else and start somewhere else. My wife is American and we could go there but the rhetoric there was even worse in some respect because it was all tied in with Trump.”

You can watch the interview below.