Forever Green

With Peter Green’s recent passing still raw in our minds, we thought we’d revisit Guitarist’s recent look at this most mythologised figure from the 60s blues boom.

- Henry Yates

It was October 1966, and God had gone missing. Scanning the Decca Studios in North London as John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers set up to record A Hard Road, producer Mike Vernon felt a sense of rising panic. “I said to John, ‘Where’s Eric Clapton?’ Mayall says: ‘He’s not with us anymore, but don’t worry, we’ve got someone better.’ I said, ‘You’ve got someone better – than Eric Clapton?’ John said, ‘He might not be better now, but in a couple of years, he’s going to be the best.’ Then he introduced me to Peter Green.”

Vernon’s incredulity made sense. After all, this was Eric Clapton: pack-leader of London’s fretting classes proclaimed as ‘God’ in graffiti all across town, whose precocious fingers had shot molten soul over Bluesbreakers cuts like Hideaway, Have You Heard, and Little Girl from that summer’s scene-igniting ‘Beano’ album.

The fact that Beano’s official title gave him top billing – Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton – spoke volumes about the hotshot guitarist’s pulling power. Now he was gone, replaced by a spring-haired cockney interloper. The swap seemed absurd, like a Sunday league nonentity pulling on George Best’s hallowed number seven shirt and running out for United. Only Mayall was unruffled, showing the quiet confidence of a man with an ace up his sleeve. Bringing in Green, he reflected, decades later, “was a no-brainer”.