Eric Clapton, who is two weeks into the U.S. leg of his Reptile Tour – his first worldwide jaunt in a decade – says that the tour will be his last.
“I was musing that it might be the last time,” Clapton says about the planning stages of his current tour. “Now I’m going, ‘This is definitely the last time.’ It’s hard. It’s doesn’t work for me anymore. I will leave the door open for a couple of projects, to play the odd theater, but I’d say this is near the end. Anyone I talk to about it goes, ‘Oh, you’ll never stop.’ I won’t, in truth. I will always want to express something. But I don’t need to do it like this anymore.”
Clapton, who has two albums left in his contract with Warner Brothers, does still plan to record. He claims to have two projects in mind: a collaboration with the Impressions, whom he first worked with at the funeral of their frontman Curtis Mayfield in late 1999 and who backed him on several tracks on his latest album, Reptile; he’s also planning an album of “soulful rock blues, like an old Tony Joe White record.”
Though Reptile is Clapton’s first proper solo release since 1998’s Pilgrim, the album is his second project in the past year, as he and B.B. King collaborated on and released the hit album, Riding With the King last year.
“Since I got sober, I’ve just been trying to develop… a career with dignity, records where I can say, ‘I finished it, it’s complete,'” Clapton said. “Whether or not it’s up to the standard of the current thing, it’s complete.”
