His guitar playing was sufficiently advanced that, by the age of 16, he was getting noticed. In 1961, after leaving Hollyfield School in Surbiton, Clapton studied at the Kingston College of Art but was expelled at the end of the academic year because his focus had remained on music rather than art.
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He preserved his practice sessions using his portable Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder, listening to them over and over until satisfied.
Clapton was influenced by blues music from an early age, and practised long hours to learn the chords of blues music by playing along to the records. Two years later he picked it up again and started playing consistently. Ĭlapton received an acoustic Hoyer guitar, made in Germany, for his thirteenth birthday, but the inexpensive steel-stringed instrument was difficult to play and he briefly lost interest. Years later, his mother married another Canadian soldier and moved to Germany, leaving Eric with his grandparents in Surrey. The similarity in surnames gave rise to the erroneous belief that Clapton's real surname is Clapp (Reginald Cecil Clapton was the name of Rose's first husband, Eric Clapton's maternal grandfather). Clapton grew up believing that his grandmother, Rose, and her second husband, Jack Clapp, Patricia's stepfather, were his parents, and that his mother was actually his older sister. Fryer was drafted to war before Clapton's birth and then returned to Canada.