It has perhaps fallen into the category of those songs that have fallen out of fashion through sheer ubiquity, becoming irritating through overexposure (like All Right Now, Satisfaction and Hey Jude), but it’s actually a brilliant piece of work, albeit two tunes welded together by producer Tom Dowd – with a true story of unrequited love behind its poignant lyric.

 

Clapton was inspired by a Persian story (Layla and Majnun) about a Muslim princess who went mad after being made to marry a man she didn’t love, seeing parallels with his own situation. After he contributed to George Harrison’s post-Beatles album All Things Must Pass (having famously played guitar on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, while Harrison played on Cream’s epic Badge), he fell in love with George’s wife, Pattie Boyd. 

 

He hoped to win her back with this song but, as he admitted sadly in the revealing documentary Life In 12 Bars: “It didn’t work” – though  there was a happy ending as they did eventually get together and marry five years later.

 

Layla does, of course, have one of those instantly memorable guitar riffs, like Sweet Jane and Smoke On The Water, composed by Duane Allman of The Allman Brothers, who also plays his signature slide guitar, duelling with Clapton on the song’s solos. The piano section in the second half, which Dowd added to the finished tune, is played and credited to the band’s drummer, Jim Gordon – but was almost certainly composed by Rita Coolidge when he was her boyfriend.

 

In added heartbreak – this time without a happy ending – Gordon would go on a decade later to murder his elderly mother with a hammer and a butcher’s knife. He was diagnosed as having acute schizophrenia and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1984 but has been denied parole 10 times and is still in a psychiatric facility in California.