One night in September 1970, Eric Clapton wandered into the recording studio and found his drummer Jim Gordon playing the piano alone.
They had recently finished recording the Derek and the Dominos album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, with its heartfelt title song about Clapton’s love for Pattie Boyd, then married to George Harrison.
As Clapton later told Guitar Player magazine, he discovered that Gordon “had been secretly going back into the studio and recording his own album without any of us knowing it”. Struck by the haunting tune Gordon was playing, he hit upon the idea of stitching it together with the title song he had already written and recorded. “Come on, man. Can we have that?” he asked.
As Gordon had