[Slowhand] Lost Clapton Song?

[EFSCHUL at aol.com]

Clapton’s ex reveals lost love song
Maurice Chittenden - Sunday  Times,  UK
9 July  2006

      
 _See and hear the video _ 
(http://www.daphnebarak.builderspot.com/f/LoryShort.mpg)  
WHEN Eric Clapton takes to the stage in front of 25,000 fans in  the ancient 
Roman arena of Verona tomorrow night, one ideally suited  song will be missing 
from the set list.  
The legendary rock  guitarist wrote Lady of Verona 20 years ago for his then 
girlfriend,  Lory Del Santo, a 26-year-old Italian television presenter who 
comes  from the city.  
Del Santo will give the world its first hearing of the song this  week after 
discovering a broken cassette tape of it stuffed inside a  waterlogged bag of 
her possessions. It has now been restored and  burnt onto a CD. Clapton 
aficionados describe it as a lost  masterpiece.  
Clapton has never released it on record or performed it live. The  song has 
been locked away until now after the couple’s relationship  broke up following 
the death of their four-year-old son Conor, who  died when he fell out of the 
window of a 53rd-floor Manhattan  apartment. Only a few Clapton insiders have 
ever heard it.  
Clapton had a huge international hit with Tears in Heaven, a song  he 
subsequently wrote in memory of Conor and which won a Grammy  award in the United 
States.  
However, he has never agreed to the release of Lady of Verona,  even though 
it includes a coded message to Del Santo about Conor:  “You know what she gave 
to me, I’ll treasure until my dying day.”  
The song was first hidden away because he wrote it when he was  still married 
to Patti Boyd, the ex-wife of George Harrison, the  former Beatle. He had met 
Del Santo in Milan on a previous Italian  tour.  
The song was consigned to the vaults when his relationship with  Del Santo, 
which was already strained because both had been seeing  other people, fell 
apart after Conor’s death.  
Del Santo plays part of the recording that Clapton gave her  during an 
interview to be broadcast on American television tomorrow  night. To watch and hear 
the clip, click on the link above. Clapton  sings:  
I fell in love with a lady 
from Verona, She’s just as  sweet as she 
can be. 
All of her life she’s been 
a loner  Because she likes to stay 
so free.  
Later Clapton sings that he loves his lady from Verona “because  she makes me 
feel so good”. He recorded the song in a studio while  laying down tracks for 
an album that he subsequently called August  in homage to the month in 1986 
when Conor was born.  
Del Santo believes that if their child had not died she and  Clapton would 
still be together.  
In an interview with Daphne Barak, the American journalist, to be  broadcast 
on CBS’s Entertainment Tonight, she says that prior to  Conor’s death, 
Clapton would lapse into silent moods when he could  not stand any noise or even 
music. She discovered that he was  drinking heavily after finding empty vodka 
bottles.  
She says that the one line in the song that best describes her is  “ ‘
because I make him feel so good’ . . . It’s not easy to make him  happy. Because 
you have to learn. One day he told me, ‘Talk only  when I ask you a question. 
Otherwise, no’.”  
Mother and son had lived in Clapton’s apartment at 57th Street  and Fifth 
Avenue in New York. The couple were estranged at the time.  Conor fell to his 
death in March 1991 after a cleaner had allegedly  left a bedroom window open and 
Conor went rushing into the room.  
She would like to see Lady of Verona released. Clapton originally  gave it to 
her on a cassette tape while she was pregnant with Conor.  “He said, ‘Here 
you are. I wrote a song for you’.”  
The tape became broken when she asked Conor to turn it off and he  broke it 
in the middle of the song.  
Marc Roberty, author of Eric Clapton: The Complete Recording  Sessions, said: 
“It has never been released but it is very catchy  and would have been a good 
hit single.”  
A spokesman for Clapton, now 61, said it was the first he had  heard of the 
song and he had no idea if it would ever be officially  released. He said that 
Clapton was unavailable for personal comment.  

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