Eric Clapton is nothing if not a survivor. As he turns 80 tomorrow – with a major series of concerts in Japan, Europe and the UK in the offing – “Slowhand”, as the world’s most famous guitarist is known, shows no sign of slowing down. He claims to find touring “unbearable”, referring perhaps to the business of trekking between anonymous hotels and stadia, rather than the actual playing live in front of tens of thousands of fans. Either way, like Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart before him, Clapton has now joined the ranks of the 80-club – a remarkable landmark in itself in an industry that worships the young and, with rare exceptions, brutally jettisons middle-aged performers.

As his biographer, I pay tribute to Clapton’s sheer endurance. He’s survived for more than 60 years and can still play a mean guitar. This is a man who has always been willing to move away from mere rock to embrace blues, country and even folk influences. He began his career with bubblegum pop in long-forgotten bands working on the London pub circuit, but soon went on to form the power trio Cream, alongside the late Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. The group’s trademark mix of blues and hard rock was a trailblazer for a new wave of bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.

After that, Clapton left to form a new group, Derek and the Dominos, who will always be remembered for the firework display of searing guitar and soulful piano of their iconic, evergreen hit Layla. Despite being sometimes erratic and even self-destructive, Clapton has always kept the respect of his fans for his virtuoso and inventive guitar playing. Over the years, his work has been recognised with album sales exceeding 100 million, as well as no fewer than 18 Grammy awards, four Ivor Novellos and three separate inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. No other living guitar player comes close to these achievements.

While a typical Clapton concert rarely touches the heights he once routinely scaled, his sheer professionalism, choice of material and clever fusion of styles shows he’s now become a musician for all seasons. Having recently released a well-received new album, Meanwhile – a collection of songs written by everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Chuck Berry – he remains acreative force.

However, it also features two numbers in collaboration with veteran singer Van Morrison which take up the anti-lockdown and vaccine-hesitant themes both artists espoused during the pandemic. While lockdown in hindsight is increasingly seen as a costly mistake, the anti-vax message remains hugely controversial. But for Clapton, there seems little chance of cancellation at this late-stage in his life and career. And while he sings about the blues, it’s often been left to others in his life to actually experience them.

Take, for example, Alice Ormsby-Gore, a society beauty who was Clapton’s live-in partner from 1968 to 1974. Just 16 when they met, Alice was a child of privilege. Her father David was a high-flying Foreign Office minister who became British ambassador to Washington during the John F Kennedy administration. After a childhood which included frequent family holidays with the Kennedys, Alice went on to divide her time between a luxury London flat and her father’s 1,500-acre ancestral estate in Shropshire. But her life with Clapton soon took a dismal turn. Both of them spent years in seclusion at his Surrey home, where their diet consisted almost exclusively of alcohol, drugs and junk food.

The weekly arrival of a 10-gram packet of heroin became the highlight of the couple’s routine. When Clapton once inadvertently spilt the contents on the floor, he promptly dropped to his knees and began snorting the rug. To his credit, Clapton was eventually to kick his drug habit, if not his taste for a drink, before going on to record a new album – 1974’s 461 Ocean Boulevard – and embark on a tour of America. It was the start of a triumphant professional comeback for him and of a long personal decline for Alice.

When the couple split, Alice’s place as Clapton’s live-in partner was taken by Pattie Boyd, who at the time happened to be married to Clapton’s best friend George Harrison. “That whole period was insane,” Boyd has said. “We were all as drunk as each other.” Meanwhile, the fragile Alice seemed to drift off into a 20-year-long lost weekend. Her world crumbled after she went to call on her elder brother Julian, who worked as a waiter, and found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot on the floor of his London flat.

Alice’s mother and her favourite uncle had already been killed in separate road accidents. Tragedy struck again in 1985 when her father died, aged 66, also behind the wheel of a car. Some of the news media began to refer to an “Ormsby-Gore curse” when describing the series of accidents, injuries, suicides and other family misfortunes.

On January 1, 1995, in a move widely applauded by his friends and admirers, Clapton was awarded the OBE for services to music. His salary for the previous 12 months was estimated at £15.4million, making him one of Britain’s highest earners. Just three months later, Alice was found dead at her home in a run-down area of Bournemouth. She was 42, and had been living there in a ground-floor bedsit with a sheet haphazardly nailed up over the front window instead of curtains.

A neighbour who lived opposite said she had been oblivious to Alice’s background: “I saw her occasionally walking across to the shops. Once I noticed her eyes were closed and she seemed asleep.” She said she heard that Alice had been found “with a syringe stuck in her arm”. The various Clapton-related affairs of the late 1970s seemed to involve most of Britain’s rock aristocracy. Essentially, George Harrison – still married to Pattie Boyd – ran off to Spain with Ronnie Wood’s wife, Krissy.

Wood, who was then in his gap year between the Faces and the Rolling Stones, in turn took up with Pattie. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin seemed to be sleeping with any of the women who happened to be free on a given night. Then George came back from Spain and began an affair with Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen.

Ringo, not surprisingly, flew into a rage at this act of betrayal by an old bandmate. “Nothing is real, nothing is real!” he shouted. At this stage, Clapton persuaded Pattie to leave George and move in with him. However, it was not an exclusive arrangement. One day Pattie came home to find Clapton sitting side by side on the sofa with a friend of hers named Jenny McLean, who happened to be a top fashion model. When Pattie attempted to start a conversation, Eric interrupted her with the words: “Can’t you see I’m in love with this girl? Just f*** off.”

Despite this, Clapton and Boyd were married in March 1979 and remained together for most of the next 10 years. One night in 1985, Clapton took his wife to dinner and announced over the first course that he’d had an affair with an Italian woman named Lori Del Santo. A few weeks later later, he took Pattie out to dinner a second time and told her Del Santo was pregnant.

Pattie herself was then 41 and had been unsuccessfully trying tohave a baby for 20 years. Conor, Clapton’s son with Del Santo, was born the following August. Tragically, in March 1991, the four-year-old was killed after accidentally falling from the window of his mother’s 53rd floor apartment in New York. The press described Conor as Clapton’s only child, but this wasn’t the case. When recording in Montserrat in 1984, he had begun an affair with a 28-year-old Anglo-Iraqi woman named Yvonne Kelly, whose husband was helping to produce Eric’s album.

On January 11, 1985, Kelly gave birth in Doncaster maternity hospital to Clapton’s daughter Ruth. In later years, the girl and her mother were sometimes seen in the front row Clapton’s concerts at London’s Royal Albert Hall, or with him at hisfavourite restaurant. In 2013, the then 28-year-old Ruth gave birth to a son – Clapton’s first grandchild – whom she named Eric. Along the way, Clapton finally parted company with his long-suffering wife, Pattie.

He had announced his decision to her on the morning of her 43rd birthday by throwing all her belongings out of the window. A decade of intermittently great music and ultimately failed love affairs with the likes of Naomi Campbell, Sharon Stone and Sheryl Crow followed. “I just like the company of beautiful girls. I have a weakness in that department,” Clapton noted dryly.

Perhaps it’s not surprising his relationships with women were sometimes troubled, given that he grew up believing his grandmother was his mother – and his mother his older sister. Nowadays, Clapton is happily married to 49-year-old Melia McEnery, a former Armani sales executive from Columbus, Ohio, with whom he has three grown daughters. Like many rock stars of a certain age, he appears to have finally settled down with a younger, no-nonsense American.

Despite a checkered personal life – having endured the shark-filled waters of the music business, and, as his new album proves, still sounding fresh and relevant – he’s become something of a national treasure. Anyone buying a ticket to one of his UK concerts will be seeing an absolute master of his craft in action.

Clapton has already survived at the top level for half a century beyond what he ever thought possible when he started playing the guitar professionally. It’s curiously tempting to bet on him lasting a fewyears longer. But on the eve of his 80th birthday, perhaps we should also spare a thought for some of those left behind along the way.

• Christopher Sandford is the author of Clapton: Edge Of Darkness