2001-February-14 Eric Clapton Evening News Arena Manchester, England Disc 1 - 64.27 1 Key To The Highway 3.54 2 Reptile 5.43 3 Tears In Heaven 4.45 4 Bell Bottom Blues 5.25 5 Change The World 6.22 6 My Father's Eyes 8.53 7 River Of Tears 8.59 8 Going Down Slow 6.25 9 She's Gone 6.24 10 It's Alright 3.44 11 Finally Got Myself Together 3.48 Disc 2 - 72.21 1 Got You On My Mind 5.19 2 I Ain't Gonna Stand For It 5.23 3 Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight 6.10 4 Travellin' Light 4.05 5 Hoochie Coochie Man 4.18 6 Have You Ever Loved A Woman? 7.00 7 Badge 6.05 8 Wonderful Tonight 6.58 9 Layla (Electric) 10.53 10 Sunshine Of Your Love 7.08 11 Band Intro 2.40 12 Somewhere Over The Rainbow 5.01 13 Ending Applause 1.14 Eric Clapton Guitar, Vocals Paulinho Da Costa Percussion Nathan East Bass, Vocals Andy Fairweather Low Guitar, Vocals Steve Gadd Drums David Sancious Keyboards, Guitar The Impressions Background Vocals Support act for all European shows is Doyle Bramhall II I found this great review of this show by John McIlroy on the web: February 14 - Manchester, UK & February 16 - Birmingam, UK Review by John McIlroy It’s difficult to decide if Eric Clapton really does play better at the Royal Albert Hall. The age-old proverb suggests that he does, but that’s based on an ancient quote when he once likened concerts there to ‘playing in his front room’. Comfort, we reason, equals a good show. But equally, there’s an alternative take on the idea, to the effect that Eric - inherently lazy - is now so comfortable in the Albert that he rarely gets out of second gear. In that case, watching him in a soulless aircraft hangar gives you better chance of hearing him play his socks off. After two shows at a scaffolding-encased Albert Hall, and two in the NEC and MEN Arenas, I must confess to subscribing to the latter theory. Because Eric made a much better job of fighting his way through acoustic sweetness and solo-less ‘good-time tunes’ in Brum and Manchester than he did in London. Let’s put our cards on the table: despite what should normally count as a decent shake-up of the set list (positively radical, given Eric’s notoriously conservative approach to such matters), this was never going to be an easy show for our hero. Think about it: a fair percentage of your audience don’t know much beyond Father’s Eyes, a larger bunch only want to hear Tears In Heaven and Wonderful Tonight and to cap it all, you’ve got a new album from which you want to showcase material. And it’s not out until a month after the shows, so no-one knows it. Despite the fact that the second of his opening two nights at the Albert Hall was a considerable improvement on the previous evening, I genuinely doubted if Eric could carry such a hotpotch of material through nearly two hours. One minute he was sending more elderly fans to sleep with the lift music that is Reptile, the next he’d rip the frets off of the board in Five Long Years. And in between, he only occasionally seemed to know what he was doing. But Manchester proved me wrong. Here was an Eric Clapton on a buzz, ready to play and be damned in front of a largely unappreciative audience. Few of the die-hard Londoners had made the trek north, let alone the usual plethora of Japanese visitors and doting American housewives. He started with a reasonable Driftin’, then made a passable attempt at Reptile that almost bordered on the interesting. But by the time he’d done away with Tears in Heaven and launched into Bell Bottom Blues, it was clear that the six strings were going to get more of a workout than they had in south-west London. Over the four nights I witnessed, the most consistently good section of the show was the four-track Pilgrim excerpt, featuring Father’s Eyes, River of Tears, Goin’ Down Slow and She’s Gone. In Manchester, it was truly awesome, with a wonderful long, meandering solo in the first of the four and then a pain-driven attack on the senses in River of Tears. Goin’ Down Slow seemed to have found an extra edge since the Albert, while She’s Gone lived up to its billing as a showstopper, with soaring, overdriven notes in a powerful solo. The arrival of The Impressions could have meant two things: either the best efforts of the ever-chirpy foursome would have fallen flat in a venue with as much soul as one of Gyles Brandreth’s jumpers, or they’d lift the crowd’s spirits like they’d managed in the Albert Hall. Fortunately, they achieved the latter. Changed Man, in particular, kicked along nicely, although Ain’t Gonna Stand for It badly needed to be at least two verses shorter, or feature a proper solo. As it was, it dragged. Soulful interlude over, we headed back to the classics, but hardened fans would have already been counting the seconds to the finish by this point. Hoochie Coochie Man, now with guitar and piano solos, was as tight as ever, but Badge flew by and Wonderful and Layla were both looming in the distance as Eric launched into a slow blues. At the Albert, he’d sung Five Long Years but in Manchester, he switched the lyrics to Have You Ever Loved a Woman. And played his heart out. It was a late, surprising highlight. The two aforementioned standard crowd favourites then followed with Eric sounding as disinterested as he usually does during both - perhaps more so, in fact, given that a dreadful sound glitch had him glancing round at the tech department on more than one occasion. It was a shame, really, since the audio quality in the arena had way surpassed the muddy volume that had blasted round in the inside of the Albert. At least it disappeared in time for Somewhere over the Rainbow, during which Eric actually said he’d had a good time. And you know, the way he’d played for much of the show suggested that he had.