Cream’s out-of-nowhere 2005 reunion concerts followed just one such similar appearance going back to their 1968 breakup. Seems Eric Clapton had found himself reminiscing about his old musical collaborators Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.
“I missed them, and I had missed them for a long time,” Clapton tells Southbank, “and I kind of realized, deep down, that as much as they might want to get together again that it was really my call – because I had walked from it.”
Cream had last played together during their 1993 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. When they finally reunited for an initial quartet of May 2005 shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall, they declined to give interviews.
This led to wide speculation that Clapton had relented in the face of his former bandmates’ health problems. Bruce had been battling liver cancer, and Baker suffers from severe arthritis.
The London shows sold out in a matter of moments, prompting another trio of concerts at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in October 2005. There have been no other such reunions in the interim, but Eric Clapton says he wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
“At some point, it really just came into my mind more and more and more,” Clapton tells Southbank. “I would get up, and I would think about it. I thought: ‘You may not need to do it, for whatever reason, but maybe they’d benefit.’ Not only that, we can. We actually can, because we’re all still alive. I thought this, this is worth it. This is worth whatever grief and stress we may have experienced in the past, to come back to this.”
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