Concert Details

Fan Reviews:

Review by Georges Dorka, The Netherlands
This was my 4th show of this tour and I can’t say wich was the best. I liked them all because I am a fan and I don’t really care what happens,as long as I’m there I enjoy every minute of it. But this time it was very special for us (me and my wife) because we were invited by Tim Carmon.

Tim is a very friendly person and we spend more than half an hour before he had to go on stage. I’ve never met an artist like Tim before (and I met a few over the years) who is so relaxed minutes before he had to go on to perform on stage. A very special man indeed. And I want to thank him for a very special evening. About the show we witnessed well nothing new really from the previous shows I’ve seen. EC always plays a lot of guitar himself but this tour he gives Doyle and Derek a lot of time too. He really seems to like Derek’s playing a lot because you can hear him all the time filling in as well as playing solo’s. Derek’s best performance is still in ‘Running on Faith’. But that is my personal opinion. I also enjoyed EC and Robert Cray in a long version of ‘Old Love’ and the encore ‘Crossroads’ where they shared the microphone.

Review by Axel / Germany
Well, here I am, just having arrived from the Eric Clapton concert in Dortmund. It was a fantastic show and worth the money. There are a few things that need to be criticized. You will later read about it, but all in all the actual tour is one of Eric’s best.

The concert started absolutely on time at 8.00 pm with a 45 minute performance of the Robert Cray Band. Robert was so good. Although I always had problems to really like his modern blues style, I have always liked his style of guitar playing. He is a really good guitar craftsman. Unfortunately I cannot tell you which songs he played, but I can assure you the selection of songs was great. He played some great blues tunes, and a very impressive political song. His performance was absolutely entertaining and a perfect opening act for Eric Clapton.

Eric came on at 9.15 pm and started with "Pretending" from his "Journeyman" album. He delivered a great interpretation of that song with a fantastic bottleneck guitar playing of Derek Trucks. From the beginning on, Derek was always specially featured on the big screens beside the stage. During the whole concert the cameras caught him nearly permanently and presented his fine talent on the big screens. Derek is a young guitarist in his twenties who usually is a member of the Allman Brothers Band and of course his own band, The Derek Trucks Band. He is the nephew of Butch Trucks, an original founder member of the Allman Brothers Band. I follow the career of Derek Trucks for quite a while. When I first heard him play I thought that he was not able to play as he wanted to, but he developed through the years. Now I can say he is a fantastic guitar player who fits perfectly into the Allman Brothers Band. And he fitted perfectly into the Eric Clapton Band tonight. In Derek’s playing you can hear the inspiration of Duane Allman.

The second song was "So Tired" from Eric’s actual album "Back Home". Actually I do not like the album very much. For me it is not bluesy enough and too mainstream. Eric’s private life is in good shape these days, he seems to be very happy with his family, and recently he got a new baby. Through all the years I have been following Eric’s career I can say that when his private life was all right, he made uninteresting and sometimes boring albums. When he felt really down and out, he made fantastic albums. Fortunately "So Tired" went straight into "Got To Get Better In A Little While". This is an old classic from his Derek & The Dominoes times. I think he has not played it since then. I have never ever heard it live in concert before, and so that song made me very enthusiastic

Then "Old Love" was being played. On the original studio version on the "Journeyman" album, Robert Cray played along with Eric. They co-wrote the song together. Robert came back to the stage for this song and did a great job