I guess that's why they call it the blues

Regular visitors to this blog will know my fascination with the south-west suburbs of London that I grew up in and their profound connection with the music Britain exported to the world in the 1960s and 70s. At its root was the Blues and the songs of an impoverished American South, implausibly transported into Surrey bedrooms​ to provide identity to angst-ridden teenagers living in relative affluence on the outskirts of the capital.

Of these adolescents, the individual who, perhaps, channeled the Delta Blues most effectively, both in terms of his playing and his own, personal tragedies, is Eric Clapton, the subject of Lili Fini Zanuck's engaging new documentary, Eric Clapton: Life In 12 Bars. The Clapton-endorsed film doesn't seek to tell anything new about the guitarist - nor does it. Instead, via a lengthy sequence of home movie clips, archive interviews and personal photographs, overlaid with dialogue from characters who've been pivotal - one way or another - in Clapton's 72 years, Zanuck focuses on several periods in his life which have defined him, and via the footage used, adds an extra dimension to much of what Clapton himself wrote about in his 2007 autobiography.

Indeed, Zanuck's film somehow continues the catharsis Clapton has been seeking, it would appear, most of his life and, arguably, for those things most people know about him already: his childhood, growing up believing his grandmother was his mother, and his mother was his sister; his rapid rise from teenage guitar prodigy in 1963 to feited "god" as one third of Cream in 1967 (having passed through The Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in the process); his descent into drug and alcohol abuse at the turn of the 70s and the addled decade that followed; the tragic death of his first child, son Conor, when he fell from the 53rd floor of a New York apartment building in 1991.

It's always tricky, presenting a multi-millionaire rock star with the Italian-style Surrey mansion, a collection of Ferraris, vintage Rolexes and a penchant for Armani suits, as a tragic figure. But, if A Life In 12 Bars panders selectively towards the melancholy, rather than periods of happiness, contentment and celebration in Clapton's 55 years as a professional performer (not to mention the teenage years busking in the riverside pubs of Kingston-upon-Thames), it is consciously to draw out the sadness as the fuel behind his career. In this respect, Zanuck's film neither calls for pity or scorn.

It does, though, paint a somewhat despondent picture of an artist, not so much tortured as unlucky. Growing up in the peaceful Surrey hamlet of Ripley, he cut a strange and lonely figure: after getting his first guitar (bought from a now defunct shop in Tolworth), he discovered the blues of Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and BB King, also finding that, with some endeavour, he could emulate their licks on his little acoustic guitar. Learning from his grandmother the truth about his origins (his absentee father was a Canadian serviceman who'd had a wartime one-night stand with his mother), Eric Clapton would spend the rest of his life seeking escape from this conflict, while adding more, all to the soundtrack of music conjured many thousands of miles away.

Later events, such as the death in 1970 of his friend Jimi Hendrix, would build on this trajectory by putting him on a path of self-destruction, confessing - in one of the film's more disturbing scenes - his "deathwish".

As with Asif Kapadia's documentaries about Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, Zanuck's absence of on-camera interviews and use of footage and stills adds the film's tone. Disembodied, we hear Rose Clapp - Clapton's grandmother, his Auntie Sylvia, his onetime girlfriend Charlotte Martin, his wife/muse Patti Boyd, and his late friend and mentor, Ben Palmer, provide the colour. There isn't pity - Rose says Clapton had a mostly idyllic childhood - but there is plenty of undercurrent that doesn't disappear until long after the death of his son.

72 years is a lot to cram into a documentary of any length, so while it seems that large chunks of Clapton's life have been left out, they are probably the chunks that have little to add to the primary story. Indeed, the film ends with a brief montage of private film clips of the elder Clapton and his 'new' family today - wife Melia, daughters Julie, Ella and Sophie. There's no mention of his continued musical output and touring (or his reported health challenges - encroaching deafness, difficulties playing guitar), which have been Clapton's raison d'etre for the better part of six decades. But, weirdly, that's not the point.

A Life In 12 Bars - a title with so much meaning (all things - wink-wink - considered), may not be the perfect editorial study; indeed, Zanuck - who first met Clapton when she was directing the harrowing drug cop film Rush, to which he provided the musical score - doesn't open up anything more than a third, pictorial dimension to the star's life. But it does provide a rich scrapbook to remind ourselves just what the fuss was all about - why a 17-year-old Surbiton schoolboy was invited to join The Roosters in 1963, why he then became a part of British blues history in The Yardbirds, in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, in Cream, in Blind Faith, with Delaney And Bonnie, and as the frontman of Derek & The Dominoes, and as the rock star's rock star ever since. Because down on that Ripley village green in the mid-1950s, with his blues records and his Hoyer acoustic guitar, was the lonely, troubled misfit, rejected by his birth mother, who embarked on a journey to counter that rejection and apply what can only be described as a God-given talent for making a guitar sing.