The three-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Clapton, teaming up once more with multiple Grammy award-winning fellow multi-instrumentalist Steve Winwood, will launch his European tour in May 2010, Rolling Stone magazine reported on its Web site. Clapton is likely to have an extraordinarily busy agenda this year as he has also announced plans to embark on a trek across the US starting in February 2010, Rolling Stone said.Clapton and Winwood’s İstanbul appearance, scheduled for June 13 at Santralİstanbul, will wrap up the duo’s 14-date tour, which will start on May 18 in Birmingham, UK, and travel across Europe to such cities as Antwerp, Paris, Düsseldorf, Malmö, Berlin, Vienna, Belgrade and Bucharest along the way, according to the Eric Clapton fan club magazine Where’s Eric.
The European tour comes on the heels of the duo’s stunning three-gig collaboration in 2008 at Madison Square Garden, the first full Winwood-Clapton concerts in almost 40 years. The concerts, released on DVD under the title “Live from Madison Square Garden,” earned the duo two nominations this year for the 52nd Grammy Awards, including Best Rock Album.
Both Winwood and Clapton have long and prestigious music careers with countless honors and awards to their names. Their music paths connected in 1969 with the formation of Blind Faith, a group that pioneered the fusion of rock and blues into tremendous studio and stage success. Despite critical and popular acclaim, the band was short-lived with only one album and a brief 1969 tour that debuted in July at Madison Square Garden and ended in August in Hawaii. Since that final show, Winwood and Clapton have remained friends, but have only performed together a few times over the years for an occasional song at a charity event.
Tickets for the duo’s concerts in Germany are already on sale. An announcement on when tickets for the İstanbul concert will be available has yet to be made.
