Take one arthritic grumpy pensioner who trains polo ponies at his ranch in South Africa, put him with his worst enemy, a moody recluse recovering from a liver transplant, add a tragic prima donna superstar who once said he could no longer stand the other two squabbling, and it hardly adds up to the stuff of which dreams are made.

Yet when the artistes known as Cream — a name that has always reflected their natural lack of modesty — take to the stage of the Albert Hall this week for their first concert together in 37 years, there will be middle-aged men in the front row close to tears of rapturous joy.

Her Majesty the Queen might well be bemused — having recently asked Eric Clapton if he’d been playing long — but for one generation his reunion with the splenetic, often violent Ginger Baker and the choleric Jack Bruce as the self-styled “world’s first supergroup” is a musical event only to be matched (if at all) by a Beatles get-together to usher in the second coming.

That barometer of over-the-top enthusiasm, the eBay internet auction site, has registered bids of more than 10 times the cover price for tickets to see three old men thrash out their differences at the scene of their last encounter.

For those under 40 it must seem a mystery why there is so much menopausal hysteria. The band came and went within two years and were renowned for competing in self- indulgent solos when they weren’t throwing things at each other.

But then those are the people who also have no memory of an England soccer team winning the World Cup, kipper ties, or — until recently — hiding behind the sofa from the Daleks.

The years 1966 to 1968 were not just a time of remarkable social revolution in Britain but also of a musical flowering that briefly gave this country a global dominance it has scarcely known before or since.

Those were the years of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Procul Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale, and Cream’s epoch-making Disraeli Gears with its Day-Glo pink psychedelic cover.

That album’s collection of original and innovative rock music played with virtuoso skill, unbridled talent for improvisation and obvious roots in blues and jazz was a milestone. While the Beatles were turning out ever more experimental pop music, Cream were coming from somewhere else altogether.

Even if our own royal defender of the faith was blissfully unaware of the fact, the most common graffiti scrawled on walls from London to New York and San Francisco at the end of the 1960s was “Clapton is God”. Cream sold 35m records.

Given that the group members’ talents were almost exclusively musical, an often overlooked yet essential part of the package lay in the lyrics, written for most of their songs by Pete Brown, a little-known beat poet. Bruce’s dramatic bass riffs were much magnified by being paired with the trippy romantic snapshot surrealism of lines such as:

In the white room with black curtains near the station
Blackroof country, no gold pavements, tired starlings . . .
You said no strings could secure you at the station
Platform ticket, restless diesels, goodbye windows . . .
I’ll wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves

Brown says he finds his lyrics from that period “weird”. His share of the royalties changed his life but as the band fell out with each other he drifted away and has not been invited to the reunion. But then Cream were never a group of chums who had started out playing together in each other’s garages.