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Clapton was an illegitimate war baby from suburban Surrey brought up to believe his mother was his sister, who got his first acoustic guitar for his 13th birthday but found learning so difficult he almost gave up. He didn’t, though, but he would later earn the ironic nickname “Slowhand” because of the slow handclap from the audience when he played so hard he broke a string and had to repair it on stage.

Kingston College of Art expelled young Eric for playing guitar in class. He drifted into manual labour but eventually into the two bands that would become the nurseries for a whole generation of British guitar heroes: the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

It was at one of the latter’s Oxford gigs that he ran into Baker, mercurial drummer with a regarded but underachieving jazz-blues band called the Graham Bond Organisation. Baker, five years older, was impressed by the guitarist and offered him a lift in his highly desirable Rover (if that isn’t a sign of how the world has changed, what is?) and suggested they form a band.

Clapton almost blew it by insisting they brought another Graham Bond member over: bassist Jack Bruce. A one-time boy soprano who had studied at the Royal College of Music, Bruce had an enormous reputation as a virtuoso performer but he and Baker also loathed one another.

Baker thought Bruce’s playing over-elaborate and disliked him so much he would throw drumsticks at his head until Bruce, who considered Baker’s drumming too loud and too insistent, threw a guitar at him. They had had fist fights. On one occasion Baker pulled a knife.

But it was a creative tension that with Clapton in the mix worked an improbable magic. The name Cream was Clapton’s idea, supposed to suggest their rich fusion sound, but it was also a subtle boast that each of them were regarded as the best in their field.

When the Australian impresario Robert Stigwood booked them for the 1966 Windsor blues and jazz festival, Cream floated up and away. The success of their first album, Fresh Cream, was followed by the inspirational Disraeli Gears, then came the Wheels of Fire double album. But almost before it had started, it was over: the final album, Goodbye Cream, was recorded barely two years after the first. By the time it was released the trio had gone their separate ways.

The Bruce-Baker squabbling had been exacerbated by fame, money and drugs — at the notorious Fillmore concert in San Francisco they had been escorted from the airport by Hell’s Angels and it was hard to tell whether the band or audience was more stoned. Clapton became obsessed with the high life — spending vast sums on clothes, including famously tight satin trousers — and the free sex. He claimed to have bedded more than 1,000 women and once ordered a fellow musician to let him have sex with his girlfriend.

Drink, cannabis and LSD all played a part. Bruce passed out at one gig, while Baker collapsed with stomach ulcers while playing at the BBC. Clapton’s weight had plummeted to nine stone and he was a wreck. Bruce recalls that fans who came to Cream gigs would shout: “You gonna die tonight, Ginger?”

The next year Clapton collaborated with Baker in the short-lived Blind Faith, but then went his own way to solo stardom, drink and drug abuse and a remarkable rehabilitation. His passion for women led briefly to a rift with George Harrison (with whom he had written Cream’s hit single Badge) when he stole Harrison’s wife Patti Boyd. He dedicated his mega-hit Layla to her.

His life has been beset by tragedy — losing several friends in a helicopter crash in 1990 and then Conor, his four-year-old son by the Italian model Lory Del Santo, who fell from a New York apartment block— but also by fame, with the one-time addict receiving a CBE at Buckingham Palace last year from someone who had little idea who he was.

Now part of the Establishment, his resistance to getting Cream back together has been eroded by time and the knowledge that both Bruce, 61, and Baker, 65, are in poor health and not as financially comfortable as Clapton. Baker’s osteoarthritis makes practising the drums impossible, which should at least spare fans the ordeal of his excruciating extended drum solo, Toad.

But it won’t be hugs and kisses all round. Baker has said of the equally ailing Bruce: “We’ll play music together but we don’t have to talk to each other.” It could still all curdle on the night.