Richard Clapton

Richard Clapton
Richard Clapton, 9 October 2005 The Entertainment Quarter
Background information
Born	18 May ca. 1949
Origin	Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Genres	Rock and roll
Occupation(s)	Singer, songwriter, producer
Instruments	Singing, guitar
Years active	1965–present
Labels	Infinity, Festival, Mushroom, WEA, Warner, Sony, Columbia
Associated acts	Darktown Strutters, Bitch, Sopwith Camel, Sun, Renée Geyer, The Party Boys
Website	www.richardclapton.com

Richard Clapton (born 18 May ca. 1949) is an Australian singer-songwriter, producer and guitarist from Sydney, New South Wales. His solo top 20 hits on the Kent Music Report Singles Chart are "Girls on the Avenue" (1975) and "I Am an Island" (1982). His top 20 albums on the related Albums Chart are Goodbye Tiger (1977), Hearts on the Nightline (1979), The Great Escape (1982), and The Very Best of Richard Clapton (1982). As a producer he worked on the second INXS album, Underneath the Colours (1981). In 1983, he briefly joined The Party Boys for a tour of eastern Australia and the live album, Greatest Hits (Of Other People) (1983) before resuming his solo career.

Australian rock music historian Ian McFarlane described Clapton as "one of the most important Australian songwriters of the 1970s". On 12 October 1999, Clapton was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame. On 1 August 2014 Clapton published his autobiography, The Best Years of Our Lives.

Richard Clapton's year of birth is elusive: in a 2002 interview with a Melbourne newspaper, The Age, he described himself as being 50-something. An article in Who magazine (1996) gives his birth year as 1951, while Ian McFarlane's Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop (1999) has 1949. Clapton's mother was a night nurse at a Sydney hospital and his Australian-Chinese father was a surgeon—they had a volatile relationship and divorced when Clapton was two years old. During his childhood, Clapton had no contact with his father and lived with his mother who had mental health problems. She would periodically place him in care until she committed suicide when he was aged ten. Clapton met his father at her funeral and was subsequently enrolled in a Sydney boarding school, Trinity Grammar, at Summer Hill. As an adolescent he listened to the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, and was given his first electric guitar by a school friend's father. He cites Richard Wherrett—his house master and English teacher at Trinity who later became a prominent theatre director—as an early mentor.