LONDON - Rock guitar hero Eric Clapton has admitted for the first time that he was so addicted to alcohol and drugs that he abused his wife. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he acknowledged he was a „full-blown, practising alcoholic“ and this had had a devastating effect on his marriage to Patti Boyd during the 1980s. „Everyone used to walk around me on eggshells. They didn‘t know if I was going to be angry or whatever. When I‘d come back from the pub I could come back happy or I could come back and smash the place up,“ he said. Clapton added: „There were times when I just took sex with my wife by force and thought that was my entitlement.“ The guitarist, who rose to fame in the 1960s at the head of the rock trio Cream and then went on to form Blind Faith before embarking on a solo career, indicated that no longer sees himself as a musician. He said that if he needed a drink in order to write a song, „then perhaps being a musician was not such a great idea. „So I slung that away, I got rid of that and I thought ‘What am I? What am I, really?‘ And, on record I am an alcoholic and that is where my identity is.“ Clapton now concentrates on Crossroads, a clinic to treat drug and alcohol abuse in Antigua, where he retreated after his four-year-old son Conor fell to his death from a New York skyscraper in 1991.