Review of Eric Clapton Unplugged

Introduction

"Unplugged" was definitely one of the releases that "relaunched" Eric Clapton in the early 1990s. Recorded at Bray Studios, Windsor on the 16th of January 1992 for the ever popular MTV Unplugged, this is probably the biggest seller of all the Unplugged series.

Eric Clapton shows that he is equally at home on the acoustic guitar, with acoustic versions of some of his greatest hits, plus some new compositions.

When you get this DVD from the box, your first reaction is "aarggh, flipper !" But don`t panic, as it is simply a dual sided disc with different audio tracks on either side !

Video

The video quality is not excellent. I get the impression that this was recorded as NTSC for broadcast initially on MTV USA. There are no artefacts or problems of that nature, it just has that NTSC, washed out American TV conversion look to it.

Audio

Now it would be fair to say that I know the Unplugged CD note for note, back to front, any which way. So I'd like to think that I'm well qualified to talk about the audio on this disc.

Side A contains a DD5.1 remix, which on the whole sounds absolutely excellent. I noticed lots of subtle differences whilst listening, and was suitably impressed. On one or two tracks it does sound as though someone overdid the reverb when remixing Eric`s acoustic guitar, but it`s not too distracting, and actually adds something to the performance.

The links in between songs are slightly different to those on the CD, with slightly longer links and a couple of extra speeches to the crowd.

Side B contains a PCM stereo mix, which also sounds slightly different to the CD mix, and is also very good. But it`s the DD5.1 mix that you want to listen to here.

Features

No real extras to speak of. There is a "meet the band" screen, which allows you to navigate around a picture of the band, and highlights each member with a spotlight, and gives brief information.

There are also subtitles for each song, so if you thought that Eric sings "My biscuit roll was gone" during "Rollin` & Tumblin`" then you can find out the correct lyrics.

Conclusion

Not very good video, excellent audio, not many extras. Despite all of this, this is still an essential purchase for fans.

It would have been nice to see the interview segments that were included in the original MTV broadcast, the three extra songs which have never been released in this form from the show - Circus Left Town (which was in the MTV broadcast), My Father`s Eyes and Worried Life Blues, but it seems they will never see the light of day (apart from on bootlegs). There were also some alternate takes of some of the songs too, and these are still confined to bootleg editions only.

Despite all of this, this is probably the best recording of the performance that you can own at the moment.