Wonderful Tonight is quite simply one of the most beautiful guitar-driven love ballads I’ve ever heard. It’s stunning how the lyrics and music, particularly that ghostly guitar riff, so perfectly capture the romance and intimacy of the evening, the anticipation of the big occasion and the profound feelings between the couple.
You feel privy to it all, to the point that the song carries the aroma of perfume and cologne in the air as you hear it. It’s insider access, total, and it’s quite the musical accomplishment.
Also, the ‘bridge’ is to die for. When he sings, you just don’t realize / how much I love you, it always makes the hairs on my arms stand up on end.
Wonderful Tonight was written in 1976 for Pattie Boyd while Clapton was waiting for her to get ready to attend Paul and Linda McCartney’s annual Buddy Holly Week event. Boyd had married George Harrison in 1966, but they divorced in 1977. She then married their mutual friend Eric Clapton in 1979, but they ended up divorcing in 1989.
All good things come to an end, which seems to be a common theme here of late. The song is mentioned in Boyd’s 2007 autobiographical book Wonderful Today.
The song peaked at number 16 on the US Billboard on 15 July 1978, spending seven weeks in the Top 40. I think I have heard this song more than any other Clapton song in my life.
I first heard it at the Academy when I was 18 years old. My section under officer, ‘Hilly’, was a huge Springsteen fan and we often shared music, and I believe this is one I got from him. So he deserves a high-five and, on the flip side, to put it mildly…
[Verse 1]
It’s late in the evening, she’s wondering what clothes to wear
She puts on her makeup and brushes her long blonde hair
And then she asks me, “Do I look all right?”
And I say, “Yes, you look wonderful tonight”
[Verse 2]
We go to a party and everyone turns to see
This beautiful lady that’s walking around with me
And then she asks me, “Do you feel all right?”
And I say, “Yes, I feel wonderful tonight”
[Bridge]
I feel wonderful because I see the love light in your eyes
And the wonder of it all is that you just don’t realize
How much I love you
[Verse 3]
It’s time to go home now and I’ve got an aching head
So I give her the car keys and she helps me to bed
And then I tell her, as I turn out the light
I say, “My darling, you were wonderful tonight
Oh, my darling, you were wonderful tonight”
References:
1. Wonderful Tonight – Wikipedia
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
I can’t think of a more intimate and romantic rock ballad. Thanks for sharing it and your thoughts and memories, mate.
Very kind of you Steve.
My pleasure, Matt.
I have always loved this song but never knew the backstory. Thanks for sharing it.
It’s strange, isn’t it? When you’ve been listening to a song for decades, and then you find out what inspired it and all the nitty-gritty details behind it.
Thanks for chiming in, Tracie.
The guys a racist knob and can get in the sea as far as I’m concerned.
I’d never heard of that.
His onstage rants about “getting the foreigners out of Britain” was the catalyst for the Rock Against Racism movement forming.
If it’s about effective border protection / control, then I’m probably in his camp.
Clapton told the audience to “get the foreigners out” and repeatedly shouted the fascist National Front slogan “Keep Britain White,” alongside using explicit racial slurs.
If he shouted ‘Keep Britain White’ and using explicit racial slurs, then I’m most definitely not in accordance. Do you have a reference?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Against_Racism
The article is largely leftist propaganda, and the framing of Clapton and Bowie is beyond ridiculous. They are activists words.
Clapton’s 1976 outburst… he later retracted saying he was drunk and wish he never said them. and being ashamed of.
The thing is…. the way the western media control the narrative now and since about 2015, if he was way outta line – the whole music world would have disowned him, which hasn’t happened.
Not just that, if he was outta line, do you think, for one second, Bob Dylan would have accompanied him on stage in multiple performances?
There’s no if here. He did what he did. So did Bowie. However, Bowie atoned for it. Spent time getting sober and did a fair whack of apologising. Changed direction (persona if you like, his thing was when he was being The Thin White Duke) he married a Somalian woman and owned what he said as ‘Drug fogged nonsense’. Clapton spend years doubling down. What Zimmerman did or didn’t; choose to believe is up to him. I’m not a crusader against Clapton, but when I read his comments (I have attended RAR events and am against racism and fairly left leaning) and then read several other interviews with him defending Enoch Powell and echoing the points he made on stage I kinda thought “Sorry Eric I’m no longer a fan mate, you seem like a bad dude to me”
The article is a Wiki entry. For a real historical musical movement. The thing happened. I suspect you and I differ on politics. That’s OK. I’m sure there’s many bands we agree on. I’m sure there’s many an example of poor rockstar behaviour too that we over look. They’re musicians not moral crusaders. The music world let loads of them get away with all sorts of terrible stuff. Clapton for me is a no go. Because he hung on to his rhetoric for so many years. And I read those interviews Creem, Rolling Stone, Q Etc with my own eyes.
I agree. I was wrong to say, “If he was outta line,” because clearly he was.
Firstly, to use music history and innuendo to declare whether someone has atoned or hasn’t — simply because they married into another race — is itself pretty censorious. You can’t get inside another person’s head; you can only comment on observable behaviour and patterns. Anything beyond that is speculation.
So Clapton clearly has a genuinely troubling racist episode in his history, but that is quite different from establishing that he is, or always was, a racist.
I was a moderate-to-progressive leftist in my early to middle adulthood, until the movement went radical — and dangerously so. The Douglas Murray quote I love is: “The train of progressivism never stops at the station. It keeps going full steam ahead.” I’ve written posts about why I bailed out.
You are right: they are musicians, not — and shouldn’t be — moral crusaders, unless a justifiable cause inspires their art. I just write about how music captivates me, and I’m frankly sick of how politics is sometimes dragged into it.
Fair enough. I should probably have kept my option on old Slow-hand to myself, but of all the old guard he pisses me off because he sticks by his bad choice time and again in many examples of classic rock journalism I’ve read (I do love reading the archives of the old rock press).
Bowie has worked hard to say “it wasn’t me it was the epic amount of drugs I was on. I own that. Sorry.” And then there are many of his actions to support his statement. Clapton, not so much.
But admittedly I haven’t read every interview he’s done. Just enough to conclude “I don’t think I like this bloke”
Well, thanks for making your opinion felt, which broadened the scope of the article. I had a similar thing happen with a Don Henley-related article, ‘Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough’ (if you care to read it), but not of a racial nature – rather, it was about his censoring of Eagles music on YouTube. Cheers.
Oh not about him being charged with corrupting minors after getting caught with underage sex workers then?
Thanks for your tolerance on the topic.