It’s late 1978 and the charts are in a state of mild rebellion. Punk has been and gone, disco is everywhere, and somewhere in the middle of all this a long-haired guitarist from Surrey is quietly getting on with the business of being thirty-three. “Promises” was Eric Clapton’s single that autumn, a gentle, shuffling thing that sounded as though it had been recorded on a porch. It climbed to number nine in America, and it turned up in Britain too, stopping at thirty-seven. It wasn’t his own song, and it wasn’t a grand statement. But it’s a quietly clever piece of writing about how people break their word without ever meaning to, and I rather like it more with every listen.
Who Wrote It, and How It Was Made
The song came from Richard Feldman and Roger Linn. Feldman was a songwriter and producer who had grown up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the same patch of America that supplied much of Clapton’s band in the seventies, which probably explains why the song fits him so snugly. Linn was a guitarist and tinkerer who would go on to become famous for building drum machines. Indeed, the demo of “Promises” was recorded with an early version of the instrument that eventually became the LinnDrum, which means this gentle, country-ish shuffle is, in a small way, a footnote in the history of electronic music. I find that rather wonderful. Nobody could have been less aware of it than the people involved.
Clapton recorded it in London in the late summer of 1978, with Glyn Johns producing, as part of the album Backless. Johns was a celebrated engineer who had worked with everyone from the Rolling Stones to the Who, and he had a gift for making records sound relaxed. That relaxation is what you hear on “Promises”: a lightly rolling beat, a vocal that stays politely under its hat, and a guitar that dips in and out without making a fuss. It’s the sound of a man who has decided to enjoy himself for a change, and who sees no good reason to apologise for it.
What the Lyric Is Saying
At first glance, the narrator seems almost cheerfully detached. He opens by saying it doesn’t bother him if the woman never comes home, and that he doesn’t mind if she drifts off over some distant sea. You wonder, in that first verse, whether he’s being generous or simply trying very hard to look unbothered. By the later verses the shrug starts to slip. He admits to having a problem, and the problem is a woman who flips between love and the opposite of love, sometimes in the space of a single afternoon. It’s a recognisable predicament, and he describes it with a wry, weary calm.
The line that gives the song its meaning is the simple observation that they once swore to stay friends, and nobody warned them that promises have a shelf life. It’s a quietly devastating thought. Most break-up songs blame somebody. This one points, gently, at the promise itself. The vow wasn’t a lie when it was made. It just turned out to be bigger than the people who made it. That’s a more adult sort of sadness than rage or revenge, and it’s the reason the song survives long after the fashions of 1978 have been folded away.
The Sound of 1978
It would be easy to say that “Promises” sounded out of step with its moment, and in some respects it did. While a new generation was smashing guitars, Clapton was settled into a loping, country-flavoured groove with a cast of Tulsa veterans behind him. But the year had room for more than one kind of record. America took to it warmly, and it climbed to number nine on the Billboard chart, which made it one of the biggest singles of his solo career. Critics were rather less excited. One reviewer called it an understated pop shuffle, and didn’t consider the album it came from especially memorable, which is a polite way of saying he’d have liked more fireworks.
Which is fair enough, if you’re after fireworks. But I’ve always thought there’s a kind of courage in understatement. Clapton had spent his twenties being described as a deity. By his early thirties he was happy to be a decent singer of a decent song, with a band that played as though they’d all just enjoyed a good lunch. If you want evidence of how comfortable he’d become, listen to how little he feels the need to solo. He wanders in, makes a remark, and wanders out again, like a man leaving a party at exactly the right moment.
Why It’s Lasted
I suspect “Promises” has lasted precisely because it asks so little. It’s three minutes long, it has a tune you can hum, and it’s about something that happens to nearly everyone sooner or later. You can play it at a barbecue and no one will be offended. You can also play it late at night when you’re thinking about someone, and find it has more to say than you expected. That doubleness is a rare thing in a pop record. It’s cheerful on the surface and faintly sorrowful underneath, rather like a good holiday photograph of people who’ve since fallen out.
There’s also the matter of its title, which is quietly ironic given Clapton’s own history. Here was a man who had made, and broken, a good many promises of his own by 1978. He sings the song without any obvious self-pity, though, and without any obvious self-defence either. He lets the words stand, and leaves the listener to draw conclusions. That reticence is one of his underrated gifts. It’s the difference between a singer who tells you what to feel and one who simply puts the feeling on the table and lets you pick it up.
The band, too, deserves a nod. The people playing behind Clapton on Backless were the lot he’d been touring with for years: Carl Radle on bass, Jamie Oldaker on drums, Dick Sims on keyboards, and George Terry on guitar, with Marcy Levy adding her voice to the mix. They’d played together so often that they hardly needed to look at each other, and that ease is audible in every bar. Nobody is showing off. Everyone is simply listening, which is the most underrated skill in any band, and the reason a track this modest can sound so assured.
What It Adds Up To
So what is “Promises” really saying? That we make them in good faith, that we mean every word, and that life then goes ahead and rearranges the furniture. It’s a gentle, wise, slightly sad little song, and it doesn’t have the faintest interest in shouting. Clapton and his band give it the lightest possible touch, and the writers, Feldman and Linn, deserve more credit than they usually get. I’d happily play it to anyone who thinks the seventies were all about excess. Here’s a record that says something true, softly, and then gets out of the way. We could do with a few more of those.