Famous Wife & Muse Pattie Boyd Brings Life Story to NZ

George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me; An Evening with Pattie Boyd

Famous Wife & Muse Pattie Boyd Brings Life Story to New Zealand

Pattie Boyd was the wide-eyed, model face of Sixties’ London who inspired ex-husbands George Harrison and Eric Clapton to write some of the greatest love songs of the 20th century. Most famously, Harrison wrote for her Something, and I Need You. Gripped by the desire to wrest Boyd from the arms of an increasingly errant Beatle, blues-god Clapton wrote Layla for her, and once they were married, Wonderful Tonight.

his May Boyd will bring her compelling and entertaining life story to audiences in Auckland during an intimate three hours of George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me; An Evening with Pattie Boyd. Starting off on a swanky hour of cocktails with Pattie, guests will then enjoy a conversational two-hour show.

This New Zealand music month tour of Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland will mark her inaugural visit to New Zealand– plans to come in the ‘70’s with then-hubby Eric Clapton were stymied by the NZ authorities approach to a drug conviction in London. Boyd elaborates.

“I was on tour with Eric, landing in Australia before New Zealand. I was told to get off there as New Zealand heard George Harrison and I had been busted for a lump of hash that had been planted by Sergeant Pilchar in 65.”

oyd will share memories, film footage and personal photographs from her incredible life with the greatest legends of rock’n’roll. It’s an era that MC, long-time friend and creator of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Richard O’Brien, refers to as the “rock-ocracy” of the sixties. Those who moved in that circle included members of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. O’Brien is delighted to revisit those years with Boyd, a now respected photographer who was once commissioned to photograph him for OK! Magazine.

Though a fashion-world icon in her own right, after Boyd met Harrison on the set of A Hard Day’s Night,she was carried along by the hysteric adulation of the Beatles era and became one of the world’s most talked about musical muses; she features in Clapton’s latest and current documentary, Life in 12 Bars.

Says Boyd on the socio-musical landscape of the time: “I think there was definitely a more energetic and vibrant attitude between musicians. I think some of this shows in my photographs - it seems as if the 60’s and 70’s were a free society with not as many restrictions as [we have] now. Of course, I knew I was living an unusual and exotic life with all these divine people coming in and out of our lives.”

EVENT NOTES

Venues:

Saturday, 19 May, at Auckland Museum, Auckland

Timings:

7pm - Cocktails & Canapes with Pattie Boyd

8pm – George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Me; An evening with Pattie Boyd – MC Richard O’Brien

10pm - Close

Visit: www.pattieboydtour.com

Tickets are: $295 pp or $2500 for a table of 10 (includes Cocktails & Canapes)

FAST FACTS

• Pattie Boyd was born Patricia Anne Boyd in March 1944. She spent many of her younger years in Kenya with her brothers and sisters. Both sisters ended up either modelling or living a similar lifestyle to Boyd.

• Boyd married Harrison in 1966 and they were divorced in June 1977, she married Clapton in 1979, divorcing him in 1989.

• Boyd’s photographs of Harrison and Clapton have travelled previously under the title of Through the Eye of a Muse, and exhibited in Dublin, London, Sydney, Toronto, Moscow, Europe and the USA.

• In April 2015, Boyd married long-standing partner and property developer, Rod Weston.

ENDS

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