Three Polaroid photographs, circa 1974

Pattie Boyd: George phoned one day to say he was in the area and wanted to see us. I took these photos of him and Eric smoking in the little TV room.

Under the strain of George Harrison's infidelities and Eric Clapton's obsessive pursuit, Pattie Boyd made the decision to leave George in July 1974. In her 2007 autobiography Wonderful Today, Boyd explains The final straw was his affair with Maureen Starr, Ringo’s wife... I felt we were like chopsticks joined together and cracking apart; something had to give... On July 3, I told George I was leaving him... The next day, with a great sadness in my heart, I packed some things, said a tearful goodbye to Friar Park and our two Siamese cats, then flew to America. Within a few weeks, Pattie had joined Eric on his US tour.

By October, George had flown to Los Angeles to begin rehearsals for his forthcoming Dark Horse Tour, where he would meet and begin a romantic relationship with Olivia Arias, then working for the US office of his new record label Dark Horse Records. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1979, Harrison revealed: After I split up from Pattie, I went on a bit of a bender to make up for all the years I’d been married... I just went on a binge, went on the road… all that sort of thing, until it got to the point where I had no voice and almost no body at times. Then I met Olivia and it all worked out fine. Evidently suffering from a tumultuous year domestically and over-exertion in the studio, Harrison began his US tour exhausted and hoarse, evoking a mixed critical reception that would leave the former Beatle so shell-shocked that he would not tour again until 1991. In his 1980 memoir I, Me, Mine, Harrison recalled his return home after the tour ended on 20 December: When I got off the plane, and back home I went into the garden and I was so relieved. That was the nearest I got to a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t even go into the house.

Pattie remembers that George would unexpectedly join her and Eric at Hurtwood Edge that Christmas: we laughed and he had some Christmas pudding with us, and some wine, and it wasn’t awkward at all. I couldn’t believe how friendly he and Eric were toward each other. When asked about the affair during a press conference some months earlier, Harrison had famously said of his longtime friend: I’d rather she was with him than with some dope. Despite the circumstances, the two musicians would remain friends until George's death in 2001.