Veteran rocker Eric Clapton rewrote his tell-all memoirs after realising he had wrongly blamed friends for his descent into drink and drugs hell.

In his 2007 autobiography, the Layla hitmaker detailed his desperate struggle with alcohol and heroin at the height of his fame in the 1970s.

The book famously pulled no punches as Clapton opened up about his drug-induced years as a hermit at his home in England, but now the famed guitarist has revealed he rewrote the entire book because in initial drafts of the tome, he was blaming others for his past.

Clapton tells Mojo magazine, "I am a blamer. A number one blamer. The early drafts had stuff like, 'It wasn't my fault that this happened' or 'It was extenuating circumstances'...

"I had to think about it in a moral way. What kind of legacy am I leaving here? Is this how I want to present myself? And I rewrote it, taking full responsibility for my part in everything. It helped me to grow up at the age of 60 or whatever, and I became proud of what I'd done."