Richard Clapton (born 18 May 1948) is an Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist and producer. His solo top 20 hits on the Kent Music Report Singles Chart are "Girls on the Avenue" (1975) and "I Am an Island" (1982). He reached the top 20 on the related albums chart with Goodbye Tiger (1977), Hearts on the Nightline (1979), The Great Escape (1982) and The Very Best of Richard Clapton (1982). Clapton's highest-charting album, Music Is Love (1966–1970) (April 2021), peaked at number 3 on the ARIA Chart. As a producer he worked on the second INXS album, Underneath the Colours (1981). In 1983, he briefly joined the Party Boys for a tour of eastern Australia and their live album, Greatest Hits (Of Other People) (1983), before resuming his solo career. Australian rock music historian Ian McFarlane described Clapton as "one of the most important Australian songwriters of the 1970s." On 12 October 1999, Clapton was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) hall of fame. In August 2014 he published his memoirs, The Best Years of Our Lives. Career Early years Richard Clapton was born on 18 May 1948, however his birth name is elusive. When the artist changed his birth name in the mid-1960s, he used the last names of two of his music heroes, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. Speculation over his age has varied: an article in Who magazine (1996) gives his birth year as 1951, while Ian McFarlane's Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop (1999) has 1949. In a 2002 interview with The Ages Warwick McFadyen, he described himself as being 50-something. Clapton's mother was a night nurse at a Sydney hospital and his Australian-Chinese father was a doctor—they had a volatile relationship and divorced when Clapton was two years old. During his childhood, Clapton had no contact with his father and lived with his mother, who had mental health problems. She would periodically place him in care until she committed suicide when he was aged ten. Clapton met his father at her funeral and was subsequently enrolled in a Sydney boarding school, Trinity Grammar, at Summer Hill. As an adolescent he listened to the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, and was given his first electric guitar by a school friend's father. He cites Richard Wherrett—his house master and English teacher at Trinity who later became a theatre director—as an early mentor. In 1965, Clapton formed Darktown Strutters