In the booklet that accompanies Phil Manzanera’s career-spanning, 11-CD box set, 50 Years of Music, there is a photocopied page of small ads from a 1971 edition of Melody Maker. In between the news that chart-topping comedy trio the Scaffold need a “sensitive musician” for a university tour, and an unnamed German rock drummer “seeks a good heavy group (no time-wasters)”, lurks an appeal from an “avant-rock group” in search of a guitarist. It says nothing about their sound or their influences, but offers an intriguing set of adjectives: the successful applicant will be “fast, slow, elegant, witty, scary, stable, tricky”.
As Manzanera explains, had he not been sufficiently intrigued to apply, “we wouldn’t be sitting here today” – on a video call, with him in his London studio. He didn’t initially get the job with the nascent Roxy Music, but stayed in the band’s orbit. When their first choice didn’t work out, he stepped in, joining something he wryly describes today as less a band than “an art collective experiment, by two different branches of the art world – Brian Eno’s art education, Bryan Ferry’s art education. And I was just a puppet in this sort of art project, which I’m very proud to have been”.
Experiment or not, six months later he was on Top of the Pops, miming to Virginia Plain, his eyes hidden behind a vast pair of sunglasses with their lenses entirely covered in diamanté studs. They lent his solos a certain avant garde edge, he says, because he couldn’t really see what he was doing.
It’s still the image that springs to mind when you hear Manzanera’s name. But, as 50 Years of Music underlines, he has enjoyed an intriguing parallel career away from Roxy Music – one that takes in everything from working with Pink Floyd and Tim Finn (he first encountered Finn’s band Split Enz while touring Australia in the 70s, and they’ve sporadically collaborated ever since) to his and Brian Eno’s deliberately short-lived mid-70s band 801, to albums filled with psychedelic rock and music inspired by South America.
Central and South America are rooted in Manzanera’s youth. He had already led an extraordinary life before he answered Roxy Music’s ad, spending his childhood in Cuba – he can remember sheltering in the bathroom of the family home in Havana as Fidel Castro’s Barbudos revolutionaries fought a gun battle in their back garden – and Hawaii, before being packed off to boarding school in Britain. His mother was Colombian. His father was an Englishman who ostensibly worked for the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) airline, but circumstantial evidence suggests he was probably a spy (and possibly the model for Wormold, the lead character in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana).
In fact, Manzanera’s family history was even more exotic than he first realised. When he was 40, his aunt told him that his father was, in fact, the son of a Neapolitan opera singer called Mr Sparano. “She thought I was going to be upset, but I thought it was fantastic, exciting, he wasn’t some boring guy from Kent.” Then, when attempting to get a Spanish passport after Brexit by proving he had Sephardic Jewish heritage, he discovered he was a direct descendant of Moses Cohen Henriques, the 17th century’s most famous Jewish pirate of the Caribbean. “I found a painting of him,” laughs Manzanera, “and he looks like me on the cover of the first Roxy album. Long hair, boots – absolute ringer!”
Nevertheless, it was his time in Cuba that most affected him creatively. The first music he learned to play – on his mother’s guitar – was “boleros and all that type of thing, the acoustic music people later heard on Buena Vista Social Club”. As he points out, the homegrown musical culture of Cuba was so strong, “a groove that was so much part of social and cultural life”, that rock’n’roll struggled to make any impact.
He can remember being taken to Havana’s famous El Tropicana nightclub as a child – “there was a fabulous recreation of it in The Godfather Part II, set exactly when I was there, Christmas 1958” – and seeing Celia Cruz and pianist Rubén González perform. “Nobody asked me anything about my background or South America in the whole 12 years of Roxy. Latin music had a weird image in Britain – it was all Edmundo Ros and Carmen Miranda with bowls of fruit on her head. I sort of kept quiet about it, I was a bit embarrassed. In Roxy, they were a bit older than me. I just wanted to learn and get on with it. But [Cuban music] was bursting to get out of me; I had to stick it into Roxy somehow by stealth. So I played a 6/8 echo groove against [drummer] Paul Thompson’s 4/4 beat – the 6/8 time signature is the basis of cumbia.”
Once he was away from Roxy, Manzanera’s musical influences came gushing out: the opening track of his 1975 solo debut, Diamond Head, was called Frontera and featured Robert Wyatt singing in Spanish. And his South American roots were made more explicit still on 1990’s Southern Cross – featuring his retelling of his childhood experience of the Cuban revolution, the track Dr Fidel – and 1999’s Vozero.
In fact, you get the feeling that a considerable amount of Manzanera’s solo work was a reaction to Roxy Music, in which life always seems to have been slightly fraught. He once compared the band to a Rolls-Royce he bought at the height of their success: beautiful, but so difficult to drive that it was best only occasionally taken out of the garage. Certainly, Manzanera’s stark, drum-machine-driven 1982 instrumental album Primitive Guitars sounds like a response to the lushness and intricacy of Roxy Music’s final album, Avalon, the making of which was so strained that Manzanera departed the band after the subsequent tour by shaking Bryan Ferry’s hand and offering the words: “Goodbye – it’s been a great pressure working with you.”
“Oh, absolutely, 100%,” he nods. “I understand [the sound of Avalon] better now, because Bryan’s a fine artist and it’s his work of art. But I was more rebellious. I thought: I’ll just do an album with drum boxes and all sorts of shit on it, more experimental, distilling everything down.”
None of his solo work ever sold in vast quantities. Occasional Roxy reunions notwithstanding, he says, he’s proudly been “indie since about 1983”, having realised early on that “I’d have to go and ask someone’s permission to make music for the rest of my life, unless I acquired the means of production – and there we are, referencing Marx and Che Guevara”. Nevertheless, some of it has unexpectedly found its way to a mainstream audience, not least when the title track of his 1978 solo album K-Scope ended up being sampled on No Church in the Wild, the opening track of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s 2011 album Watch the Throne and subsequently a triple-platinum-selling single (it recently popped back up on the Gladiator II trailer). He had been sampled by hip-hop producers before – his riff from Roxy Music’s Amazona turned up on Ice-T’s That’s How I’m Livin’ in the early 90s – but even so, it came as a shock.
Manzanera claimed he earned more from the sample’s use than he did in 50 years of Roxy Music, and No Church in the Wild’s producer, 88-Keys, felt the urge to visit him backstage and fill him in on how he came to use it. “He came to see me when I was playing with David Gilmour at Radio City in New York, and he brought his copy of K-Scope with him. He told me he specialises in sampling vinyl records made between 1976 and 1978; he goes through the bins in record stores and that’s how he found it. He slowed it down so much I didn’t recognise it at first, but that’s the genius of 88-Keys. I gave him a huge hug and said, ‘Man, I love you.’ It was like an act of God, like there’s somebody up there saying ‘good karma – stay in your lane, be nice to people, just chill out and things will happen’.”
It has, he concedes, been quite a journey. His latest musical project is a collaboration with Roxy’s Andy MacKay and Paul Thompson, involving “90% improvised music”. They played some tiny gigs in London last year, and intend to release the recordings next year. Struggling to describe what it sounds like – “improvised but not jazz … strange sounds, space and texture” – he suddenly mentions the old ad in Melody Maker that started all this. “Avant-rock!” he says, happily. “We’re back in the avant-rock space. It’s come full circle. We’re back in the experimentation business.”
• 50 Years of Music is released on 1 November
