ROXY AND ELSEWHERE

Mambo-ing through Manzanera’s highlights: Mat Snow.

THE GLAM EXTRAVAGANZA Roxy Music ★★★★★ Country Life (ISLAND, 1974)

Unjustly upstaged by its sleeve, Roxy’s fourth album boasts exhilarating bangers (All I Want Is You and The Thrill Of It All), honking good times (If It Takes All Night), the deeply sinister (Bitter-Sweet and Casanova), two thrilling Ferry-Manzanera co-writes (Out Of The Blue and Prairie Rose), and throughout a spectacular and lavish banquet of scintillating guitar showcasing his confident mastery of multiple styles aged only 23.

THE AVANT-SUPERGROUP 801 ★★★★ 801 Live (ISLAND, 1976)

Reuniting Manzanera with schoolfriend/Quiet Sun bandmate Bill MacCormick and elbowed Roxy multiinstrumentalist Eno, 801 added Lloyd Watson (guitars), Francis Monkman (keyboards) and Simon Phillips (drums) to a project designed to optimise a six-week window of opportunity in the blazing summer of ’76. Drawing from their individual repertoires plus The Beatles and Kinks, 801 Live pristinely captured their third and final show in September 1976, a psych/ prog/proto-post-punk masterpiece.

THE COLOMBIAN BROMANCE Corroncho ★★★★ Corroncho (EXPRESSION, 2010)

Like Manzanera’s mother, Lucho Brieva hails from Colombia’s Caribbean coast where folks are dismissed as ‘Corronchos’ by metropolitan Bogotá; thus the guitarist and his artist-sculptor collaborator (also the second Mr Chrissie Hynde) exuberantly celebrated their joint roots in a swinging, utterly pleasurable Spanish-sung album of Manzanera originals plus songs by Dylan, Hynde and Willie Colón. Like all Manzanera’s non-Anglophone projects, it wears both dancing shoes and its heart on its sleeve. ¡Arriba!