Dylan, Dali and Bryan Ferry
Roxy Music guitarist and art-rock great Phil Manzanera discusses his upcoming riotous autobiography.
Phil Manzanera, guitarist with Roxy Music and worldly gentleman of art rock, is showing me round his envy-inducing loft in west London. The walls are covered in vast, quasibiblical paintings by Nicholas De Ville, who designed several of Roxy’s album sleeves. There is a bespoke studio, mounted on thousands of conical springs, where Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde and David Gilmour have recorded.
Hanging on a hook is Manzanera’s blue-satin “Firebird’’ stage suit embroidered with red guitars by Wendy Dagworthy, “the high priestess of British fashion”. On a sideboard are the glasses with jewel-encrusted lenses made for him by Antony Price, another of Roxy’s style gurus, who designed suits for them, David Bowie and Duran Duran.
“Try them on,’’ says Manzanera, a sleek 73 in rollneck and slacks. He wears the fabulously impractical specs with panache on the cover of his new autobiography, Revolución To Roxy, but they look ridiculous on me, as they do on Jonathan Ross in a photo on the wall.
The book is a great, globe-trotting read, charting 50 years with Bryan Ferry et al in one of the most influential and innovative bands of them all, and has encounters with Bob Dylan in Seville, Vivien Leigh in London and Salvador Dali in Paris.
And the early chapters, which you sometimes skim in memoirs, are just as engaging because Manzanera had a bracingly colourful childhood. He uses the surname of his mother, who met his British father when his dad was working for the British Council in her native Colombia, and dedicates the book to them for giving him a life “sin fronteras’’.
Six years after he was born, the family moved from London to Cuba – the “revolución’’ of the book’s title is Fidel Castro’s, which Manzanera saw first hand at the age of 7. In Havana, they lived next to one of the government’s generals, and on New Year’s Eve 1958, Manzanera says, “there was a gun battle in our garden’’ between Castro’s revolutionaries and loyalist soldiers.
“We were fearing for our lives,’’ he says in the book. “We were all crouched on the bathroom floor, heads pressed down by our shrieking mother, and our hearts pounding. Bullets were flying all over the place and with every rifle shot my mother was screaming and praying out loud.’’
In the morning the government soldiers were rounded up. “One of the men ran away and we heard shots,’’ Manzanera says. They didn't see him die, but had a good idea what had happened.
“Did I have post-traumatic stress? I guess I don’t want to go there.” A few days later, lorries handed out communist “merch’’ – caps, armbands – and, to young Phil’s delight, one of Castro’s men poured the gunpowder out of a shell and set fire to it with a whoosh.
Manzanera’s parents decided this might not be the ideal environment for a young family and decamped to Hawaii, then Venezuela. By 9, he was boarding at Dulwich College, the independent boys’ school in south London, about as far from Caribbean communism as you could get.
It was there that he began playing in bands and cultivating the collegiate amenability he still exudes. Yes, he is a fantastic musician – listen to how his guitar erupts after the long, hushed intro on Roxy’s In Every Dream Home a Heartache – but almost as important has been his ability to rub along with big egos.
Since Ferry pulled the band’s strings, often without consulting the others, Manzanera sometimes felt like a session musician, but he generally put up with it.
“Roxy wasn’t ever going to be like the Three Musketeers, it was like an art collective.’’ The art-school-educated Ferry and Brian Eno “had been taught to make beautiful things. People get fed up that Bryan [Ferry] takes too long to do things, but it’s because he is an artist. He is doing some weird and wonderful stuff at the moment that I hope he is brave enough to put out’’.
He has worked with Eno several times since the latter left Roxy in 1973, and played and produced for Gilmour, while Pink Floyd refashioned one of his old demos into a track, One Slip, on their 1987 album A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
Manzanera remembers a holiday in the south of France with Roger Waters in which they competed in what sounds like a bourgeois quadrathlon.
Waters thrashed him at tennis and water-skiing, but Manzanera got his revenge at table tennis and swimming, which didn’t go down well. “Roger likes to win. He’s an alpha male and I don’t know how David coped with that.’’ The turmoil in Pink Floyd, Manzanera says, “makes Roxy look like a bunch of hippies’’.
Financial strife was a feature of Roxy’s early years. They received only 5% of the profits from their 1972 self-titled first album, split six ways. “Since record companies were invented they’ve been ripping off their artists,’’ he says. “That’s why my heart sings when I hear about Raye, winning all those Brit awards and doing it independently.’’
It took Manzanera until 1984 to get into the black. He woke up to what he’d been missing in 2011, when a guitar riff from his solo record K-Scope was sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye West on No Church in the Wild from their Watch the Throne album.
He made more money from that sample than in his whole time with Roxy. “Syncs – that’s where the money is,’’ he says, referring to the licensing of music to films, TV and adverts. No Church in the Wild featured in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and, even better, in its trailer, “which pays five times more than being in the film’’.
Manzanera and his second wife, Claire Singers, split their time between London and Sussex, where they live near Ferry.
Roxy Music did a successful reunion tour for their 50th anniversary in 2022 and, this month, Manzanera will play intimate gigs in Soho with bandmates Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson.
He reckons he has worked on about 80 albums in 50 years, recently producing some of Swing Fever, the big band record by Rod Stewart and Jools Holland. Not what you'd expect.
“I thought, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ And it’s No 1 this week. My whole thing is, I’m not really afraid to fail.”
How can music be daunting when you've survived a revolution?
Revolución To Roxy by Phil Manzanera (Wordzworth Publishing) is scheduled to be released on March 22.