Was my airline executive father really Our Man In Havana?
Roxy Music star Phil Manzanera’s life has been exciting enough. But his gripping new memoir raises the intriguing possibility his dad might have been a Cold War spy
AS GUITARIST with one of the most influential bands in British history, Phil Manzanera has worked and lived in the heart of the music business for over five decades. As well as fronting Roxy Music alongside Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Brian Eno – who, with David Bowie and T-Rex, established the art and glam-rock movement back in the early 70s – he has played with Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, and even Bowie himself, and still counts some of the world’s biggest stars among his closest friends.
Yet while Manzanera’s memoirs lift the lid on many of his rock-n-roll escapades, as well as offering an insider’s perspective on the disputes that led to an 18-year hiatus, and later reformation, of Roxy Music – whose hits include Avalon, Love Is The Drug, and a version of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy – they also reveal an aspect to his life that, up until now, has been shrouded in mystery.
Manzanera invited the Daily Express into his West London home studio to talk not only about his autobiography but about the intriguing life of his father, whose exploits could possibly fill a book of their own. The London-born star adopted his Colombian mother’s maiden name, Manzanera, to add a Latino touch to his musical persona.
However, despite the upper-middle-class sounding dependability of his paternal surname, Targett-Adams, his father, Duncan, was a suave, globetrotting airline executive with a suspicious knack for, as Manzanera puts it today, “jetting into places just as a revolution was about to kick off and then getting the hell out as quickly as possible afterwards”.
His father’s job involved him setting up offices in South American territories in the 1950s and 60s for BOAC (the British Overseas Airways Corporation) – one of the forerunners to today’s British Airways. Based in locations such as Argentina, Cuba, Paraguay and Venezuela, young Phil often accompanied his father to assignments where the simmering Cold War, as it was played out by proxy in various locations around the world, was turning red hot.
Aged just six when his parents moved to Havana in 1957, he found himself living opposite one of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s key military generals, just as Fidel Castro was about to overthrow the government in a fiercely fought revolution, aided by guerilla leader Che Guevara.
In his book, Manzanera recounts spending the following New Year’s Eve “crouched on the bathroom floor, [my head] pressed down by my shrieking mother, and [my heart] pounding. Bullets were flying all over the place, lighting up the darkness outside and a gun battle was taking place [in] our back garden… It was terrifying”.
BUT IF a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time seemed like just bad luck at the time, later revelations caused Manzanera to wonder whether it really was just coincidence. His father had also been in Argentina when President Juan Perón was ousted and in Paraguay when rebel forces had fought against President Higinio Morinigo.
A local newspaper at the time even commented: “Targett-Adams… is an old hand at South American revolutions”.
Sitting relaxed in his studio chair today, his trademark cardinal red Gibson Firebird guitar on his lap, Manzanera tells me about his suspicions in a refined, softly spoken voice that subtly hints at his public school upbringing – the only clue to his “rock-n-roll legend” status being the “El Magnifico” guitar-strap around his shoulder, a gift from David Gilmour.
They started at Christmas when he rewatched the film version of Our Man In Havana. Set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, and adapted from a Graham Greene novel, the story centres on an innocent-seeming British expat working in Havana, who is recruited by an MI6 handler to spy for the British government.
“Graham Greene wrote it while we were in Havana, just 100 yards around the corner from my dad’s office and where [Ernest] Hemingway’s famous bar is,” Manzanera explains. “My family were friendly with the British Consul, in fact the ambassador also lived opposite our house. The movie was filmed two months after we were evacuated from Cuba.
“In the film, there’s this great scene where Noël Coward (from MI6) tells Alec Guinness (his newly-recruited spy) that they should communicate via coded messages left in books.
“So, recently I went looking through the letters my dad used to write to the head of the British Council in Argentina and in these letters he’s telling my Dad to ‘go to a particular bookshop in Charing Cross Road, buy these exact books and send them to me’, just like in the film.”
Manzanera adds: “Of course, in real life MI6 would never ever reveal whether or not these things took place. When the Spanish version of my book came out, I was at the Hay [Literary] Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. I’m giving my talk and I’m rabbiting on about MI6 and my father’s possible spying activities for the British secret intelligence services and then I look down and see that, sitting in the audience in front of me, is the British Ambassador. “So I joke and say that I probably shouldn’t really be talking about this and then I look over at the British
Ambassador and I can see him looking very serious, shaking his head slowly and frowning at me!
“There were so many indicators [of what my Dad was involved with]. I saw an old picture the other day and it was of me, my family and the former British Consul in Havana when we lived there. He’d long retired – after a career in places all over the Middle East as well as South America – and was now living in Brighton.
“So I went down to see him and I showed him the picture taken in our garden in 1950s Havana. In it, there are all these men standing with us in starched white shirts I don’t recognise. So I asked the ex-Consul who they were and he immediately replied, ‘They’re spooks’, quite seriously.
“He promised to write everything down for me but unfortunately he died soon afterwards… the strange thing is he was discovered with a loaded gun hidden in a chest of drawers.
“Anyway, there’s no way of knowing for sure, I guess, but I just love the idea that perhaps Our Man in Havana is in some way based on my Dad.”
DESPITE these possible links to the world of international espionage, Manzanera remembers his father as a kindly man who rescued him from some sticky situations of his own. After leaving Cuba, the family moved back to London – via a spell in Venezuela and Hawaii, living near Waikiki beach (after which his first solo studio album, Diamond
Head, is named) – where he became desperate to emulate his heroes, The Beatles, by being in a band.
There was just one problem: the young Manzanera didn’t have a guitar.
Lacking the funds to purchase one, he would flick idly through the pages of catalogues from his local musical instruments shop, Bells in Surbiton, dreaming of the day he could afford the object of his desire: a red Hofner Galaxie.
Then one day, as he describes in his book, he “discovered something called hire-purchase. Incredibly, aged just 10, I took out an HP agreement with £5 deposit (a birthday present from my parents) and a few days later the guitar duly arrived”.
“My joy was short-lived [though] because… a few weeks later a letter arrived saying ‘you haven’t paid the next instalment’. Needless to say, I had no means to do so, and by the time I got on the plane back to South America [his father was now working in Venezuela] with my suitcase and my gleaming red beautiful guitar, I was also carrying a solicitor’s letter threatening to take me to court for non-payment… “When I eventually arrived at Caracas airport, my dad came onto the plane to meet me [where]… I showed him [the guitar and] the letter and burst into tears.”
To his enormous relief, Manzanera’s father paid off the rest of his son’s debt, but it was a financial lesson that he has remembered for life. In fact, the vagaries of the music business are something that also came as a shock early on in his career.
“For the first decade of Roxy Music, we didn’t even break even,” he tells me. “Since they invented record companies and then invented managers for musicians and artists, the people at the bottom of the heap are definitely the artists.
“For the first 10 years I used to get by on a pittance. My mum used to say ‘You’ve made all these records and won all these awards, so where’s the money?’. And I used to scratch my head and say, ‘I don’t know’. I used to go and ask my accountant time after time, ‘Can you please explain how royalties work, again?’. “We were getting five per cent of the profits divided between six musicians, and that literally only stopped three years ago! But when you’re young you can deal with that; you just want to see the world and have fun. “And then miraculous things happen out of the blue to make up for that,’’ Manzanera adds, referring to the use of a guitar riff he wrote and recorded back in 1978 for his solo album K-Scope. The riff was sampled and used as a bassline by Jay-Z and Kanye West on their song No Church In The Wild.
IT FEATURED on their 2011 album Watch The Throne which debuted at number one in the US, received two Grammy nominations, winning one of them, and went on to sell in millions all around the world. All of which was unbeknownst to Manzanera… until, that is, the royalty cheques started rolling in.
“I’ve actually made more money from that short four-second riff than I have from 50 years in Roxy Music,” he laughs.
So is he now enjoying the money which eluded him for so long, I ask.
“Of course,” he replies, “it’s fantastic. But the reason I became a musician is to have freedom. Not to be told what to do. That’s why I’m so pleased about people like [British musician] Raye being successful, and Taylor Swift. They’re getting back control, and that’s great because it’s morally right.”
But surely there must be some other advantages to it?
“Well, yes,” he pauses to think, then says, leaning across the mixing desk as if to let me in on a secret: “At least I don’t have to buy my guitars on HP any more!”
●Revolución to Roxy by Phil Manzanera is available to buy now via manzanera.com