Phil Manzanera: “I always wanted Roxy Music to be like ‘The Three Musketeers’ but the bands are fighting”

So, it is the merit of the translator and author of the preface of the confessing admirer named Ramón de España that we enter into a story that takes us to Havana. There, eight-year-old Manzanera participated in the dawn of Castro’s revolution. While many autobiographies make us yawn with their first chapters devoted to the artist’s childhood, this chapter is exciting from the moment we meet the musician’s father, a high-ranking employee of the airline BOAC, who took his family to a succession of exotic destinations. : From Cuba to Hawaii, via New York and on to Caracas, until he returned to his original London.

David Gilmour’s friend

Manzanera (Colombian) on his mother’s side and Targett-Adams (British) on his father’s side, the guitarist adopted the former as his stage name to feel close to ‘acid’ heroes Santana and Jerry García. With distance it now estimates the importance of lucky breaks, for example: It turned out that a friend of his older brother was David Gilmour, who was around twenty years old and had recently joined Pink Floyd. “A lot of things in my life went unplanned,” reflects Phil Manzanera, smiling and welcoming in a Zoom chat. “I never thought about career development. “What I wanted was to live a life filled with music, understanding it as a form of freedom.”

He spent his adolescence in London and had access to clubs where Pink Floyd and Soft Machine performed, as well as clubs where Jimi Hendrix performed. “With the Beatles in the audience. “It was crazy.” And in 1972 he joined a group called Roxy Music: He set out to “create a world for Bryan Ferry’s voice” by recruiting ‘non-musician’ Brian Eno and “developing textures and atmospheres”. Roxy’s classic era of unpredictable art-rock, 1972-75, gets as much of a score as the 1979-82 cycle, which culminated in the most popular and also wealthiest album, ‘Avalon’.

like musketeers

Roxy Music noted the famous internal tensions between the vocal leadership and the rest of the band. Their dissolution was due to Ferry’s desire to rule alone. and the return of 1979 precipitated, at least in part, an emotional abandonment, the book says: when Jerry Hall left her to go with Mick Jagger and she needed an emotional refuge. Phil Manzanera explains: “I always wanted to be in a band like ‘The Three Musketeers’: all for one, one for all.” “But there always comes a point where gangs fight and want to kill each other. How many people are still together after all these years?” As for his ideas and future with Ferry, he understands that “he has two brands, Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry, and he has to appreciate both.”

He says he would like to write a new chapter dedicated to his connection with Spanish artists for a future reprint, but they are specifically mentioned in the book in relation to them. Heroes of Silence. Maintain cordial contact with Enrique Bunbury recorded Roxy Music’s ‘Oh, Yeah’ demo for the ‘remake’ album the guitarist had planned and left in the fridge. And treats him like a “big friend” Quimi Portet. “My hero”.

A few years ago, Bryan Ferry called him. “Why don’t we do something for the 50th anniversary?” But the 2022 tour is almost over. “I don’t think we’ll ever play live together again.” He recently released an album with fellow saxophonist Andy Mackay at Roxy Music, and this will soon be followed by another album with Crowded House’s Tim Finn. Announcement a ‘box set’ of his upcoming solo work for next summer. “Eleven compact!” It could still be Phil Targett-Adams or Phil Manzanera, depending on the situation. “In London they don’t even know how to pronounce Manzanera, but in New York I use it all the time: they treat you better.”