Oi oi!
Boy have we got a name-dropping edition for you this morning. Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera has seen it all, but a gentleman never tells. At least not until he’s greeted by Niall’s face on Zoom and then it all comes gushing out. Bowie, Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry… imagine what the contacts on Phil’s phone are like? Huge danger of pocket-dialling a musical great every time he sits down.
Anyway, we shan’t keep you. Today’s edition is free but if you like it, it probably means you’ll like our other editions too. You’ll need to subscribe to receive those. Don’t say you weren’t warned! This is the warning! It’s a friendly warning though, we’re your pals.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Phil Manzanera
Phil Manzanera has been one of music’s most creative dynamos for over 50 years. The guitarist joined Roxy Music in 1972 just before the group went in to record their debut album, becoming a key part of the band and co-writer with Bryan Ferry as they became a worldwide success throughout the 70s. Even before they split in ’83, he’d started to spread his wings, hinting at the prolific collaborations to come by working with arty Kiwis Split Enz and helping his former Roxy Music bandmate Brian Eno out on his iconic debut Here Come The Warm Jets. Across his career, he’s worked with Dylan (more on that below), Pink Floyd (and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour on solo matieral), Nico, John Cale and more, and he has the stories to prove it. Ahead of a 50th anniversary Roxy Music tour in October, Niall spoke to Phil over Zoom for a very entertaining chat about his half-century in music…
Hello Phil, thanks for doing this.
My pleasure, thank you.
It’s a very sunny day to be sitting inside talking to me on Zoom.
Yeah, I’m down in the country so I hope that the Wi-Fi is alright.
What’s going on with you at the moment?
Well, I’ve got an album coming out with Tim Finn [The Ghost Of Santiago, out next week]. It’s the second one, we had one out at this time last year and this is the second one, all part of a bunch of songs we started writing in March 2020 and we ended up 25 songs.
They’ve both been done completely remotely, is that right?
Yes. I haven’t actually physically been in the same room as him since 2005 or something. But I have physically been five foot away from Neil Finn at Hampton Court Palace, when I saw him afterwards.
What’s the pros and cons of making music that way?
Well, it’s 50 years that I’ve been a professional musician. I’ve made loads of albums and nearly all of them have been done together in the same room or in the same studio, so whenever you change your method of working, something different occurs. It used to be you’d say, when technology advances, you change your method of working and it leads to something different. This way of working, it took us about a year to work out how to use Zoom, so we actually hadn’t seen each other, we were just doing emails and sending Logic sessions to each other. In some ways, it was fantastic because there was no pressure of being in the same room and saying, “do you like that?” “Well, I don’t know,” to “just do whatever you do and send it back” and that’s what happened.
What did you learn from the experience?
Well, I learned how fucking brilliant Tim Finn is, quite frankly. Because every time I sent him a piece of music, he’d bat it back with lyrics almost the next morning because of the 12-hour time difference. Those Finn brothers, they’re just unbelievable. I knew that from 1975 onwards, so I’m just delighted that I am still in contact with them.
Let’s go from your latest album right back to your first, how does this experience compare with making Roxy Music’s debut?
A totally different thing. The first album that I ever was in the studio with was with Roxy and it was the first time for any of them. We called ourselves ‘inspired amateurs’ because basically we thought, ‘let’s try and get better, no-one will notice while we’re trying to get better’. And suddenly, the thing was a big hit so we had to do six or eight tours immediately to get trained up in how to play properly. But it was very, very exciting and great fun. I knew that these guys, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno and Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson were special. I just knew, I had spent all my teenage time, when I came from South America to London at the beginning of the 60s, just getting involved in pop music, rock music and The Beatles and Stones and Hendrix and every iteration that happened in the psychedelic 60s, I was there, early Pink Floyd, early Soft Machine, I was into all these things so I recognised when I met these guys that they were something special.
You had a sense for it from the off?
Absolutely. I knew my instinct was right. Their instinct initially was for me to fail the audition and not get in the band and I thought, ‘Oh, damn, these guys are gonna make it, they’re fantastic’. Luckily, for them, they changed their mind! I joined and, six weeks later, I was in the studio recording the first album. Then we were supporting Bowie at the pub in Croydon and both albums were released on the same day.
Was there a specific moment where you could feel it was blowing up big or was it a gradual thing?
Every day was like Christmas. First of all, John Peel gave it the seal of approval, then Richard Williams at Melody Maker gave it the seal of approval, and every day some cool person was saying ‘those guys are pretty cool’. There was a lot of bands saying, ‘Oh, they haven’t paid their dues, where the fuck did they come from?!’. Even Bowie must have thought, ‘hang on, I’m on album four or five, these guys have appeared out of nowhere, fully-formed, how did that happen?!’
Did you feel like you had more to prove because of that?
We were just on for the ride. It never occurred to me, although when you went to a tiny pub all dressed up in the Roxy gear and everything, you thought, ‘we’re gonna do our set, regardless of if people throw water bombs at us or whatever, we’re here, and we’re gonna do this’.
Where did that that swagger and belief come from?
All the other guys were a little bit older than me, about four or five years older, and they were very grown-up, they’d been to university, they had bank accounts, they had cars, Andy and Bryan were teachers, Eno was Eno. They were sound in their self-belief that they had something to offer. All their friends were on the way up, all the designers and fashion designers that they mixed with. I came into this world but I had a belief in my musical abilities because I’d been in a prog-rock band before, so I thought ‘well, I can play in 17/8, I must be good musically!’, but we all loved the Velvet Underground. You could see this was a continuation of art-rock, like The Beatles was art-rock, The Who was art-rock, Bowie, we seemed to be in the right place at the right time.
Fast forward a decade and Roxy Music came to an end in ’83 – did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do next?
Absolutely not. I had no idea. There was a series of absolute disasters but I’m in it for the long game and musical adventures.
On that note, you’ve been such a prolific collaborator over your career.
Yeah, a collaborator and a facilitator for people. That’s because the reason I got into music was for the social thing, to meet people and have an enjoyable time and spread out enjoying music over a whole lifetime. When I was 17 or 18, I thought, ‘I don’t want to learn too much technique, I want to spread out the learning process over a whole lifetime, I want to be in music and I want to meet people’. I guess because I was brought up almost like an only child, because in South America - my brother and sister were at boarding school - and so I thought, ‘I want to be part of a gang’. That’s why I begged my parents to send me to boarding school because I wanted to be with other people. Looking back on it, it’s almost like a continuation, ‘Hang on, I’m going to leave school, I need to be with a bunch of people - a band! Right, get into a band!’. Then 50 years later, these people are still around. Thank God!
When those big landmarks come around, like the 50th anniversary of Roxy Music, do you find yourself reflecting back?
You just think, how fucking lucky am I to be here still, touch wood, pretty healthy and be able to have a tour coming up. It wasn’t meant to be but this is the way it’s turned out, it’s all new and uncharted territory for old people. Obviously, there were jazz people and Chuck Berry and all these people got to a good old age, BB King, but bands weren’t meant to be. These bands started with what The Beatles created, which was a band that you thought ‘this is the model’ and then it lasted up until they spit and then you thought ‘hang on, I thought they were for life, aren’t they, no?’ Everything started changing as everybody grew up and here we are still. It’s a nice reflection. I’ve been very lucky.
I saw a quote from you after the last Roxy Music tour where you’d said that Roxy’s work was done and they’d be no more tours. What changed?
50 years. I was sitting there having a cup of tea with Bryan [Ferry] last Christmas because I’ve been doing a little bit of work on his solo stuff, and he just said, ‘do you fancy doing some gigs next year?’. I said, “well, actually thinking about it, it’s our 50th, what else are we going to do?” We need to celebrate it because we’re still here, God willing, after 50 years, so let’s do some gigs, let’s try it. There’s always jeopardy in the sense that it could be a disaster, it could be brilliant. You know, I’ve been to Bob Dylan gigs, I’ve seen the brilliant ones and I’ve seen the disasters. I’ve played at a disaster with him!
Haha, tell me about that.
It was Guitar Legends in 1991 in Spain. I had to rehearse him for a week underneath the stage in Seville and it was daunting, because I think he thought I was a Mexican guy with a name like Manzanera, so the first thing he said when he came in is, “do you know this Tex-Mex song from 1947?” I said, “no, but if you show me how it goes, we’ll all learn it.” I had Jack Bruce on bass, I had Simon Phillips on drums, I had the Miami Horns, I said, “we’ll learn it,” and then he played it differently every time. Everybody was going, ‘Oh, erm, I’ve got to make a phone call’, until everyone had left and it was just me and him and he said, “let’s forget all these other people, let’s play acoustics.” Noooo! In my head, I was saying ‘he’s Bob Dylan, I love Bob Dylan, he can do whatever he wants’. It was a live TV broadcast and the manager said, “he might come on, he might not come on.” I said, “who’s going to sing it if he doesn’t come on?”. I said to Jack Bruce, “Jack, can you?”. In his Glaswegian accent, he said, “I’m not fucking do it!” The manager said that if he does come on, make sure you announce him, because I speak Spanish. It was live to the whole of America and BBC Two and so I looked around and saw the spotty shirt coming out and said, “señoras y señores, Bob Dylan!” and then we all looked at each other to see what he was going to play and which chords. If you look on YouTube, you will see Richard Thompson trying to work out what song it is because he changes the way he sings the song so till the chorus comes in, you don’t really know. So anyway, having had that experience, I know there is jeopardy, so Roxy will go out and play the songs. What could possibly go wrong?
What’s it like when Roxy Music get back in a room together to rehearse?
Well, especially when we rehearse the early songs, there’s not a lot of chords, the Roxy sound is made up of everyone’s deficiencies, they all go together to add up to something more. What happens is all our limitations come together and they create this wonderful Roxy sound which sounds like Roxy. I’ve reflected on it and if the four of us, obviously Eno’s not doing it, but if Paul Thompson, Andy Mackay and me and Bryan play Virginia Plain, it immediately sounds like Virginia Plain. Bizarrely, if someone else does it, it doesn’t sound like Virginia Plain. That’s the wonderful thing about bands, certain bands add up to more than the individuals.
What’s your personal favourite Roxy Music moment?
I mean, we’ve had tons of great fun moments. One of the great things was that we never discussed what clothes we were going to wear, in those days, you didn’t have a stylist or anything. So the first time we each saw what we were going to wear was in the dressing room before we went on stage, so imagine the Greyhound pub in Croydon and we’re the support band for Bowie. It’s a tiny pub, it must have been about 50 people. David used to say, “if I had a quid for everyone who said they were there, I’d be a millionaire.” I’d say, “well, you probably are a millionaire but let’s skip that,” and we’d laugh. But backstage I’ve got this visual of Eno coming in with what he’s going to wear in a suit bag, he’d say, “right, what are you wearing?” and I’d say, “No, you show me,” and he’d get out this thing and it’s got feathers and all this sort of stuff, I’m going, ‘oh my god!’ and then he’d say, “what are you wearing?” and I’d get out an armadillo outfit, the outfits on the second album. He’d be going, “who made that?!” That was the first time we’d see each other’s stuff, it was wonderful, a lot of fun, a lot of laughter. It would be nice to get some of that on this tour.
ND
Roxy Music perform live in the UK for the first time in over a decade from 10 October. Head here for tickets. In addition, The Best Of Roxy Music is available on vinyl from 2 September.