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Prog MARCH 2024 - by Daryl Easlea

PHIL MANZANERA: REVOLUCIÓN TO ROXY

A most enjoyable dive into the Roxy Music guitarist's storied past.

Phil Manzanera is one the true gentlemen of music. "I hope you'll find my family's history every bit as fascinating as anything in my fifty-year career in music," the guitarist writes in this entertaining autobiography. "Of course, it's no problem if you want to skip straight to Roxy, but I think you'll be missing out on some cracking stories if you do."

This much is true. While future Roxy Music bandmate Bryan Ferry was dreaming of America in the north east of England, Manzenera had already seen the world. Born Phillip Targett-Adams in London to an English father who worked for the BOAC (the precursor to British Airways) and a Colombian mother (from whom he took his stage surname), he had lived in Hawaii, Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela and Cuba before he reached his teens. Today, that past would be a badge of honour for a group, but back then Manzanera would "apologetically say in press interviews that my trajectory was a million miles from theirs, but that wasn't what they wanted to hear".

Revolución To Roxy is full of the detail that's to be expected from a player as fastidious as Manzanera. Heathrow (as the airport was then called) is vividly recreated, as is his flight as a six-year-old on a BOAC Stratocruiser, and watching the Cuban revolution unfold through the eyes of a child. Yet if an in-depth expose of the ups and downs of Roxy's career is required, look elsewhere. Like the group's later works, Manzanera's writing is all about nuance and suggestion. Never a 'band of brothers', the broad smiles at the beginning of reunions always wear a little thin toward the end, yet undeniably, the love and the bonds are unbreakable. These ebbs and flows put Manzanera in good position to bear to witness to the splintered marriage of Roger Waters and David Gilmour - the former makes a cameo as a sporting aggressor until Manzanera thrashes him at table tennis, while Manzanera's work with Gilmour is arguably covered in more detail than Roxy.

What Revolución To Roxy lacks in scandal, it more than makes up for in the kind of unexpected colour that other musicians just can't match. The stories and detail come thick and fast: how Manzanera's father, Duncan Targett-Adams, may well have been working for M16 and an inspiration for near Havana-neighbour Graham Greene, using his job as a cover; how rappers Jay Z and Kanye West sampled a long-forgotten riff of his, making Manzanera more money than his entire time with Roxy, and so on. It couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow.