Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Record Collector DECEMBER 2024 - by Jeremy Allen

PHIL MANZANERA: 50 YEARS OF MUSIC

World Traveller - Complete musical anthology of Roxy Music guitarist's solo works.

Phil Manzanera's recent book Revolución To Roxy revealed a multifaceted life that proves he's more than just the guitarist with the Antony Price bug-eyed sunglasses and the well-maintained beard from Roxy Music. There are stories of fleeing revolutionary Cuba as a child and picking up the guitar in Venezuela as a teenager, collaborating with David Gilmour and helping to revive Pink Floyd, producing global artists like Café Tacvba, the "Radiohead of Mexico" as he describes them, and plenty more besides.

A solo career, though, hadn't really occurred to Manzanera before he was persuaded to make Diamond Head in 1975. His friends Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Robert Wyatt - who all play on that record - were each making one themselves, and so it stood to reason that he should, too. The concomitant solo career that he wasn't sure about is now half a century old, and it's a fascinating journey in its own right, as anyone who picks up this eleven-disc box set should discover.

50 Years Of Music begins with the aforementioned Diamond Head, which is an admittedly uneven start given the ad hoc way in which it was made, with friends dutifully chipping in. The cover depicts a locomotive coming down the tracks, though as a musician who had to vie for attention with the super-suave Bryan Ferry and the peacockian Eno in the early days, it's more an album that travels under the radar (as did the rest, later down the line). That opaque visibility gave Manzanera the opportunity to experiment, and opener Frontiera, sung in Spanish, is a strong indicator of that fact as he starts as he intends to go on.

His following '70s albums are stronger. Listen Now from 1977 kicks off the infectious, understatedly funky title track, with the next number, Flight 19, imbuing some of the futuristic sheen of Ultravox. K-Scope, from the following year, has touches of post-punk that work well too. The title track was famously sampled by Jay-Z and Kanye West on No Church In The Wild in 2011, with Manzanera returning the favour, covering Hova and Ye on 2015 The Sound Of Blue, no doubt with a more modest payday.

There's just the one 1980s album: 1982's Primitive Guitars is an experimental record apparently made in reaction to the subjection of making the slick, glossy Avalon. There's a snippet/outtake from Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets named La Nueva Ola - another hint, perhaps, at his feelings of disenchantment, as well as heavy electronic numbers Europe 70-1 and Impossible Guitar that really stand up four decades later.

In the early '90s, Manzanera went back to his roots and pleased his mother in the process with Southern Cross, teaming up with Colombian musicians and running through Latin standards like Guantanamera, as well as writing new South American themed songs (Astrud with Tim Finn is a standout). Extras on the CD include live renditions performed at the Karl Marx Theatre in Cuba in 1992, a rare honour for a western musician at the time.

The remaining albums, from 1999's Vozero to 2015's The Sound Of Blue, are perhaps the most coherent of all, with the companion works 6PM and 50 Minutes Later from 2004 and 2005 respectively, proving that Manzanera had mastered the requirements of the singer songwriter he'd never aspired to. Indeed, 50 Years Of Music follows an unusual trajectory for such a body of work - careers normally kick off with the fire of inspiration and traverse slowly towards the dying embers of a once great talent; 50 Years Of Music, conversely, broadly improves the deeper in you go.

Q&A

Phil Manzanera on Roxy Music, royalties and not being allowed to shave his beard off.

Getting your own studio was a boon for your solo career wasn't it?

My solo work, if you like, was never intended to be a solo career. I realised that if I built a studio, I wouldn't have to ask permission from a record company to make an album. Then I was free. That's what it's all about. If you wanted to do some music, you'd do it. It doesn't really matter if it's a hit or not. Most of them would absolutely not be considered hits in any shape or form but it made me happy.

You've done ten solo albums, loads of collaborations, production work, etc, but people still see you as the guy with the fly glasses and the beard. Is it partly because beards were verboten where glam rock was concerned?

Do you know why I looked like that? Because when Roxy started, they said: "OK, we're going to put all this gear on, but you two...", meaning me and [drummer] Paul Thompson, "keep your long hair because we want one foot in the old thing. We don't want to put everyone off with a bunch of effeminate, extrovert, glamour pusses. Let's have a couple of hippies in there. Don't cut your hair, don't colour your hair, keep your beard." Me and Paul had long hair for ages and then eventually we cut it. When I joined Roxy, I thought I was joining a band like The Beatles or something; I don't mean as good as that, but more like Four Musketeers all living in the same house. But in fact, looking back on it, it was more like an art project of Bryan Ferry or Eno. A sort of art collective, really.

I saw your final Roxy Music show at the O2 in 2022, and while it was great, it felt like there were two different audiences...

Yeah, definitely. And in America they love Avalon and More Than This, and they were very surprised when we played a lot of stuff from the first albums. What can I say? There are guys in South America and Spain who I've produced who only came to Roxy via Flesh + Blood. In Every Dream Home A Heartache? Never heard it, mate".

Were you surprised when Jay-Z and Kanye West sampled K-Scope on Watch The Throne?

Sampling wasn't totally new to me by then because Ice-T had sampled the main guitar line from Amazona [That's How I'm Livin]. I got a phone call saying he's used it as the basis of this track, and I said: "Well, that's fantastic. Thank you. Bye". It never occurred to me that it was anything more than a local thing in New York or Los Angeles or wherever he's from.

Did you receive a writing credit for that one? Because obviously Andy Summers is still incandescent that Sting gets all the royalties from his riff on Every Breath You Take.

I've got no idea. I never bothered to check. You can either spend your time chasing the inequities of things that have happened to you over the last fifty years, or you can get on with new stuff. And then something happens out of the blue to make up for any rip-offs and things that happen. It's like someone up there says: 'Okay, take that, you're all right, man, just stay in your lane. Keep doing music and good karma will come to you.' It's definitely one of those kinds of things.