VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN DE ROXY
A CONVERSATION WITH PHIL MANZANERA
Phil Manzanera should need no introduction. Besides being the guitarist for Roxy Music, he has established himself as a solo artist, as a member of 801, The Explorers, Quiet Sun, Corroncho, Nowomowa, working with Tim Finn, Brian Eno and Andy MacKay. He has worked with Pink Floyd and David Gilmour. He also has many production credits, including producing tracks on the recent Rod Stewart/Jools Holland album, Swing Fever which made number one in the U.K. He has also written an incredible memoir, Revolución To Roxy. As well as releasing his memoir, Phil Manzanera recently appeared in concert in London with Andy MacKay in a series of shows that was unusual and something new for Manzanera. The shows were to promote his new album with Andy MacKay, AM.PM, an avant-garde album that earned rave reviews.
I recently had the chance to speak with him via Zoom and we started off by talking about those shows. “It was sort of scary…terrifying really. We had no idea how it would turn out. We had very little rehearsal. I was going to blame it all on Andy if it went wrong because he forced me into doing it,” laughed Manzanera. “But by some miracle it turned out to be really good. I don’t know how that happened. We made a blueprint of something. A template, so maybe we could do some more.” Manzanera hopes that a live album from the shows will be released by the end of the year.
Along with avant-garde concerts, Manzanera is learning to navigate book readings and book festivals. “I did one in Spanish in Cartagena in Jan. and one a couple of weeks ago. It is fun actually, because you get to see people close up and talk to them and have a good laugh.” It shows one thing, Manzanera is willing and able to learn new skills, such as writing a book.
Revolución to Roxy is an incredible memoir full of great stories and it offers an inside glimpse into the life of this great artist. “It started about seven years ago,” Manzanera said. “It is a memoir, not an autobiography. With a memoir you can choose random stories and things. But about seven years ago, I was in Cartagena, COL, for the Hay Festival. I didn’t have a book, but they wanted me to speak. Some British journalists who work for The BBC. were interviewing me and I told them a few of these stories and we had a laugh. They said I should write a book, and I was like ‘sure, yeah yeah’. And they said, ‘go on, try’. So I tried. I did the first two chapters, and it took me forever, and I thought this is going to take too long and I wanted to get on with some music. I am not a writer; this is not going to happen.”
But this did not stop Phil Manzanera from finishing his brilliant memoir. “Three years passed, and some other journalists said ‘you should write a book’. And I thought, not you lot again. They offered to find someone to help, just to get it down on the page. The typing doesn’t come naturally to me, which is why it was taking so long. I can play the guitar,” he laughed. “But typing, so I got on with it. I would like to say it was something that happened because of COVID but it wasn’t. It was an ongoing thing. The more I remembered things, the more one thing led to another, like a voyage and discovery for me about my family. And I thought, ‘it’s good to put this stuff down for my kids, my grandchildren and cousins’. So, we are all on the same page, and know where we came from. To a large extent, it was about that…family. However, I need to make sense of what’s happened in my musical life, for 52 years being in a band as well as what happened to my family. Suddenly, it was there.”
For Manzanera the exercise of writing the book helped him learn something about himself and the connection between his family and his career. “I discovered in my DNA there was a musician, my mother was from Colombia, so the groove aspect was there. And when I was 40, I discovered that my father’s father was an Italian opera musician. My father was actually illegitimate. You just couldn’t make this stuff up. That’s why reviewers in Spanish have said that ‘this reads more like a 17th century novel rather than a memoir’. The book is a little like Forrest Gump, I seem to be turning up everywhere. How did this happen kind of thing.”
Manzanera also discovered that he is related to a rather famous Jewish pirate. “I was finding out about my mother’s side of the family. The reason why I continued with my mother’s side was because she had Sephardic Jewish origins, and I had read in the Times paper, when Brexit happened, which I was really annoyed at, that if you could prove you had Sephardic Jewish origins, you could get a passport in Spain or Portugal. I kept digging and digging. Of course, I found they were expelled from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella and went to Portugal, then they went to Holland and eventually Panama. I googled Cohen Henriques and he turned out to be the most famous 18th Century pirate of the Caribbean. It was just incredible, you know. After the book was finished, I found a painting of him, and it is very funny because it looks like me in the early days of Roxy with a big beard and bug-eyed glasses. The boots and all that stuff.”
REVOLUCIÓN TO ROXY BOOK REVIEW
When one reads the book, it is clear that Manzanera was present for a great deal of history. He was a child, living in Cuba, when Fidel Castro took power. “People may think I am making all of this up, but it really did happen. I find myself taken to Cuba when I was six in 1957, and we lived there. My mom taught me some guitar, that’s where I started my music. Then Castro comes along, and there’s the Cuban revolution. I was in a house about two miles away from the Palace and there is a gun battle going on in my garden because [Fulgencio] Batista lived across the street from us and they are trying to attack my house. I’m remembering the bullets flying, my mother screaming, our faces pressed down on the bathroom floor. I have been back to the house and walked through it and relived this scary moment. But when you are a kid, I was seven going on eight, you don’t really have any context and know how scary it was for my mother.”
Going back to his home in Cuba proved to be very emotional for Manzanera and he wrote about it very beautifully in the book. “I did get very emotional. I had to walk away, and I walked down the road and this old lady pokes her head out the window and she says ‘are you the little English boy’, and it was very emotional, too much.”
When one reads his memoir, Revolución to Roxy, it is interesting that Roxy Music is a small part in the book. “I have read lots of musician biographies, and it can get boring. “We had a hit, went on tour, met so and so and we had wacky parties. Then we made another record,” laughed Manzanera. “That’s why I put in the preface, ‘if you just want to read about Roxy, go to these pages, but you’ll be missing a lot of fun and funny stories if you do.”
One of the most beautiful aspects of Revolución to Roxy is the incredible photographs. These photographs helped Manzanera remember a great deal. “My father photographed us a lot and super eight footage. So, I look at the pictures and it brings back memories. And then being in a band and the musical things I have done, there are always people taking pictures. And even me taking pictures. I have that photo of Eno waving goodbye after his last ever gig in a field, 1973, up in Newcastle. I am dropping off a copy of the book tomorrow, and he doesn’t know I have that photo. He is going to be shocked”.
Manzanera thankfully collected Roxy Music memorabilia and it is because of him historic pieces exist and can be seen to this day. “I was the guy who collected everything in Roxy. I was the guy who kept stuff. Along here is another room that is just a whole mountain of memorabilia that I have to sort out. Obviously, I never will, but when I need to find some info, I go and scramble around and I find a diary with dates in it. Not how I felt and things, but then you reflect on things, and try to make sense of all these things.”
The book has allowed Manzanera to put things in perspective and the past and this helps him with future plans. “What I say to myself is ‘do this and sort of wipe the slate clean and then go forward. That’s why it was great to do those gigs last week when I was doing promotion for the book, and that’s all looking backwards. And suddenly there was this big challenge where we are going to play these three gigs, what we call ‘avant-rock’. It is virtually impossible to prepare for it, it is in the moment, it was great. When we finished the track I said ‘we’ve never heard anything like that, but thanks for being there and applauding’. I am looking forward to doing new music and new stuff. I am very happy about the past and having gotten down. It would be nice to do something new.
The reason I became a musician was to be free, not to be controlled by multinational corporations and just to do music. The great thing is that all of us who started off in Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy MacKay, Paul Thompson, the original bass player Graham Simpson, who, sadly, is no longer with us, are all still doing music. We love music, we appreciate the power of music, the resonance it gives. It acts as a background and soundscape to our lives, and it is very therapeutic. That is the message, really, it is all in the music. You can chase fame and fortune, but if you decide you love music, stay in your lane and stick with music. It has helped me so much through so much. I look back at Cuba, the revolution and all sorts of things, music is the constant in my whole life.”
And moving forward is exactly what Phil Manzanera does. “I am working on a track with Bryan Ferry that we started 10 years ago, and still working on it. I have no idea; something is going to pop up. There’s lots of things all over the place. I’m just following Henriques.
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Main Photo Credit: CTA
