Phil Manzanera


Phillip Geoffrey Targett-Adams, known professionally as Phil Manzanera, is an English musician, songwriter and record producer. He is the lead guitarist with Roxy Music, and was the lead guitarist with 801 and Quiet Sun. In 2006, Manzanera co-produced David Gilmour's album On an Island, and played in Gilmour's band for tours in Europe and North America.

Early life

Manzanera was born on 31 January 1951 in London, England, to a Colombian mother and an English father, who worked for British Overseas Airways Corporation. He spent most of his childhood in different parts of the Americas, including Hawaii, Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba. It was in Havana, Cuba, living under Batista, that the young Manzanera, aged six, encountered his first guitar, a Spanish guitar owned by his mother. His earliest musical accomplishments were Cuban folk songs inspired by the Cuban Revolution.
In Venezuela, the eight-year-old Manzanera started experimenting with the sounds of the electric guitar. During his teenage years he was absorbing the twin influences of 1960s rock and roll and Latin American rhythms of merengue, cumbia, and particularly the boleros of the Mexican Armando Manzanero.
In his late teens Manzanera – then a boarder at Dulwich College in south east London, where his brother was also a pupil – formed a series of school bands with his friends Bill MacCormick, later a member of Matching Mole, 801 and Random Hold, MacCormick's brother Ian and drummer Charles Hayward, later of This Heat and Camberwell Now. Among the younger students at the school who saw the older boys performing in these various bands were Simon Ainley, David Ferguson and David Rhodes; Ainley was briefly the lead vocalist for 801 in 1977, and all three were members of the late-1970s progressive group Random Hold; Rhodes subsequently became a long-serving member of Peter Gabriel's backing band.
The final incarnation of Manzanera's Dulwich College bands – a psychedelic outfit dubbed Pooh & the Ostrich Feather – evolved into the progressive rock quartet Quiet Sun with the addition of keyboard player Dave Jarrett. They wrote a number of original songs and instrumental pieces, none of which were recorded until years later, and the band broke up when MacCormick joined Matching Mole, but Manzanera briefly revived the group in 1975 to record a full LP of their original music during the making of his first solo album Diamond Head; later he included two other previously unrecorded Quiet Sun tracks on his 2008 album Firebird V11, which also featured Charles Hayward.

Music career

Roxy Music (1971–1983)

Manzanera was determined to join a professional band, and in October 1971 he was one of about twenty players who auditioned as lead guitarist for the recently formed art rock band Roxy Music. Manzanera displayed a wide-ranging interest in music. Influenced by his childhood sojourns in Latin America, and his stints at boarding school, he came to know several prominent musicians including Soft Machine's Robert Wyatt and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, who was a friend of his older brother, Eugene.
Manzanera was not initially hired as a guitarist for Roxy Music, but instead was hired as a roadie/guitar tech. After David O'List left the group in early 1972, Manzanera was invited to replace O'List as Roxy Music's guitarist. His bandmates at this time were Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Paul Thompson, Andy Mackay, and Graham Simpson. Roxy Music's rise was meteoric, with the band being hailed as a major stylistic influence of the early 1970s. During the next 12 years, until 1983 when the band members went on a "long break", Roxy Music released a series of internationally best-selling albums, achieving ten UK Top Ten albums and touring extensively throughout the world. Although Ferry had sole writing credit on the first two LPs, and his work dominated the group's output, Manzanera was credited as co-writer with Ferry on the following Roxy Music songs:
  • "Amazona"
  • "Out of the Blue" and "Prairie Rose"
  • "Whirlwind" and "Nightingale",
  • "Manifesto", "Still Falls The Rain", "Trash" and "My Little Girl"
  • "Trash 2"
  • "Over You", "No Strange Delight" and "Running Wild"
  • "Lover"
  • "Take a Chance with Me"
Manzanera also received sole composer credit on the following Roxy Music song:
  • "Hula Kula"
In parallel with Roxy Music, Manzanera has always pursued solo projects, both recording his own albums and producing for others. His first major credit as producer was in 1975; after spotting the New Zealand group Split Enz, who had supported Roxy Music on their 1974 Australian tour, Manzanera produced the group's second LP, Second Thoughts, which was recorded in London.
Manzanera played guitar on three tracks of the first Brian Eno album Here Come the Warm Jets, as well as providing guitar and production assistance on Eno's second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain .
All his previous solo albums have been digitally remastered and re-released with new artwork on his own label, Expression Records.

Solo work and collaborations (1975–2001)

As a writer, producer and solo artist, Phil Manzanera has worked with many of the luminaries of modern music, such as Steve Winwood, David Gilmour, John Cale, Godley & Creme, Nico and John Wetton. He has co-written material with many artists, including Brian Eno, Tim Finn, Robert Wyatt and Gilmour. Manzanera co-wrote Pink Floyd's single "One Slip" from their 1987 A Momentary Lapse of Reason album.
Manzanera's first solo album Diamond Head featured an all-star line-up of session contributors, including most of the former and current members of Roxy Music, except Bryan Ferry. Brian Eno co-wrote and sang on two tracks, Paul Thompson, Eddie Jobson and Andy Mackay all contributed, and Roxy Music's occasional tour bassist John Wetton played bass and duetted on vocals. Robert Wyatt co-wrote and sang on "Frontera", and the members of Manzanera's pre-Roxy Music group Quiet Sun featured on the instrumental tracks. Concurrent with the recording of Diamond Head, Manzanera reunited Quiet Sun and used the studio time to quickly record a full LP of Quiet Sun material, released by EG Records under the title Mainstream.
Reworked versions of two tracks from Mainstream featured on Manzanera's next major collaboration, the critically acclaimed concert recording 801 Live, which was recorded at a 1976 London show performed by the "special occasion" band 801. The group comprised Manzanera, with Eno on vocals, synth and treatments, Quiet Sun bassist Bill MacCormick, Curved Air keyboardist Francis Monkman, 19-year-old drumming prodigy Simon Phillips, and slide guitarist Lloyd Watson, who had previously performed as a solo support act for Roxy Music. The LP featured an eclectic mix of Manzanera, Quiet Sun and Eno originals, alongside distinctive cover versions of two well-known tracks, The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and The Kinks' "You Really Got Me". The album also broke new ground in live concert recording, being one of the first live LPs to use the "direct injection" method of recording, in which the signals from the various electric instruments were fed directly into the recording console, enabling a dramatic improvement in fidelity over the earlier method of placing microphones near the various instrument amplifiers.
The success of the live album led to the creation of a more permanent incarnation of 801, without Lloyd Watson. Manzanera's old schoolmate Simon Ainley took over from Eno as lead vocalist, who only provided treatments and textures. Francis Monkman, Bill and Ian MacCormick and Simon Phillips became part of an all-star session group that also included Tim Finn and Eddie Rayner of Split Enz, former 10cc members Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, saxophonist Mel Collins, Roxy Music's Eddie Jobson and drummer Dave Mattacks. The 'new' 801 -- officially billed as "Phil Manzanera/801" -- recorded the studio album Listen Now, was released in November 1976, although according to Ainley the initial recordings had begun in December 1975, well before the original concert line-up of 801 was put together. The studio LP was not a commercial success and the group disbanded after a short UK tour. A live performance at Manchester University in Nov. 1977, with Ainley on vocals and guitar, and appearances by special guests Andy Mackay, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, was recorded on 24-track tape, but the recording remained unreleased until 1997.
Manzanera's second solo album K-Scope was originally intended to be the second 801 studio album, and indeed it featured many of the same personnel from Listen Now, including Ainley, Bill and Ian MacCormick, John Wetton, Simon Phillips, Mel Collins, Tim and Neil Finn, Eddie Rayner, Godley and Creme, and keyboard player Dave Skinner. According to Ainley, he was slated to perform the lead vocal tracks, and he contributed to the composition of the track "Slow Motion TV", but by his own account he had a severe cold the day he began recording his vocals and could not hit the notes; as a result Manzanera replaced him with Tim Finn, and Ainley contributed only rhythm guitar to a couple of tracks. The LP was eventually released under Manzanera's name, but shortly after it was released Roxy Music reformed, and Manzanera's solo projects were put on hold until the group disbanded again in 1982.
His third solo album Primitive Guitars marked his tenth anniversary as a professional musician. It was intended as a retrospective of his musical influences and stylistic growth, interpreted through a series of solo pieces that represent various stages in his life – childhood in South America, adolescence in London, his work in Roxy Music and 801, and other projects. Manzanera plays all the instruments, backed only by a drum machine, except for one track that features John Wetton on bass. In between tracks, Manzanera inserted snatches of dialogue recorded at various rehearsals.
In the 1990s, Manzanera performed in concerts all over the world, including at Guitar Legends, the five-day guitar festival in Seville, where he was musical director for the event as well as playing with Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Jack Bruce, Vicente Amigo, Dave Edmunds, Joe Satriani, Steve Cropper, Aterciopelados, Robert Cray and Richard Thompson. He has also played in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Spain, France, Italy and the UK, including a ten-date European tour with the Cuban band Grupo Moncada. He played at WOMAD festivals in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Manzanera ended the 20th Century by appearing with Bryan Ferry at the British Gas Millennium Concert at Greenwich, the first time they had performed together in 18 years. Manzanera produced the 1993 album Severino from the Brazilian rock band Os Paralamas do Sucesso, which included a participation by Brian May.