Q&A: Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera shares stories from the Cuban Revolution to stardom

In 1971, guitarist Phil Manzanera was a 20-year-old rock guitarist without a band. Then, a friend showed him an ad in Melody Maker magazine for a band that needed someone just like him.

“The Perfect Guitarist for Avant-Rock Group,” the ad read. “Original, creative, adaptable, melodic, fast, slow, elegant, witty, scary, stable, tricky.”

Call Roxy, it finished, and Manazanera did just that.

“I was sort of up to here with playing prog rock,” Manazanera says of his previous band, Quiet Sun. “I’d been playing 13/8 bars, 15/8 or 7/8,” he says of the complicated time signatures progressive rock bands required. “I just wanted out, and I loved the Velvet Underground.

“So I met these guys, arty guys, older than me, sort of grown-up,” he says on a recent video call from his home in England. “You know, they had bank accounts and a loan to buy a PA.

“They could hardly play, to be quite quite honest,” Manzanera says, laughing. “You know, ‘So let’s have a jam.’ OK, two chords.

“And a little bubble in my head said, ‘I’m joining the Velvet Underground. They only had two or three chords, and it worked.’”

The band, which would soon change its name to Roxy Music to avoid conflict with an American band called Roxy, included singer Bryan Ferry, saxophonist-keyboardist Andy Mackay, Brian Eno on electronics, with drummer Paul Thompson soon to join.

Manzanera felt a musical kinship with what the band, which was playing live gigs but had yet to make a record, was doing.

“I felt on my musical palette there was all sorts of music I had in common with the other guys,” he says. “The main one was the Velvet Underground, but we all loved Motown; we liked pop songs. Goes without saying the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, all that kind of thing.

“I thought, ‘Well, I could slip into this and be useful,’” Manzanera says. “Of course, I did fail the audition, didn’t I?,” he laughs. “But I did manage to wheedle my way in eventually.”

Months later, just three days after Manazanera turned 21, Roxy Music invited him in to replace the guitarist who’d won the audition advertised in Melody Maker. Since February 1972, he, Ferry, Mackay, and Thompson have been the lineup of Roxy Music whenever the band’s been active.

“You know, how lucky were they?” he says, grinning. “Because the first time, they couldn’t see it.

“It turned out OK.”

Manzanera currently is touring “An Evening Of Words And Music With Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera.” He’ll mix music with stories from his recent memoir, “Revolución to Roxy,” which traces a boyhood spent in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Hawaii – his mother was Colombian – to his teenage years in a British boarding school – his father was English – and the life in rock and roll that followed.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Manzanera discussed the discoveries he made while researching his memoir, his lifelong love affair with the guitar and more.

Q: We’ll talk about the memoir and its companion album, but is that your original Spanish guitar I see there in the background?

A: Funny enough, that is. That’s the Cuban one that was my mum’s that I started playing in 1957. It’s pretty cool when you look inside. It’s a made-in-Havana 1956 or ’57. [His father opened an office for the British airline BOAC in Havana in 1957.]

And actually, hanging down next to it is the gold epaulet of the dinner jacket of the chief of staff of the dictator [Fulgencio] Batista that I, as a 7-year-old, stole from his house after it was looted.

Q: Because you made friends with the guard after the revolutionaries toppled the government?

A: Took him some coffee, and he said, “Do you want to go in?” And so in I went.

Q: What motivated you to write a memoir?

A: You know, sometimes I hear people say, “Oh, my parents died, and I wish I’d asked more questions about what happened in the early parts of their lives.

I guess that makes one start thinking. I thought, “I wonder if my mum knew about my dad’s background.” [Late in life, after the death of his parents, Manzanera learned his father was born out of wedlock when his grandmother had an affair with a traveling Italian musician.]

We started exploring and going to the National Archives here in Kew and finding letters dating back to the ’30s. One thing led to another.

Q: That must have been fascinating.

A: There was a story there, I thought, for me to pass on to my grandchildren on one side. And I realized I’ve actually got 60 Colombian cousins who probably have no idea where they came from.

But actually, one of the big triggers was Brexit in the U.K. when England committed the biggest act of self-harm to themselves, when they came out of Europe. It meant you could no longer go to Europe with the British passport, really.

An article appeared in the Times newspaper here saying that if you had Sephardic Jewish ancestry, you could get a Portuguese passport or a Spanish passport. I was so annoyed about Brexit, I thought, “We’re going to fool the system.” So I started investigating everything. [He ultimately found proof of his Sephardic roots and got the Portuguese passport.]

Then I thought, “Well, why don’t I just put it all down?” I said, “Well, I must chuck in bits about being in a band, because they’ll want to know about that,” you know, and the music lives on. So hey, let’s just go and have some fun.

Q: And you’ve continued to research your family history even after the memoir came out in England in 2024?

A: So many other developments have happened. Just one little snippet. One of my ancestors, the great-great-great-great-grandfather, was the most famous Jewish pirate of the Caribbean [Moses Cohen Henriques], the right-hand man of Captain Morgan. I went to his website, he’s got a website, and I found that Sean Paul, the Jamaican dancehall rapper, is related to him.

I’m trying to send him a message, saying, “You’re not going to believe this … .

Q: Let’s talk about your boyhood and what it was like to focus on remembering how it was.

A: Remember that for the last 50 years I’ve been doing interviews. But to be fair, for the first 10 years, nobody ever asked me about my background in South America, being Latino, or whether my mum was British, or anything.

But the fact that I begged my parents to send me to boarding school in London, [and I] literally arrived in September 1960, was just so lucky. Because I arrived, and within a year, the Beatles happened, the Stones happened, the Who happened, the Kinks happened. Hendrix arrives in England. It just explodes.

And then age 16, to go and meet David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd, whom Manzanera’s older brother knew through school] and ask him how to become a professional musician. It’s just mind-blowing. The chance, the accidents of birth. You get to my age, you’re trying to make sense of what happened. Hang on, what happened there?

Q: You were 7 when he started playing your mother’s guitar, and barely into your teens when you told your family you wanted to make guitar your career. Tell me about the appeal of the guitar to you so young.

A: Well, there is just the thing of vibrations. Any instrument, really, it affects the sound around you. And obviously, guitar is easy to sort of have around you because it’s small. But I guess because my mother started having guitar lessons.

She was from Barranquilla, Colombia, and she was very lively. She was into groove and dancing and she was slightly extroverted. When I was pulling on those strings and annoying her, she just said, “I’m going to have to show you because you’re going to destroy my guitar.”

So it caught me, the sound of moving frequencies, and it stayed with me the whole of my life. It’s been a companion and helped me with my life. Music is good for your mental health and also your physical health. You dance your troubles away quite frankly. Whatever is going on, you put on like a groovy beat, and you dance to it and people are sort of happy.

I have a 14-month-old grandson. I bought him a three-string guitar, and I taught him already not to pull the strings, just to strum them. I open-tune it and I have an open-tune guitar and we sort of communicate. It’s extraordinary.

Q: Roxy Music wasn’t like other bands at the time, and is considered one of the earliest art rock bands.

A: I knew about art rock in the sense [of the Velvet Underground], Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, John Cale, a guy from the U.K. But also, I knew the Who, who were very much like an art rock band, but a different kind of art. You know Pete Townshend’s teacher at art school was the game guy who taught Brian Eno.

So I saw connections there. And the Beatles were like, well, they were everything, but they were an art rock group too, and combined visual things with amazing imagery and metaphors and their lyrics. By then, the psychedelic has seeped into everything, which made everything so colorful.

Q: I was really interested in the chapters where you write about your experiences as a producer for Spanish-language rock bands like Heroes del Silencio and Aterciopelados and others.

A: What I’ve done is produce what they call Rock en Español. And one of the ways I could contribute was the fact that I had done loads of albums and been taught how to produce albums by somebody who had worked with George Martin, Chris Thomas, George Martin’s assistant. So the tradition of the Beatles, Abbey Road, how to lay down and record tracks properly.

When I started producing artists like Fito Páez from Argentina, Draco Rosa from Puerto Rico, Aterciopelados from Colombia, the grooves do have some element of each country’s grooves, but also coming from pop music and rock music. So Elvis Costello, the Beatles, or reggae or English ska, something like that.

Q: You write about how you really tried to enjoy Roxy Music’s 50th anniversary tour in 2022 more than you’d been able to enjoy earlier ones. What did it end up being like for you?

A: One of the great things about that tour, it was the first time ever we were able to play our songs in a visual context that actually was fabulous. We hadn’t realized how expensive it was until the tour was finished. [He laughs] But I don’t regret it one minute. Those screens and the way it was laid out. All the Warhol stuff.

Obviously, we’re numpty musicians. We didn’t get the proper permission to do it. When we went to New York, the Warhol people came and said, “What the [bleep]?” And a huge bill came in.

But it was great to be able to play the music in the visual context for the first time, and as it turns out, the last time ever people will see Roxy. That was such a thrill.

Q: I saw it at the Forum, and people were loving the whole show.

A: It was exciting to see the reaction of the people, the resonance. You could see them reliving moments. I was looking at them thinking, “Wow, this is such a vibe.” That’s why at the end I was sort of waving, saying, “This has been great. Thanks. You won’t see us again.”

So I really was so pleased that I enjoyed it. I’d say to Bryan, “I really hope you’re enjoying it, because this is about over. It’s not going to get any better than this.”

I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity.