Diamante visions

Phil Manzanera has been a friend since I first interviewed him during the days of Quiet Sun, the band of school friends he was in before being recruited by Roxy Music in time to play on their debut album in 1972. So I can’t pretend to be completely objective about Revolución to Roxy, his newly published autobiography. But I can be completely honest in saying that it will prove informative and entertaining to anyone who’s followed his career over the past half-century, even from a distance.

Here’s a sample that had me almost collapsing with laughter, when he spins a metaphor out of one of the trappings of early success: a maroon Rolls-Royce coupé whose combination of heavy weight and light steering was guaranteed to induce car sickness in children, making it “completely useless as an everyday family vehicle” and forcing him to keep in storage, bringing it out only on special occasions.

“The car carried a famous brand name,” he writes, “it was sleek, stylish and smooth, and undoubtedly in its own way it was iconic. It was a treat to take out, and whenever I did, it was admired and enjoyed by everyone who experienced it. Eventually, though, the time would come when it needed to go back into the garage and once again be covered by the tarpaulin to keep it well preserved and in good order, ready for the next outing.

“I guess you can see where this is going. There was something about that Roller which felt to me to be a bit like Roxy Music. Eye-catching, stylish and high quality, extremely enjoyable and I was proud to be associated with it. From time to time, it would be an absolute joy to take out for a ride so that it could be admired and appreciated; but the ‘steering’ difficulties and the resultant discomfort meant that its outings were strictly limited. After a while it had to go back under the tarpaulin so I could live my everyday life in my runabout.”

The history of Roxy Music as a kind of artistic Petri dish is, of course, explored in some depth throughout these 300 pages, from Manzanera’s first failed audition through the years of great success to the period in which, he began to feel like “not much more than a session player in my own band” — a band in which “I had to find out what was going on more or less by accident.”

Not least, the book is an interesting exploration of rock-band dynamics, with all the associated uncertainties, insecurities, frustrations and exasperations, and Manzanera has a perceptive take on Bryan Ferry’s legendary penchant for procrastination and prevarication: “His Fine Arts background obliged him to tinker and fiddle way beyond the point where the vast majority of people would long since have settled. I now understand this is about his need to make everything he does artistically beautiful and perfect. I tend to want to do things quickly and I’m not worried if they have a primitive edge, and what I’ve learned is that in Roxy opposites can attract. That’s integral to what makes Roxy music special. Makes it us. Makes us it.”

As musical director of the Guitar Legends festival in Spain is 1991, he had the job of telling Bob Dylan that the organisers expected him to perform “All Along the Watchtower”. How he coped and got there in the end, with the aid of Richard Thompson, is worthy of a place in Ray Padgett’s recent book of interviews with people who’ve worked with Dylan. Recollecting in tranquillity, Manzanera writes: “The way I think about the whole thing is much the same as I used to think about my first visit to various foreign countries. I’m really keen to go, really keen to get to know their individual customs and idiosyncrasies, but having been there and done that, I don’t necessarily ever feel the urge to revisit.”

There are stories about his long collaboration with David Gilmour, a shorter and almost Dylanesque one with the Argentinian hero Fito Paez, a WOMAD tour of South Africa and the Antipodes, his discoveries of the pizzica music of Puglia while directing another festival, his adventures with Jack Bruce in Cuba, his songwriting partnership with Tim Finn and his long relationship with Robert Wyatt. And about 801, that short-lived but incandescent all-star band he created in 1976 with Brian Eno, Bill MacCormick, Francis Monkman, Simon Phillips and Lloyd Watson. And, of course, about those diamante-studded bug-eyed sunglasses created for him in Roxy’s early days by Antony Price.

But, as the man who interviewed Phil for today’s Times observed, this isn’t one of those rock-star biogs where you skip the early chapters dealing with childhood, family and schooldays. In this case, that aspect of the narrative is quite as compelling as the rock-star stuff. Phil was born in London but grew up in Cuba during the run-up to the Castro revolution, the son of an Englishman, Duncan Targett-Adams, who had worked for the British Council in Colombia but now represented BOAC in South America, and a Colombian mother, Magdalena Manzanera. There were mysterious elements on his father’s side of the family — was he a spy? where did an Italian opera singer fit into the picture? — and the Latino influence from his mother’s side on his life and work is interestingly explored.

In a way, though, the most striking passage in the book come when he discusses the phone call from America one day in 2012 in which he was told that Kanye West and Jay Z had sampled a riff from K-Scope, his slightly obscure second solo album, then more than 30 years old. They used it on “No Church in the Wild”, a bleak modern masterpiece and the lead track from their album Watch the Throne, which went platinum in the US and gold in the UK before the track appeared in ads for Audi and Dodge cars. Most significantly of all, as it turned out, it was used by Baz Luhrmann on the soundtrack and the trailer for The Great Gatsby.

“Who knew,” Phil writes, in a sentence that tells you a great deal about the evolution of the music industry in our lifetime, “that I would earn more money from a short guitar riff I wrote one evening on a sofa in front of the telly in 1978 than I ever earned in the entire 50 years as a member of Roxy Music?”

* Phil Manzanera’s Revolución to Roxy is published by A Way With Media (£35)