Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera on meeting Bryan Ferry and co for the first time

Seven months after my dad died, at Christmas 1966, I casually mentioned to my mum that I wanted to be a rock guitarist and to be in a band. I can only imagine what this suggestion triggered in the mind of this woman from Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. She asked what must to her have seemed the very reasonable question, “Que es eso, I know about cumbia, salsa and boleros, but what is this rock music?” Overhearing her from the kitchen, my brother Eugen interjected, “Okay, I know this guy from Cambridge who’s just joined a band as a professional musician. Let’s go and see him and ask what you have to do to become one.”

I was all for it, and so Eugen made a couple of phone calls and we set off to Earl’s Court, to meet at a restaurant opposite Wetherby Mansions where the founder member of Pink Floyd Syd Barrett shared a flat with the pop-artist Dougie Fields.

My brother’s friend turned out to be none other than David Gilmour. Neither David nor I can remember what advice he gave me that day, but he now jokes that it must have been good because five years later I joined Roxy Music. After lunch we went up to David’s flat, he packed his Stratocaster into its case and off he went to Abbey Road to continue recording A Saucerful of Secrets, the first Pink Floyd album he played on, and which turned out to be Syd Barrett’s final recording for the band.

————————————————————

My mum was delighted when I received offers of university places from Kings College, London, and Southampton, and now I was in a race to make progress in my music career to avoid having to go. We were starting to do well with Quiet Sun, supporting bands like Caravan and Robert Wyatt’s Symbiosis at various gigs. We hired a studio in Clerkenwell to record a demo, splitting the £15 it cost for three hours, and recorded a track called “Years of the Quiet Sun” which we sent to Richard Williams at Melody Maker, the most read weekly music paper, accompanied by some promotional blurb written by Ian.

We read Richard’s column avidly every week, so were disappointed when his response came back: “the best thing about this recording is the press release accompanying it”. Undeterred, we also sent the demo to every record company we could think of. Each one of them sent back letters of rejection, and the words “absolutely no commercial potential” are imprinted on my mind.

I was 19 years old, and this was 1970 – the year the Beatles released Let it Be. Paul had announced that it would be their last album, and approximately 600,000 “heads” had turned up on the Isle of Wight to see Hendrix and The Doors. Having wanted to be in a professional band since the age of nine or ten, I felt I was making some headway at last. Warners paid for us to do a week-long residential session in a recording studio, and we were beginning to gig regularly.

But then, just when it all seemed to be happening for us, came a bombshell. Our friend Robert Wyatt announced that he’d been asked to leave Soft Machine and was forming a new band called Matching Mole (a play on the French translation of Soft Machine, Machine Molle). Very Robert, very pataphysical.

Bill MacCormick was leaving us and going to join him. My plan for rock stardom had taken three steps forward and now it was two steps back. “That’s great for you,” I told Bill, and then rather sullenly said: “but what am I going to do?” That was when Bill told me that the band Roxy Music was looking for a guitarist and pointed to an ad in Melody Maker. “Wanted,” it read; “The perfect guitarist for avant rock group: original, creative, adaptable, melodic, fast, slow, elegant, witty, scary, stable, tricky. Quality musicians only.”

Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay were both employed as teachers at the time and were sharing a cottage in Latchmere Road, Battersea. I was still living with my mum in the family house in West Road, Clapham, so it was an easy bus-ride with my Gibson 335.

The cottage had a small living room with a bed in it, one bedroom upstairs, and a little kitchen and eating area in the back. Brian Eno and Graham Simpson were there with Bryan and Andy, and so we all sat together in this back room. First, they played me the Roxy demo tape, which I thought was great; then I played them the Quiet Sun demo tape, which they thought was terrible.

Eventually we sorted ourselves out and started to have a jam. I can’t remember what we played – maybe a Carole King song – but I recall it was a very simple tune with probably only two chords. Having recently been playing a lot of esoteric jazz improvisations with very complicated time signatures, I felt this was all very liberating and reminded me of the Velvet Underground, which I loved. My enjoyment was only slightly impaired by the fact that I had an awful cold and kept sneezing throughout.

We played for a while and then Bryan and I went upstairs for a chat, which was mostly about our mutual interest in films, and I think I must have told him about my history growing up in South America. Even then I knew there was a significant gap between their experience and mine.

For one thing they were five or six years older than me, they’d also been to university, had things like bank accounts and cars, and they seemed to know all about art and the avant-garde. Meanwhile photographs of me at the time show a very hairy bloke with long beard and thick glasses. I also think they didn’t like the look of my Gibson 335 and wanted their guitarist to play a Strat’.

This is an extract from Revolución to Roxy by Phil Manzanera (Expression). Buy the hardback edition from Blackwell’s here or the paperback edition here.

Signed commemorative bundle available from Phil Manzanera Merch.

Phil Manzanera is our guest on A Drink with the Idler this Thursday 30 May at 6pm. Free to subscribers.

Our May/June 2024 issue is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.