Phil Manzanera

Phillip Geoffrey Targett-Adams (born 31 January 1951), 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.

Manzanera was born on 31 January 1951 in London, England, to a Colombian mother (nee Manzanera) and an English father, who worked for British Overseas Airways Corporation, and 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, England, where his brother was also a student – formed a series of school bands with his friends Bill MacCormick, later a member of Matching Mole and Random Hold, MacCormick's brother Ian (better known as music writer Ian MacDonald) and drummer Charles Hayward, later of This Heat and Camberwell Now.

Roxy Music's rise was meteoric, with the band being hailed as a major stylistic influence of the early 1970s.

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 (before the group had made any commercially issued recordings), 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.

They wrote a number of original songs and instrumental pieces, none of which were recorded until years later, and the band broke up when McCormick 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.

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 guitar and production assistance on Eno's second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

All his previous solo albums have been digitally remastered and re-released with new artwork on his own label, Expression Records.

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's first solo album Diamond Head (1975) 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 ("Big Day" and "Miss Shapiro"), Paul Thompson, Eddie Jobson and Andy Mackay all contributed, and Roxy Music's occasional tour bassist John Wetton (ex Family, and then a member of King Crimson) played bass and duetted on vocals (with Doreen Chanter on "Same Time Next Week").

Robert Wyatt co-wrote and sang (in Spanish) 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 (who had not been able to make any professional recordings) 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" (DI) 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 (who was later a member of Random Hold with Bill McCormick) took over from Eno as lead vocalist, who only provided treatments and textures.

Among the younger students at the school who saw the older boys performing in these various bands were Simon Ainley (later in 801), 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 Feathers – evolved into the progressive rock quartet Quiet Sun with the addition of keyboard player Dave Jarrett.

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:

Manzanera also received sole composer credit on the following Roxy Music song:

In parallel with Roxy Music, Manzanera has always pursued solo projects, both recording his own albums and producing for others.

Manzanera co-wrote Pink Floyd's single "One Slip" from their 1987 A Momentary Lapse of Reason album.

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.

He wrote and presented a series of 14 one-hour radio programmes for station Planet Rock entitled The A-Z of Great Guitarists.