Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera on Castro, Kanye, his spook dad and the two Bri/yans

Roxy Music didn’t make Phil Manzanera rich. Kanye West did. When a guitar phrase from Manzanera’s obscure 1978 solo song, ‘K-Scope’, was sampled in 2012 by West and Jay-Z on their track, ‘No Church in the Wild’, the one-third share Manzanera was given of publishing and sales revenue proved life-changing. The song featured on a platinum-selling album, and was used in The Great Gatsby and numerous adverts. ‘I would earn more money from a short guitar riff that I wrote one evening on a sofa in front of the telly than I ever earned in the entire 50 years as a member of Roxy Music.’

Prior to the West windfall, Manzanera was hardly on his uppers: he’d experienced the standard industry rites of poor management and dodgy deals. These days he seems to be doing all right. I’m chatting to him via Zoom from his home in West Sussex, where his nearest neighbour is David Gilmour, though it’s not possible to wave a greeting at the Pink Floyd singer across a lovingly creosoted garden fence. ‘David lives next door,’ he smiles. ‘When I say next door, it’s about ten minutes’ drive away…’

As the guitarist in Roxy Music from their eponymous debut album in 1972 to their farewell shows in 2022, Manzanera played beautifully skewed, cumbia-inflected rock guitar on all those classic songs: ‘Virginia Plain’, ‘Do the Strand’, ‘Love is the Drug’, ‘More Than This’. When Bryan Ferry was off chasing solo stardom, Manzanera did his own thing, continuing an alliance with his former Roxy foil Brian Eno on several projects, reforming his school band, Quiet Sun, making solo albums, producing, curating, collaborating. The list of close associates – Eno, John Cale, Robert Wyatt, Gilmour – reads like a Who’s Who of British innovators, a group to which he comfortably belongs.