“I understand Avalon better now – Bryan’s a fine artist. But I was more rebellious. I was more interested in the avant-garde, Eno’s Oblique Strategies,” he says. “I was trying to push the envelope a bit more, be more experimental. I didn’t want to do the same thing twice. I wanted to do something different every time.”
He has certainly achieved that. Whether producing the likes of Split Enz, Ultravox, and Godley & Creme, working with Pink Floyd on their album The Endless River, or releasing albums under his own name, Manzanera has remained a restless, innovative figure in music. As for that 1971 ad that changed his life, he’s not sure he would have the same luck if he were starting out today.
“Now, if you put an ad in for a guitarist, you’d get 1,000 replies,” he says. “It was a magic moment, the beginning of my career. I was in the right place at the right time, and I had something to offer.”
Certainly, Manzanera’s stark, drum-machine-driven 1982 instrumental album Primitive Guitars sounds like a response to the lushness and intricacy of Roxy Music’s final album, Avalon, the making of which was so strained that Manzanera departed the band after the subsequent tour by shaking Bryan Ferry’s hand and offering the words: “Goodbye – it’s been a great pressure working with you.”
“Oh, absolutely, 100%,” he nods. “I understand [the sound of Avalon] better now, because Bryan’s a fine artist and it’s his work of art. But I was more rebellious. I thought: I’ll just do an album with drum boxes and all sorts of shit on it, more experimental, distilling everything down.”
None of his solo work ever sold in vast quantities. Occasional Roxy reunions notwithstanding, he says, he’s proudly been “indie since about 1983”, having realised early on that “I’d have to go and ask someone’s permission to make music for the rest of my life, unless I acquired the means of production – and there we are, referencing Marx and Che Guevara”. Nevertheless, some of it has unexpectedly found its way to a mainstream audience, not least when the title track of his 1978 solo album K-Scope ended up being sampled on No Church in the Wild, the opening track of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s 2011 album Watch the Throne and subsequently a triple-platinum-selling single (it recently popped back up on the Gladiator II trailer). He had been sampled by hip-hop producers before – his riff from Roxy Music’s Amazona turned up on Ice-T’s That’s How I’m Livin’ in the early 90s – but even so, it came as a shock.
Manzanera claimed he earned more from the sample’s use than he did in 50 years of Roxy Music, and No Church in the Wild’s producer, 88-Keys, felt the urge to visit him backstage and fill him in on how he came to use it. “He came to see me when I was playing with David Gilmour at Radio City in New York, and he brought his copy of K-Scope with him. He told me he specialises in sampling vinyl records made between 1976 and 1978; he goes through the bins in record stores and that’s how he found it. He slowed it down so much I didn’t recognise it at first, but that’s the genius of 88-Keys. I gave him a huge hug and said, ‘Man, I love you.’ It was like an act of God, like there’s somebody up there saying ‘good karma – stay in your lane, be nice to people, just chill out and things will happen’.”
It has, he concedes, been quite a journey. His latest musical project is a collaboration with Roxy’s Andy MacKay and Paul Thompson, involving “90% improvised music”. They played some tiny gigs in London last year, and intend to release the recordings next year. Struggling to describe what it sounds like – “improvised but not jazz … strange sounds, space and texture” – he suddenly mentions the old ad in Melody Maker that started all this. “Avant-rock!” he says, happily. “We’re back in the avant-rock space. It’s come full circle. We’re back in the experimentation business.”
50 Years of Music is released on 1 November