REVOLUCIÓN TO ROXY
Old Alleynian Phil Manzanera’s new memoir makes for a heartwarming read, says Neil Croally
The future rock star was born in 1951 in London and lived with his parents in Clapham until aged 6, when he was flown with his mother and siblings to Havana, Cuba, where his father had been sent to open the first BOAC office in Cuba (BOAC was a forerunner to British Airways). His father, Duncan, apparently of the sturdi- est middle-class stock, is later revealed to have been the son of a travelling Neapolitan musician. His mother was Colombian, with the maiden name which Manzane- ra would adopt in the 1970s. Manzanera and his family live through the fall of the dictator, Batista, in Cuba. The description of the gun battles around their house – one neighbour is General Tabernilla, Batista’s Chief of Staff – is both harrowing and exciting. After escaping the chaos of Castro’s revolution – Manzanera wonders whether his father was working in some capacity with British intelligence – the family move first to Hawaii and then Venezuela. So, Manzanera, in his formative years, experiences a variety and range of music, of cultures, of parents (!) that is striking for a pupil at a reasonably famous independent school in a London suburb. The book is excellent on his parents’ colourful social life, and on the smells, tastes and rhythms of life in (especially) Cuba and Venezuela. And it is this early life abroad that seems to make Manzanera so open-minded and artistically generous. While at the College, obsessed with music, he makes friends with other musos, including the MacCormick brothers, Bill and Ian (the latter, renamed Ian MacDonald, will go on to write one of the best books about the Beatles, Revolution in the Head); he manages through College friends to meet Robert Wyatt, later of Soft Machine and, through his brother, David Gilmour of Pink
P hil Manzanera, guitarist with Roxy Music, arguably the greatest English pop group of the 1970s, friend of, and collaborator with, marvellous musicians from five continents over five decades, was – as Philip Targett-Adams – educated at Dulwich College between 1961 and 1969 (his elder brother was School Captain). That is a striking dichotomy. More importantly, though, unlike the rustled-up stage names and invented personae of some other performers, the Manzanera/ Targett-Adams doubleness was (and is) no fiction. As this charming, generous and urbane autobiography makes clear, the doubleness of the exotic and the grounded lies at the very heart of Phil Manzanera’s identity: reserved, English; Spanish, excitable – all apply.
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THE ALLEYNIAN 712
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