Roxy Music reissued their 1973 album For Your Pleasure recently, and Phil Manzanera has been talking about that record and other aspects of his long career in a new interview.
For Your Pleasure was their last record with Brian Eno, and Manzanera still rates it highly: “It’s probably our best album.” He explained to Vulture how the first side of the album, particularly the gobsmacking-at-the-time In Every Dream Home A Heartache, set a template for how the band would work in the future: “I would do the music and have no idea what the top line or the lyrics are going to be.”
“Bryan (Ferry) started by saying, ‘I’ve got these four chords’,” he recalled. “There’s a big stop, the same chords come in, and I play a guitar solo. Because of the limitations of vinyl, it’s cut relatively short, but on this reissued version you hear the whole length.
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“One of the signals from my guitar goes into Eno’s VCS3 synthesiser, so you get this extraordinary straight fuzz guitar sound.”
He continued: “In those days, nobody was using synthesisers to treat other instruments except Pink Floyd. Eno and I were trying to create a sonic backdrop for this guy, Bryan, with a weird voice who looked pretty cool.
“Roxy Music was very much about texture at that point, it wasn’t about technical playing. So I got to pretend to be Jimi Hendrix by playing my solo. I bought the guitar I used off Eno, who had bought it off his milkman. And then the song turns out to be about an inflatable doll. Can you imagine hearing that for the first time after you just did all that music: ‘Oh my God, it’s a song about an inflatable doll?’”
Roxy’s dexterity was their secret weapon; as much as they were Ferry’s art project, they were also a pop band, and Love Is The Drug is one of the most enduring hits. “(That) started out with Andy Mackay’s chords, and our bass player at the time, John Gustafson, came up with that incredible bass riff,” says Manzanera. “Then it morphed into sort of a reggae thing when I went bing-bong and tuned my guitar.”
“When Bryan came to the studio a week later to sing and add his words, I went, ‘Hooray, we’ve got a hit single. This is so, so good.’ We all knew immediately.” It was, he says, the only Roxy session where he knew he was recording a hit – “Even with Avalon and More Than This, I didn’t predict success.”
The guitarist also confirmed that their 2022 tour represented the end of the road for the band. “It was the first time we were ever able to play with the appropriate and well-presented iconography of Roxy Music,” he says. “For a band like Roxy, that’s very important, because it’s always about music and image. I was finally able to show people what I do without the equipment blowing up. I could say goodbye. There will never be another Roxy gig.”
