Phil Manzanera, born Philip Targett-Adams on January 31, 1951, in London, served for many years as guitarist in the acclaimed British art-pop ensemble Roxy Music. Raised across Hawaii, Cuba, and Venezuela by an English father and Colombian mother, he picked up the guitar at age eight while living in the latter country. Both Latin music and rock & roll left deep marks on his playing, and during his 1966 enrollment at Dulwich College he helped launch the psychedelic outfit Pooh and the Ostrich Feather, which later became Quiet Sun as its direction turned more experimental. After the band split in 1972, Manzanera stepped in for Davy O'List and joined Roxy Music in time to cut their debut album.
Following the string of landmark records that ensued, he completed his first solo project, the mostly instrumental Diamond Head, once 1974’s Country Life was finished. Around the same period he lent his talents to Bryan Ferry’s Another Time, Another Place and to Brian Eno’s pioneering sessions for Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), while also reviving Quiet Sun for the album Mainstream.
Manzanera kept juggling Roxy Music commitments with outside work, producing the rising New Zealand band Split Enz in 1975. When Roxy Music paused activities the next year, he assembled the brief-lived 801 and later toured alongside Ferry; the 801 name resurfaced for 1977’s Listen Now. After finishing K-Scope he rejoined the reactivated Roxy Music for Manifesto, their strongest-selling U.S. release to date. He stayed through the group’s final studio effort, 1982’s Avalon, and afterward formed the Explorers with former Roxy saxophonist Andy Mackay while also recording a 1986 album alongside ex-Asia singer John Wetton.
Southern Cross, issued in 1990, included substantial vocals from ex-Split Enz member Tim Finn, yet Manzanera largely stepped away from recording for much of the ensuing decade and concentrated instead on concert appearances, among them sets at the Guitar Legends and WOMAD festivals. He returned with the Latin-tinged Vozero in 1999 and closed the year by supporting Ferry at the British Gas Millennium Concert—their first shared stage in eighteen years.
Manzanera participated in Roxy Music’s 2001 reunion trek, which encompassed fifty-two performances worldwide, followed by shorter runs in 2003 and 2004. Through his own Expression Records imprint he began issuing both archival material and fresh recordings, among them 6pm in 2004, 50 Minutes Later in 2005, and Firebird VII in 2008. In 2006 he co-produced and played on David Gilmour’s On an Island, later appearing on the guitarist’s 2008 concert document Live in Gdańsk.
From 2003 to 2008 Manzanera worked with artist and songwriter Lucho Brieva on a song cycle centered on two Bogota ne’er-do-wells; they titled the project Corroncho and released an album under that name in 2009, featuring guest contributions from Robert Wyatt, Paul Thompson, Annie Lennox, and Chrissie Hynde. Poet Anna Le joined forces with Manzanera for the 2012 collaborative release Nth Entities. Another solo album, The Sound of Blue, arrived in 2015, and in 2017 he and Brieva reconvened for Corroncho 2.
