Phil Manzanera | |
---|---|
Birth name | Philip Geoffrey Targett-Adams |
Also known as | Phil Manzanera |
Born |
London, England |
31 January 1951
Genres | Art rock, Canterbury Scene, glam rock, experimental rock, jazz fusion, pop rock, art pop |
Occupation(s) | Musician, songwriter, producer |
Instruments | Guitar, vocals, bass, keyboards |
Years active | 1971–present |
Associated acts | Bryan Ferry, Quiet Sun, Roxy Music, Brian Eno, 801, John Wetton, Andy Mackay, David Gilmour |
Website | manzanera |
Notable instruments | |
Gibson Firebird, Gibson Les Paul |
Phil Manzanera (born Philip Geoffrey Targett-Adams, 31 January 1951) is a British musician and record producer. He was the lead guitarist with Roxy Music,801, and Quiet Sun. In 2006 Manzanera co-produced David Gilmour's album On an Island and played in Gilmour's band for tours in Europe and North America. He wrote and presented a series of 14 one-hour radio programmes for station Planet Rock entitled The A-Z of Great Guitarists.
Manzanera was born in London to a Colombian mother and an English father, and spent most of his childhood in different parts of the Americas, including Hawaii, Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba. It was in Cuba that the young Manzanera, aged six, encountered his first guitar, a Spanish guitar owned by his mother. His earliest musical accomplishments were Cuban folk songs inspired by the Cuban Revolution.
In Venezuela the eight-year-old Manzanera started experimenting with the sounds of the electric guitar. During his teenage years he was absorbing the twin influences of 1960s rock and roll and Latin American rhythms of merengue music, cumbia, and particularly the boleros of the Mexican Armando Manzanero.
In his late teens Manzanera – then a boarder at Dulwich College in south east London, England – formed a series of school bands with his friends Bill MacCormick, later a member of Matching Mole and Random Hold, MacCormick's brother Ian (better known as music writer Ian MacDonald) and drummer Charles Hayward, later of This Heat. Among the younger students at the school who saw the older boys performing in these various bands were Simon Ainley (later in 801), David Ferguson and David Rhodes; Ainley was briefly the lead vocalist for 801 in 1977, and all three were members of the late-'70s progressive group Random Hold; Rhodes subsequently became a long-serving member of Peter Gabriel's backing band.