Roxy Music helped reinvent what rock’n’roll could be in the 70s, a debonair bunch who were both experimental and poppy, suave and chaotic, glam-rock progenitors whose 50th anniversary shows a couple of years showed that they’d lost none of their trademark swagger despite their advancing years. Speaking to The New Cue ahead of those shows in 2022, guitarist Phil Manzanera looked back to their early days and said he knew as soon as he met his future bandmates that they were onto something.
“It was very exciting and great fun,” Manzanera said. “I knew that these guys, Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno and Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson were special. I just knew. I had spent all my teenage time, when I came from South America to London at the beginning of the 60s, getting involved in pop music, rock music and The Beatles and Stones and Hendrix and every iteration that happened in the psychedelic 60s, I was there, early Pink Floyd, early Soft Machine, I was into all these things so I recognised when I met these guys that they were something special.”
