No. 3: Alan Jones, Melody Maker
The situation, though, is rather more complex, however according to Manzanera. Roxy Music, for instance, have not split up in any conventional sense. It was decided, explains Manzanera, after the completion of "Viva!", the Roxy Music live album that the band should temporarily suspend ail collective activity. There was, Manzanera emphasises, no internal dissension or personal incompatibility. Roxy, he says, could, with no great difficulty, have produced their annual album and toured in the autumn, but, independently, the members of the group all thought some kind of sabbatical was required. So, rather than conform to the expectations of their audience and deliver another album, the group decided to follow individual pursuits for at least nine months and re-form in the Spring of 1976.
Manzanera, at Christmas, had, started work on his second solo album and was preparing an album with Split Enz a New Zealand band who supported Roxy on their Australian tour last year, whose record he has recently produced for Chrysalis. Manzanera had been working on his solo album with bassist Bill MacCormick and drummer Simon Phillips and, during the sessions for that project - which also involved Brian Eno - began to consider the possibility of using these musicians as the nucleus of a group which would perform at several of this summer's open air events. His original concept was quite simple: the group would select their repertoire from material already recorded and featured on either his solo album, "Diamond Head" Quiet Sun's "Mainstream" or on Eno's solo albums. The project was to be considered as a collaboration rather than a solo venture, he insists, and admits to being horrified by press reports of the Reading appearance, which described the event as his solo debut.
Inevitably, Eno's involvement has, as Manzanera remarks, changed his initial concept, which has now assumed a more ambitious outlook. Manzanera's original idea, Eno offers, was slightly more innocent than his own. He had, he explains, been thinking for some time of establishing some hind of framework which would allow a band to accommodate the experimental and unexpected in their performance. He had, in fact, explored this concept during the recording of "Another Green World" when he assembled a group of disparate individuals and encouraged them to exploit their own ideas without restraint and without any preconceived ambition.
"For me" Eno explains, "projects aren't really interesting if you can predict their outcome. One of the most encouraging things, actually, about our recent rehearsals has been that something has been happening, that none of us anticipated You see, I think the moment something becomes really exciting is the moment you start to lose grip of an idea and the idea takes on an identity own. Some very exciting things have been happening, particularly during the last rehearsal."
Manzanera's approach to the project is, he admits, rather less cerebral. Instinctively though, he realised, after protracted and occasionally heated discussions with Eno prior to the group's current rehearsals that their ideas were entirely compatible. They reached, then, a compromise: the group's repertoire would be chosen from the aforementioned albums, but the songs selected would be used to provide a base from which the musicians could develop individual ideas.
"We've taken" says Eno, "a lot of liberties with the original songs and their arrangements. Sometimes, we've taken a fragment of a song and isolated it and developed it, and discovered possibilities in that fragment and the way we've treated it which weren't at all apparent at the time the original song was recorded. In that sense the project is something of an adventure. We are making a conscious attempt to create something new from the original songs. Phil and I both agree that we must break away from the idea that you tour or play concerts merely to promote a new album, so you give concert which are really no more than fairly faithful replicas of recorded music. I'm much more interested in creating a flexible musical situation where the musicians are required to experiment and innovate."
Manzanera, of course, is a musician of sufficient intelligence and imagination to accommodate and appreciate Eno's theories and notions and has, furthermore, established an exciting musical partnership, represented on "Diamond Head" and "Taking Tiger Mountain" particularly (to consider only Eno's post-Roxy Music recordings). One wonders, though, how the other musicians involved in the project have reacted to Eno's radical approach. Bill MacCormick has, of course, recorded with Eno on several occasions previously, but Simon Phillips, Francis Monkman, the former Curved Air keyboard player, and Lloyd Watson, who completes the line-up on slide guitar, have no previous experience of working with Eno. Eno admits he found it initially difficult to communicate his ideas to the group, and found their unwillingness to enter into any dialogue disconcerting.
"No-one actually wanted to rationalise the ideas which were being thrown up. Everyone wanted to play rather than talk. I maintain, you see, that there is a difference between doing something and knowing you're doing it and doing something and not knowing you're doing it. I believe that it's very important to be conscious of being in an experimental situation. I can't play ideas for the musicians or indicate note sequences. So I did have some difficulty in getting certain ideas across. We'd rehearse and everyone would play quite furiously and then shut up completely."
"This" Manzanera adds, "is always a problem when you assemble a group of musicians who've never played together before. There's a feeling that you have to prove yourself. So there's an incredible amount of virtuoso playing, with everyone out to play as fast and as impressively as possible. It's really a form of ritual which happens all the time." Eno, he elaborates, does relish the prospect of unsettling musicians and provoking them to attempt things they would not, in more conventional situations, even consider. I recall from an earlier conversation with Manzanera, that he had, occasionally, found it rather difficult to tolerate the various ways Eno used, in the early days of Roxy, to treat his guitar. "Oh, certainly," he replies "Sometimes what I was playing bore no resemblance to what was coming out of the P.A. I often couldn't believe what was happening. I know that during a solo the spotlight was upon me, and I would go through all the motions of playing the solo and reacting to what I was playing but often what the audience heard was not something I was play."
"At that time," Eno continues, "I had an echo delay system that was rather' complicated. Phil's guitar was being fed through two Revoxes that I was operating, and I was splitting the signal two ways on two separate recorders and then playing them back at two different delays, and changing the delay all the time." "I remember once," says Manzanera, "taking my hands off the guitar and still hearing myself playing. That's why he had to leave. I said either he leaves or I give up playing the guitar."
"That's not quite true," counters Eno, "I said that I wouldn't stay in Roxy unless I could do the same thing with Bryan's voice." Both Manzanera and Eno emphasise the point that the current project is in no way a permanent collaboration They will be playing only a few concerts this summer, including Reading, of course, and the Corbiere Festival in the South of France, with the possibility of further concerts later in the year. "One of the most exciting things about this group," says Eno, "is the knowledge that it is going to be a brief collaboration. You see, there's a certain transitional period in the history of most groups which, usually, can be associated with the period when the group is most interesting. It's that period when the people involved are no longer uncomfortable with one another, but not so comfortable they become complacent. I really think that's why groups in their early stages are very interesting. You find that a group in its early stages is full of contradictions and paradoxes, and the musicians are excited by that and have enough mutual trust to exploit all the possibilities open to them. This group will, hopefully, achieve that kind of flexibility."
No-one could possibly accuse Eno of excluding the unprecedented and the unpredictable from his career since he left Roxy. Three solo albums two albums with Robert Fripp collaborations with Genesis John Cale, Nick and Robert Wyatt, the formation of Obscure Records, the composition of a score for the recent Sparrowfall, can all be catalogued as evidence of his diverse and impressive achievements over the last three years. Most bizarre and intriguing of the projects with which he has been involved, however, is the collaboration with David Bowie, Robert Fripp and Iggy Stooge, which was announced some weeks ago. Bowie, apparently, had heard and liked Eno's first solo albums and had been very impressed by "Another Green World." They met, originally, at Wembley during Bowie's concert series there and Eno was invited to participate in the recording of a forthcoming Iggy album. Nothing definite was planned but Bowie was determined, it seems, that he and Eno should work together. Weeks later Eno received an urgent telephone call from Bowie. "He said he was in Paris and Robert Fripp and I should fly over immediately. Fripp was still in Sherborne (where he is involved in some religious study), and I knew he wouldn't be able to go, but I was interested in the idea of working with Bowie. I then got another call and was told that there were all kinds of disruptions in the Bowie camp so everything's been cancelled for the moment. I've no real idea about the nature of the project or what role I was expected to fulfil all I know is that it was for lggy's album."
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