No. 5: Stepehen Lavers, National Rockstar
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The music consists of new arrangements of tracks from albums by Manzanera, Eno and the former's pre-Roxy group Quiet Sun. Also, Lennon and McCartney's "Tomorrow Never Knows" and the Kink's "You Really Got Me". Line-up: Manzanera (lead guitar), Brian Eno (keyboards, synthesiser, guitar and vocals), Lloyd Watson (slide guitar and vocals), Francis Monkman (Fender Rhodes and clavinet), Bill MacCormick (bass and vocals) and Simon Phillips (drums and rhythm generator).
The album was recorded on September 3 at 801's third and last gig at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. A warm up at Cromer in Norfolk and an appearance at the Reading Festival complete the list. But why so few gigs:
"We didn't intend it that way. I put the band together to play at festivals. We had booked a lot of European dates, but they kept getting cancelled. Then, the week before we were going to France, their government banned all festivals because of a Hells Angel's riot in Marseilles. Then the others fell through for different reasons, and it ended up with just these three concerts."
"The idea was to put a band together to play some past album material that had never been played before live. Then things changed. I went away into the country with Eno and Bill MacCormick and started having a dialogue about the purpose of this venture. We wanted to do concerts that weren't just to be throwaway copies of the music on the albums. We wanted to form a band that would rearrange numbers and integrate them into a set. I wanted the group to have different elements in it. On the one hand, you'd have accomplished technicians like Francis Monkman and Simon Phillips, and at the other extreme you'd have Eno and Lloyd Watson, both more for feel. In the middle there'd be Bill MacCormick and I. Because we had these different approaches yes, it did create tension. We had arguments in working out the arrangements. But they were productive."
His relationship with Eno provides a good example: "There are certain fundamental differences between us. I like variety, for some reason he doesn't - we often argue about that. He's heavily into systems music which is the same thing repeated ... No, that's a superficial statement to make, it's much more complicated than that. Even I don't understand half of it. I've always felt uncomfortable about Eno's lyrics for 'Miss Shapiro', which is on the album. They are unconventional. I always have to fight against my yearning for the conventional. I've always thought that's one of my biggest hang-ups. We end up working together for about a month a year, then we just naturally drift apart. He gets fed up with me, I get fed up with him."
MANZANERA'S MUSIC itself is hardly conventional. His first band, formed in the sixth form, Pooh and the Ostrich Feathers, looked to the Velvet Underground, Soft Machine, The Doors and Zappa as mentors. After leaving school in 1969 the band renamed itself Quiet Sun.
"We rehearsed for about a year and did three gigs. We approached record companies but not many were interested in instrumental rock and roll played in funny time signatures. If we had been doing it two years later than probably we would have signed with a company like Virgin."
"I went through a great crisis between the age of 15, when my father died, and 20. I desperately wanted to get involved in the rock business. I had a burning ambition, but I wasn't progressing at the speed I thought necessary to get in. It was depressing getting rejected by the record companies. It was a make or break situation - I had to do something. It caused me a lot of traumas, but it made me determined."
When Quiet Sun broke up Manzanera replied to an ad for a lead guitarist with Roxy Music. He was interested because Roxy had received a better write up from Richard Williams than his old band in a newspaper column intended to expose new talent.
"I went to see Bryan Ferry and Andy Mackay, who were living in Battersea, with a tape of Quiet Sun material. They didn't particularly like it but they picked up on a few aspects of my primitive guitar playing. I didn't join them then, because they wanted a name in the band to help them and they got Dave O'List. He only stayed two or three months because there was a personality clash. I went to see the audition they did (for what's now our management company) and O'List and Paul Thompson had a fight over some petty little detail in front of everyone". A few months later Manzanera finally joined Roxy Music.
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