Phil Manzanera’s musical life has been closely tied to a very specific vintage electric guitar, which has been by the Roxy Music hero’s side for the majority of his career. It’s seen countless stages and can be heard on every single album Manzanera has ever recorded.
We’re talking, of course, about his red Gibson Firebird – and in the new issue of Guitarist, Manzanera takes a trip down memory lane and tells the story of how he got it in the first place.
“This is a guitar that I found in the back of the Melody Maker,” Manzanera tells Guitarist. “They used to have ads for guitars for sale in 1973 and I rang up, and it wasn’t in a shop or anything, it was a private individual.
“So I went to this very posh house in Regent’s Park in London, knocked on the door and this 16-year-old American kid held it up, and I said, ‘It’s a red guitar – I’ll have it!’ I didn’t even plug it in. I think it was about 120 quid, but I needed something flash for my Roxy stint.”
Manzanera knew right there and then that he’d be buying the guitar, owing to the fact it was unlike anything he had ever seen before. As he was to find out, the guitar had originally been purchased as a birthday present for the aforementioned kid.
Not only that, it had been ordered in a custom red color direct from Kalamazoo – which is why Manzanera had “never seen anything like it before”.
“It turned out that the boy’s parents had come over from Kalamazoo and they’d bought it for him – in a custom colour red for his birthday,” Manzanera goes on. “For some extraordinary reason, he didn’t want it or maybe it was too unwieldy or he had given up guitar and taken up cricket or something.
“I don’t know, but I said, ‘Thank you very much – I’ll have that!’ It’s become my signature guitar, and I first used it on the third Roxy Music album, Stranded, in particular on the track called Amazona.
“What’s particularly good about this guitar is it’s always been great for recording. The tuning aspect is not brilliant, but for recording purposes... it just likes going onto analogue tape. And so this was used in quite a lot of the Roxy songs – I’d use this for something on every album.
“I’d also use a ’51 Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul. But this one has appeared on every album I’ve done, including all my solo albums.”
To read the full interview with Phil Manzanera, head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitarist.
