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‘Somebody’s up there saying: good karma!’ Phil Manzanera on Roxy Music, Cuban grooves and making a fortune off Jay-Z and Kanye West

Born into a line of pirates and possible spies, the guitarist went from Castro-era Cuba to art-pop’s greatest group. As his solo work is reissued, he explains why he was too adventurous for his old band

He had already led an extraordinary life before he answered Roxy Music’s ad, spending his childhood in Cuba – he can remember sheltering in the bathroom of the family home in Havana as Fidel Castro’s Barbudos revolutionaries fought a gun battle in their back garden – and Hawaii, before being packed off to boarding school in Britain. His father was an Englishman who ostensibly worked for the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) airline, but circumstantial evidence suggests he was probably a spy (and possibly the model for Wormold, the lead character in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana). Occasional Roxy reunions notwithstanding, he says, he’s proudly been “indie since about 1983”, having realised early on that “I’d have to go and ask someone’s permission to make music for the rest of my life, unless I acquired the means of production – and there we are, referencing Marx and Che Guevara”.

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