Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera recalls that a stack of MiniDiscs from the early 2000s led to his 10-year working partnership with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. The pair had known each other since the days of their early careers, but didn’t collaborate until 1987 when Manzanera wrote a song that became One Slip on Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.
More was to follow, as Manzanera tells Vulture: “I met and had lunch with him when I was 15 – the week he joined a ‘professional band,’ and I wanted advice on how to do the same.
“When Roxy Music was released, I sent David a telegram and wrote, ‘Remember me? I’m in a band now! It’s called Roxy Music.’ Eventually, by some ridiculous work of faith, I ended up living in the countryside virtually next door to him.”
He paid frequent visits to Gilmour. “One day we were in his kitchen and I said, ‘You haven’t done a solo album for, like, 22 years. Why?’ He told me he had hundreds of recordings on MiniDiscs, but he didn’t know what to do with them.
“So I said, ‘Look, I wouldn’t do this for anyone else. I’m personally invested here. Give me the bloody MiniDiscs and I’ll catalogue them all.” I so wanted him to get going again and be successful.”
Manzanera’s research work was the starting point for the project that became On An Island in 2006, and the pair’s working relationships continued for a decade, taking in Floyd’s final album, 2014’s The Endless River, and touring On An Island and Rattle That Lock.
“David said, ‘When we were jamming for The Division Bell, there were lots of outtakes, so it’s a bit like the MiniDisc stuff you helped with earlier,’” Manzanera says of The Endless River. “And I was like, ‘Oh, cool.’ And David said, ‘No, you don’t understand. When do you start? Let’s do it all again.’
“I spent six weeks going through all this stuff, picking out bits here and there, and joining them up with other bits. I constructed the structure for the album, like a classical piece with four movements.
“He had me play it for Nick Mason. I put on a psychedelic screensaver, turned all the lights off and played the whole thing for him. When it ended he said, ‘I think there’s possibilities here.’”
The guitarist adds: “In true Pink Floyd fashion, nothing happened for almost a year. I was scratching my head; I thought, ‘Okay, whatever.’ But we eventually recorded The Endless River with David adding some new guitar bits and Nick doing the drums.
“It came out as, really, a tribute to Richard Wright. There’s probably 50 people who don’t like it and 50 people who do.”
