At 75, Phil Manzanera Finally Names 7 Albums He Calls Untouchable

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]These are not Phil Manzanara's seven favorite albums. Favorite is too small a word. These are the seven records that rewired him, that changed what he heard when he listened, what he reached for when he played, and what he believed a guitar could do. Seven. Revolver. There is a before and an after. For Phil Manzanera, Revolver is the dividing line. He was 11 years old when the Beatles arrived in his world. And by the time Revolver came out in 1966, he had already been tracking their every move, the songs, the clothes, the way they carried themselves as a band that seemed to exist slightly outside the rules everyone else was following. But Revolver was different. Revolver was not just a great Beatles album. It was the moment the Beatles stopped treating the recording studio as a room and started treating it as an instrument.

[00:00:53]up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.

[00:00:56]>> Tomorrow never knows sits at the end of the record like a door left open onto something vast built from tape loops, reversed guitars, and a drum beat that sounds like it is coming from inside a different dimension entirely. It was unlike anything that had been commercially released before it.

[00:01:13]Manzanara absorbed it completely.

[00:01:16]>> And we'll just be in the moment and see what happens. Years later, when he and Brian Ano formed 801 and went out on the road, the first thing they chose to open their live album with was a version of that track. The choice was not nostalgic. It was a declaration of where everything had started. Revolver proved to a generation of musicians that the studio was not a place you went to capture a performance. It was a place you went to build something that could not exist anywhere else. Manzanera never forgot that lesson. Every record he has made since carries its fingerprints.

[00:01:51]Six. Led Zeppelin 1. Forget everything you think you know about this album.

[00:01:56]Hear it the way Phil Manzanara heard it as a young guitarist who had never encountered anything like it. In a world where nothing had prepared him for what Jimmy Paige was about to do. Paige did not play the guitar on this record. He attacked it. He seduced it. He pulled sounds out of it that had no precedent and no obvious explanation. Moving between delicacy and detonation within the space of a single track. Good times, bad times opens the album and within 30 seconds, the parameters of rock guitar have been permanently redrawn. By the time communication breakdown arrives, the conversation is over. Paige has won.

[00:02:42]What struck Manzanara most was the freedom. Not technical freedom, though the technique is staggering throughout, but emotional freedom, the willingness to let loose completely, to commit without reservation, to play as though the outcome of the take depended on absolute abandon. British guitarists of the era were exceptional. Clapton was elegant. Beck was inventive. But Paige on this debut had something different, a rawness that sat alongside the sophistication rather than replacing it.

[00:03:12]For a guitarist still forming his own voice, still searching for the thing that would make his playing distinctly his. Led Zeppelin one was a permission slip.

[00:03:21]>> Make them, you know, this is obviously where there's going to be a verse and this obviously is probably going to be this.

[00:03:27]>> It said go further. It said hold nothing back. Manzanero was listening and he never played cautiously again. Five. My generation. Some albums announce themselves. This one detonates. Phil Manzanero was absorbing everything the British rock scene was producing in the mid60s, but my generation arrived with a force that separated it from everything around it.

[00:03:57]>> Pete Townshin was not simply playing guitar on this record. He was conducting a kind of controlled demolition, feeding back, slashing cords, treating volume and distortion not as side effects but as primary compositional tools. Combined with the arrival of Marshall 4x12 cabinets, suddenly the guitar was not just an instrument. It was an event.

[00:04:18]Manzanara has spoken directly about Townshen's ability to unite extraordinary songwriting with the physical force of his playing. People have been actually listening properly to Santana. He integrated up those grooves early on.

[00:04:33]>> The title track alone contains multitudes, a generational statement delivered with a stammer and a sneer built on a riff that sounds like it could bring the walls down. Behind it, Keith Moon plays drums the way most people argue constantly, combatively, brilliantly. John Antwistle's bass does things bass guitars were not supposed to do. The whole band operates at a pitch of controlled chaos that should not cohhere but absolutely does. For Manzanera, the lesson was about commitment, about what happens when a musician stops being careful and starts being dangerous. Townshen stood at the front of the stage and made the guitar feel like something you could be afraid of and then wrote songs beautiful enough to make you grateful for the fear. My generation did not suggest possibilities. It kicked the door down and walked through it. Four. Are you experienced? There are guitarists and then there is Jimmyi Hendris. Phil Manzanara saw him twice. Once on a BBC television show playing Hey Joe and once at the Savile Theater in London where the Beatles themselves watched from a box as Hrix opened his set with a version of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that had only been released that week. Manzanara has described what that moment felt like. In one word, delirious. Are you experienced is the document of a musician who arrived fully formed and immediately made every conversation about guitar playing obsolete. The technique is extraordinary. The bends, the feedback, the way Hendrickx used the whammy bar, not as a trick, but as a means of expression, but technique is almost beside the point. You got me.

[00:06:17]Tomorrow just in.

[00:06:19]>> What Hendrickx had that nobody else had was an imagination that operated at a frequency other guitarists simply could not access. Purple Haze, Foxy Lady, The Wind Cries, Mary are three consecutive tracks that exist in completely different emotional worlds. Each one impossible to imagine coming from any other guitarist alive. For Manzanera, the impact was total. Here was a player who combined image, groove, technique, and an utterly original voice into something that transcended category. Not jazz, not blues, not rock. All of those things and none of them simultaneously.

[00:06:59]The guitar as a vehicle for pure unmediated expression. Are you experienced did not change what Manzanero wanted to play. It changed what he believed playing could be.

[00:07:10]Three. Soft machine volume 2. Most musicians find their influences in the obvious places. Phil Manzanera found one of his most important ones in the organ playing of a keyboardist most guitarists had never thought to listen to. Mike Ratledge ran his Hammond organ through a fuzz box. That single decision changed everything for Manzanara. The result was a sound that blurred the boundary between keyboard and guitar so completely that the two instruments became interchangeable, abrasive, harmonically complex, rhythmically unpredictable, and entirely unlike anything the jazz or rock worlds had produced in isolation.

[00:07:57]Manzanara heard it and understood immediately what he wanted his guitar to sound like. Not like a guitar like that.

[00:08:04]Soft machine were operating at the intersection of jazz, rock, and the avant guard at a moment when most British bands were still deciding which side of that divide to stand on. Volume 2 accelerates everything the debut had suggested. Rattlage's organ is more prominent, more distorted, more compositionally central, and the band as a whole plays with an intensity that feels genuinely dangerous. Robert Wyatt's drumming and vocals add a human fragility to the machine-like precision of the arrangements, creating a tension that runs through the entire record.

[00:08:39]Manzanara has named Wyatt as one of the most important musicians in his life.

[00:08:44]They met when Manzanara was 16, and the connection never faded. But it was Rattlage's sound that pointed directly at the guitar tone Manzanara spent years pursuing inside Roxy Music and beyond, the organ that played like a guitar, the guitar that played like a force of nature. Soft Machine Volume 2 gave Manzanera his target. The rest of his career was the pursuit of it too, kind of blue. Phil Manzanara does not think about music the way most guitarists think about music. He thinks about senority, about pitch, about the space between notes and what lies inside that space. That sensibility did not come from a guitar record. It came from a trumpet player who understood silence better than almost anyone who has ever recorded. Miles Davis on Kind of Blue plays in the cracks. Not on the beat, not off it, somewhere in between. in a zone that resists precise description but is immediately identifiable the moment you hear it.

[00:09:52]Manzanara has spoken about taking Davis's approach to pitch and applying it to the guitar. The idea that being precisely in tune is not always the point. That the most expressive note is sometimes the one that exists in the margins of the scale rather than at its center. That is a jazz lesson. It is also when applied to rock guitar a revolutionary one. The album itself is a masterpiece of collective restraint. Six musicians Davis, Col Train, Cannonball Addly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb operate inside a modal framework that strips away the complexity of Bbop and replaces it with something open, spacious, and quietly infinite. Nobody overplays. Nobody reaches for the obvious resolution. The music breathes.

[00:10:39]For a guitarist working inside the art rock and progressive structures of Roxy music, that lesson in space and improvisation was transformative. The ability to hold back, to find the expressive moment rather than fill every available bar runs through Manzanara's best work like a thread pulled directly from this record. One, the dark side of the moon. There are albums that define a moment. There are albums that define a decade and then very occasionally there is an album that defines what recorded music is capable of. Full stop. The Dark Side of the Moon is that album. And for Phil Manzanera, who counted David Gilmore as a close friend from the age of 16, its arrival in 1973 was something close to a personal landmark. Gilmore and Manzanara had known each other since their school days in South London. They had watched each other develop as guitarists, as musicians, as people with serious ideas about what they wanted sound to do. By the time Dark Side appeared, Mansanero was deep inside the early Roxy Music records, building his own approach to the studio and the guitar. And then this record arrived and raised every ceiling simultaneously. The production is the first thing Alan Parsons and the band created a sonic environment so complete, so meticulously constructed that listening on headphones feels less like playing an album and more like entering a room that has been built specifically around you.

[00:12:14]Every element, the clocks, the heartbeat, the cash registers, the screaming functions both as texture and as meaning. Nothing is decoration.

[00:12:24]Everything is architecture. Gilmore's guitar is the emotional spine of the record on the great gig in the sky on money on any color you like and most devastatingly on comfortably numb which would come 6 years later but carries the same D and A. He demonstrates something Manzanara absorbed completely. That the guitar does not need to be busy to be powerful. That a single sustained note bent at the right moment in the right register can carry more emotional weight than a 100 technically perfect phrases.

[00:12:58]The Dark Side of the Moon sits at number one because it is the record that showed manzanara and the rest of the world exactly how far the studio and the electric guitar could travel together.

[00:13:10]when placed in the hands of musicians who refuse to accept any limitation whatsoever. Seven records, seven moments that turned a boy who grew up between Cuba, Venezuela, and London into one of the most distinctive guitar voices of his generation. Phil Manzanara did not choose these albums, they chose him. If any of them are new to you, clear an evening and start at number seven. And if this video connected with you, subscribe, leave a comment below, and tell us which one hits closest to home.