Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay on Embracing Electronics with AM/PM
Glam’s greatest saxman goes ambient with Roxy pal Phil Manzanera on new collaboration
Rock reed legend Andy Mackay will forever be best known as a core member of Roxy Music.
But his new collaboration with Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera touches on concepts that compelled Mackay even before that earth-shaking band began.
AM/PM is an all-instrumental electro-acoustic album where sax and guitar textures swim through pools of ambient electronics also provided by the two main men. Sometimes there are percolating beats behind it all (‘70s Roxy drummer Paul Thompson appears) and sometimes Mackay and Manzanera’s Impressionist lines hang suspended evocatively in midair.
But it’s far from Mackay’s first dance with electronics, which have been a recurring element throughout his musical life. The story starts when he begins hanging with future Roxy synth wizard Brian Eno.
“The reason that I got friendly with Eno initially,” Mackay recalls, “was when I was at university in the mid-1960s I got interested in avant-garde music and art. I got into all sorts of European avant-garde music, Stockhausen and so on. There was a Fine Arts department at the university I was at, Reading University outside London, and there were some very forward-thinking teachers and students there, and we formed a little performance group that did experimental theater and music. We did a performance at an art college not far away in Winchester, and Eno attended. And we made friends and followed that up with some performances that we did together. After I graduated, for some years I didn’t see him. I bumped into him on an underground train and I said to him, ‘What are you doing these days? I’m trying to put a group together with a guy I’ve met called Bryan Ferry.’ From that he came along, and I had a synthesizer I’d bought, an EMS VCS3, which I’d been using as part of my idea to try to get into an avant-garde slant on pop music, and it went from there.”
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Part of what made the early Roxy records so unique was Eno’s electronic treatments of Mackay and Manzanera’s axes. But things got even more intense onstage.
“Like most bands we were quite short of material on our first tour,” says Mackay. “We had just over an album’s worth of songs, maybe 15 songs that we did. So, we had to spin out the gigs by having quite long improvised sessions. So, Bryan Ferry would go offstage, and Brian Eno and I would be left to play a long improvisation in the middle of the song. There’s a very interesting recording at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973 where there’s a very long version of ‘If There Is Something.’ It would still sound very strange and experimental now.”
Post-Roxy, Eno obviously pursued the electronic, experimental side of things much more than Mackay over the years. “But it always has been an interest of mine,” says the latter, “so it’s quite interesting that this project of Phil and I has turned out to be the most experimental album that we’ve done together.”
In 1981, though, Mackay’s most overt connection to electronic music so far appeared with the publication of his book on the topic. Simply titled Electronic Music, it was written at a time when the subject was still pretty much a niche topic.
“My interest in electronic music had carried on, and I was very excited that some of the things that I thought about in the ‘60s when I first encountered electronic music…it was really exciting that other bands had really started using them. And a friend of mine who was a book editor said he was commissioned to do a series on musical instruments. And he said, would I do the one on electronics?”
When Manzanera and Mackay formed short-lived band The Explorers with singer James Wraith in the ‘80s, electronics were inevitably a part of the package because, well, it was the ‘80s. “When Bryan decided that he was gonna go off and become a full-time solo artist, Phil and I thought, ‘Well we’ve been making some great records, we’ll carry on. We’ve got lots of songs.’ Virgin Records were very excited about it….We recorded, I think, some really great tracks. James, who was someone I’d produced a couple of demos for, had a lovely voice. Everyone said we’d been looking for a Bryan Ferry soundalike. That never occurred to me. I think any English singer singing our music would have been compared to Bryan Ferry. That didn’t really help us commercially. It’s certainly worth listening to some of those tracks, there’s some really beautiful music there.”
In a way, AM/PM is a continuation of the dynamic between Mackay and Manzanera that runs through all their work together. “Neither of us are focused, long-solo type musicians,” says Mackay. “Neither of us want to go onstage and actually dominate. We’re more interested in working in an ensemble. All the saxophone work in Roxy, it’s not the conventional ‘Here’s the band and then there’s the saxophone solo and the saxophone goes away.’ Much more, I was interested in doing textures and sounds. I think Phil, too, his contribution was a mixture of some rhythms, some fantastic sounds and atmosphere, some great solos, but neither of us wanted to dominate the track with a solo. And it sort of carried on that way. That’s why the latest, AM/PM, is kind of the first time really that we’ve done a record where that’s in the forefront. We’re not backing up a singer or an ensemble, it’s just the two of us.”
Like a lot of records released over the last few years, AM/PM was a COVID era lockdown project. “I was living in Brighton on the South coast, and we were not able to see each other and work together,” explains Mackay. “Phil said, ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas, I’m gonna send them over to you, just play what you like on it, and we’ll see what comes out of it.’ It was done like that over 18 months or so when we couldn’t actually work together. And then after the Roxy Music 50th anniversary tour last year, he said, ‘I’d really like to finish off those things we were working on.’ We wanted to add some drums, so Paul Thompson came down and played drums, and we just played a little bit more one day in the studio.”
Some of the album’s aural atmosphere feels like it shares DNA with the moodier moments of Roxy’s 1982 swan song, Avalon.
“Certainly some of the keyboard fabrics on Avalon,” agrees Mackay. “Also, on Avalon my sax nearly always had a lot of echo and other treatment on it. Even, in terms of atmosphere, on Bryan Ferry’s solo records [to which Manzanera and Mackay have contributed] he’s developed this very lush, keyboardy kind of echoey sound with little bits of percussion and things and I think all of that is there on AM/PM. It’s the first time Phil and I have done it just on our own.”
Looking back on his earliest dances with the electronic muse decades ago, Mackay recognizes the distance technology has traveled. “I think back in the early 1960s when I was sitting in my bedroom trying to think of how I could get into a group and earn a living working with some early electronic instruments I would never believe what’s happened in 50 years to music across the spectrum,” he says. “When I started using electronics it was a question of turning knobs and using a patch cord to plug in different sound sources and different circuits within the machine. Now there’s an amazing range of electronic sounds just on Logic, but nothing quite like the sound of the early Moogs and the VCS3. I think most of the synths [on AM/PM] probably were programmed from the laptop, but there were various instruments around. I used the wind synth a little bit—I use a Roland Aerophone at the moment.”
AM/PM is the product of two men who have been making records for more than half a century. So, what does Mackay know now that he didn’t know when he was dressing like a futuristic greaser and making musical history alongside his old bandmates? “I know that you never know. Particularly if you’re trying to write, you don’t know where the ideas come from, really. You’re grateful when they do. It maybe teaches you not to try too hard. If I look at my own career, maybe in The Explorers we were trying a bit too hard. Then AM/PM, we’re relaxing to the point where some of the music is just writing itself. I think Eno would maybe agree with that—if you create the situation in which the sounds are being made, then as part of the creative process, the music can actually create itself.”
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