How the descendant of a notorious Jewish pirate became a swashbuckling rock ’n’ roll legend

Phil Manzanera is the author of the memoir ‘Revolución to Roxy.’ Photo by CTA

By Dan Epstein September 18, 2025

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From Johnny Kidd & the Pirates to Adam Ant and beyond, “rockstar as swashbuckler” has long been a popular trope among image-conscious musicians. But few of the rockers who’ve ever affected a piratical pose can claim descendance from an actual raider of the High Seas, much less one of the most notorious Jewish pirates of all time.

But while penning his 2024 memoir, Revolución to Roxy, Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera unexpectedly discovered that his convoluted family history included a direct connection on his mother’s side to Moses Cohen Henriques, a 17th century Dutch pirate of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin. Henriques’ raids on Spanish ships in the Caribbean reportedly earned him the equivalent of over a billion dollars in today’s currency, before he settled in Jamaica and helped establish the island nation’s first Jewish community.

“This all goes back to when Brexit happened in the UK,” Manzanera told me. “I hated the idea of Brexit, and I thought, ‘How can I beat the system?’ And then I read an article in the Times newspaper saying that if you could prove you had Sephardic Jewish origins, you could get a Spanish or Portuguese passport.

“I was pretty sure my grandmother was Jewish, but I hadn’t really dug into that. So I went on to Ancestry.com, and it turned out she was born in Curacao, and then I went back and back and back and back to the 16th and 17th century, and I saw the name Moses Cohen Henriques. For some reason I thought, “’I should just Google it…” and the guy turned out to have a Wikipedia page! I couldn’t believe it — he was the most famous Jewish pirate of the Caribbean, and I had no idea there were any Jewish pirates of the Caribbean,” he said with a laugh. “I found this little drawing of him, and I thought, ‘Wow, he looks like me when I was in Roxy to start with‚ with the long boots, the beard and the long hair!’”

Though Manzanera never exactly went “full buccaneer” as a member of Roxy Music — the groundbreaking and massively influential British art rock band that was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 — he nonetheless cut a most distinctive figure during the art-rock outfit’s early years, sporting a black leather jacket and boots and the iconic “bug eyes” glasses created by British fashion designer Antony Price. At the same time, Manzanera’s long hair and full beard seemed to put him at follicular odds with the lineup’s impeccably coiffed trio of frontman Bryan Ferry, synthesizer wizard Brian Eno and multi-instrumentalist Andy Mackay. But that, he said, was all part of the concept.

“I was considered the token hippie,” he said. “The rest of the band were like, ‘We’ll cut our hair and color it, but you don’t do that!’ Paul Thompson, our drummer, didn’t do it, either. Because the thinking was that rockers or people who liked prog-rock would feel a bit more comfortable with us in the band; whereas if everybody appeared like they came from the planet Zog, it would just be too much. So Antony — who was so important to Roxy, with the image and the styling and the album covers — told me, ‘Don’t cut your beard, but stick on these glasses, stick on a leather jacket, and you’ll look a bit like a Hells Angel!’”

Though born in London, Manzanera spent much of his childhood in Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Hawaii, thanks to a father who worked for BOAC and may have also been a foreign intelligence agent. Those experiences, chronicled in Revolución to Roxy along with his prolific work as a solo artist, producer, musical collaborator and occasional session player, give the diehard Roxy Music fan plenty to sink their teeth into. The book follows the band from the moment he answers their 1971 Melody Maker ad for “The Perfect Guitarist for Avant-Rock Group” through their 50th anniversary tour in 2022, hitting all the band’s albums, stylistic shifts, fallouts, breakups and reunions along the way. But in keeping with Manzanera’s affable and philosophic nature, Revolución to Roxy offers remarkably little in the way of axe-grinding, even when it’s obvious that he and his bandmates wanted to kill their self-absorbed singer on several occasions.

“It’s a dysfunctional family, really,” he said. “You know, it’s like the Hotel California — we can check out, we can never leave. We are inextricably linked. Bryan lives about 10 minutes from me; he might ring up and say, ‘You fancy going out to the pub?’ and we can have a laugh, but we don’t need to be in each other’s pockets the whole time. We’ve lived through lots of ups and downs, and I think we’re now sort of all at peace with each other, thank God.

“When you join the band, you think, ‘Oh, great — it’ll be the Four Musketeers, or the Five Musketeers, all for one and one for all!’ And then gradually all the Musketeers want to impale each other with sabers,” he said. “So it is a miracle that we’re actually talking to each other still, I must say.”

One Roxy mate that Manzanera seems to have never fallen out with is Andy Mackay, with whom the guitarist has collaborated on numerous non-Roxy projects over the years, including their 1980s band The Explorers. Their latest collaborative effort is the new AM PM SOHO LIVE, a double album recorded with original Roxy drummer Paul Thompson over the course of three intimate London gigs. Along with new renditions of several Roxy tracks (including their 1974 classic “Out of the Blue”) and a handful of Manzanera solo compositions, the album also features a number of entrancing improvisations on pieces originally written and recorded for Manzanera and Mackay’s COVID lockdown-inspired AM • PM album, which was released in 2023.

“The last time we played together in front of an audience was the last-ever Roxy gig at the O2 — a big thing with like, 20,000 people and the big screens and the big hoo-ha, which was fabulous,” said Manzanera. “Recording SOHO LIVE was really ‘back to small,’ you know, because we did it in a screening room in front of like 75 people a night. But it was good, because you can see the people, and you’re looking in their faces going, ‘Are they liking this?’ You reconnect, I suppose, with why you’re a musician — you are listening to other musicians, you’re taking in the whole environment with all the people there, and you’re trying to reach somewhere that maybe you haven’t been to before, or something that surprises you.”

Manzanera said that his and Mackay’s collaborative dynamic boils down to that same sense of adventure on top of a solid friendship.

“I guess it’s like having a musical conversation with somebody that you’ve known some time, and trying to surprise the other person and make them surprise you, and feeling comfortable enough to not be afraid to fail,” he said. “And obviously, I find Andy very amusing as a person, as well. So imagine you’ve got a friend who you really like, and you go out and you have a bit of a laugh and stuff, but you’ve also got instruments — and you sort of take that all on stage with you. And we’re not trying to chase a chart hit; we’re just doing music. We’re just following our noses, really, because that’s what we do, and that’s what makes us happy.”

Manzanera’s own adventurousness has led him to collaborate over the years with a number of musicians who might be diplomatically termed “strong personalities” — along with Ferry and Eno, his extensive CV includes work with David Gilmour, John Cale, Robert Wyatt, Chrissie Hynde, Tim Finn, Nico, Nina Hagen and Jack Bruce — but his sunny disposition, focused work ethic and willingness to go wherever the music leads seem to have pulled him through these encounters relatively unscathed.

“I guess it’s just down to personality,” he told me. “Robert Wyatt’s wife said, ‘I think you’re a bit of a facilitator.’ And I said, ‘Is that good or bad?’ But I guess when I have my producer hat on, I try to think conceptually, think about the music, think about what we’re doing here. You know, make sure everybody’s going the same direction, and stay calm. And don’t take drugs; even if everyone else is taking drugs, you don’t take them. Otherwise you’ll be there all night!”

But as one of the funniest passages in Revolución to Roxy reveals, even Manzanera’s normally placid disposition was no match for Bob Dylan. When the legendary singer-songwriter showed up as a guest at the Manzanera-directed Guitar Legends festival in Seville, Spain in 1991, he asked Manzanera if the guitarist happened to know a 1940s Tex-Mex song whose name or artist Dylan claimed to be unable to recall — and when Manzanera asked Dylan to play it so he could get a sense of the song’s chord structure, Dylan proceeded to play him six different versions of the song one after the other, each one with different words, melodies and tempos.

Manzanera then had to deliver a request from the festival organizers that Dylan play “All Along the Watchtower,” but with Jimi Hendrix’s arrangement instead of Dylan’s original, a request which went over about as well as you might imagine — and as showtime approached, no one was sure if Dylan would actually take the stage for the internationally televised concert.

“I think many musicians in America have got their Dylan stories,” Manzanera said with a shrug, recalling that nail-biting encounter. “And obviously, if you think that he’s a genius — which I do — and respect all his work, then you put up with a lot of shit. But I was the musical director, and there was danger that he a) had no idea what he was going to play, and b) might not even come on, and it’s going out live on television in Europe and in America. And you think, “OK, I’m going to go have something to eat and meditate for a while.’ On the other hand, part of your brain is saying ‘He’s Bob Dylan, mate; he can do whatever likes.’”

Dylan did eventually come on and perform — even singing “All Along the Watchtower” as requested — though the accumulated stress probably took a year or two off Manzanera’s life. “But you know, having done that, it was like the benchmark,” he said. “I can work with anybody. I’m not afraid of anybody, now. I’ve been through hell, and I’ve come out the other side! And it’s all cool. If someone doesn’t want to go on, fine by me; I’ll just go on and noodle away.”

Manzanera shared that he’s currently back in the studio with Quiet Sun, his pre-Roxy Music progressive rock band. “We did our last album in 1975, at the same time I was doing my solo album Diamond Head, even though we hadn’t played together for five years at that point,” he said. “Now, we haven’t played together for 50 years, and we’re three quarters of the way through a new album. We’re hoping to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the longest time between the first album and second album! It’s a bit challenging for me, because it’s sort of prog-rock, but I must say it’s sounding great!”

Meanwhile, Manzanera said he’s thinking of proposing a possible collaboration with Jamaican dancehall rapper and singer Sean Paul, who also happens to be a descendant of a certain legendary pirate.

“I hadn’t looked at my ancestor’s Wikipedia page for ages,” Manzanera said, “but I looked again the other day and found the most extraordinary thing, because at the very bottom it now says that one of his relations is Sean Paul! His real name is Sean Paul Francis Henriques, and I’m getting his details so I can send him a thing and say, ‘You won’t believe this, but we might have the same great, great, great, great grandfather!’ Perhaps we could do something together — this could be a real family affair!”