My friend Eugene Manzi, who has died aged 76, was something of a legend in the London music business of the 1980s and 90s. As head of the press office for London Records, he had an impressive roster of artists, including Fine Young Cannibals, Shakespears Sister, Bananarama, New Order, the Communards and Asian Dub Foundation. The Rev Richard Coles, a former member of the Communards, described him as “the loveliest publicist in the history of recorded sound”.
Eugene was born in Burgess Hill, East Sussex, and grew up in Primrose Hill, north London, where his father, Frank Manzi, built up a business supplying pubs and cafes with fruit machines and juke boxes, and his mother, Elizabeth (nee Paolozzi), raised their eight children.
On leaving Challoner school, Finchley, he started an apprenticeship in a tool shop. In the mid 1960s, Eugene and his older brother, Carlo, were among the first wave of young London mods. Carlo went on to run a successful business hiring out vintage clothes for TV and films and, throughout his life, Eugene remained an immaculately stylish dresser. “He was one of the coolest people I’ve met, with great taste in clothes and music,” says the musician Paul Weller, who befriended Eugene in the 1980s.
In 1968, Eugene opened his own record shop, Manzi Records, on Finchley Road, specialising in imported American soul singles and hard-to-find underground rock albums. It became a go-to place for young, hip record buyers as well as local London-Italian families, who bought his extensive selection of imported compilation albums of traditional Italian songs. A young Mari Wilson worked there as a “tea girl” for a time and later, when she became a successful pop singer in the early 1980s, Eugene ran her press campaign.
In the mid 1970s, Eugene moved into music PR, running the London office of the independent American music label Berserkley. Their best-known act was the Modern Lovers, led by the mercurial Jonathan Richman. In August 1977, the group had a British crossover hit with Roadrunner, now regarded as one of the seminal singles of the punk era.
In the early 1980s, Eugene was made head of press at London Records. He was at heart a music fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of rock, soul and jazz. He was also a humorist and a storyteller of some repute – such as the one about the time Eugene hastily arranged an interview with a band from Newcastle upon Tyne, but, by mistake, took the music journalist to Newcastle-under-Lyme, some 200 miles away.
This was a less corporate time, when record label press officers were often characters in their own right. Eugene was one of a kind: knowledgable, open-hearted, generous and funny. He took early retirement in the late 1990s but remained friends with many of the musicians he represented and the journalists who wrote about them. Weller speaks for many of them: “Eugene was a true gent and such a big character. I was lucky to have known him.”
Eugene is survived by his partner, Nicky Potter, his daughters, Vicky and Silvana, and son, Eugene, from his earlier marriage to Pat (nee Brislin), and by his brothers Carlo, Michael, Leon and Frankie, and his sisters, Maria and Lorenza. Another brother, Tony, died last year.