Mike Vickers

Michael Vickers (born 18 April 1940) is a British musician who came to prominence as guitarist, flautist and saxophonist with the 1960s band Manfred Mann. He was born in Southampton in the English county of Hampshire. He originally played flute and saxophone but with the increasing popularity of guitars in bands, it was decided that Manfred Mann should have a guitarist in their line-up. Vickers volunteered for this role but he always preferred playing woodwind. His tough flute soloing on hard blues tracks such as "Without You" prefigured the work of Ian Anderson with Jethro Tull five years later. As the group were all multi-instrumentalists, multi-tracking was used to allow Vickers to perform on guitar and woodwind on the same recordings, while drummer Mike Hugg similarly doubled on vibraphone. Vickers was credited as a co-writer on Manfred Mann's early hit singles and contributed a few tracks to albums, including "The Abominable Snowmann" and "You're for Me". In 1965, his bandmate Tom McGuinness described him as "the nicest one of the group … nice nearly all the time. But when he's nasty he just can't be nice about it." McGuinness added: "He collects saxophones – which we buy for him."By 1965, according to McGuinness, Vickers was already "recording with his own orchestra and looks like becoming a definite threat to Semprini". At the end of that year, he quit the band, although his first solo album, I Wish I Were a Group Again, did not appear until 1968. In June 1967, he conducted the orchestra for the live recording of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love", which was shown on live TV across the world when communications satellite technology was celebrated by a worldwide link-up. Vickers was one of the first musicians in the UK to use the Moog synthesiser. He taught The Beatles to play it, and he demonstrated it on the BBC science programme “Tomorrow’s World”. Keith Emerson first used Vickers’ Moog (live, with Vickers patching and Emerson playing) in 1970 before Emers