Mike Vickers

Michael Graham Vickers (born 18 April 1940) is an English musician who came to prominence as the guitarist, flautist, and saxophonist with the 1960s band Manfred Mann.

Vickers was born in Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey. At the age of seven, his family moved to Scotland, and when he was eleven, to Southampton, where he attended King Edward VI School.

Vickers 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 lineup. Vickers volunteered for this role, though 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.

He 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".

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.