Mike Vickers - "I Wish I Were A Group Again"
Saturday, June 11, 2022
This album, I Wish I Were a Group Again by Mike Vickers, is the most expensive album that I have purchased due to my current obsession with the band Manfred Mann. A group that I adore with limitless passion. Vickers, the group's guitarist and a saxophone player left the band sometime in 1967. I suspect he didn’t have a strong interest in being in a jazz/rock n’ roll band and preferred to be a composer/arranger in a recording studio. He was the music director/arranger for my favorite reissue of the year, Dana Gillespie’s Foolish Seasons, and did a series of British library music in the late 1960s and the 1970s. There is a lot of strange creativity in Library music, a system where composers and studio musicians can compose soundtrack music for films and commercials. A producer can subscribe to the service and select their own ‘mood’ music for their film project.
I Wish I Were a Group Again is Vickers’ first solo album, released in 1967, and here he arranges selected pop songs from that period, including Donovan’s Sunshine Superman, Cat Stevens’ Matthew & Son, The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, and even from his previous band, the Manfred’s Pretty Flamingo. For me, who loves to jump into the time machine to music from my youth, especially if it came from London, which is unlikely that this album ever reached the United States. It’s a made-up world, and often, I revisit that world to see what life was like when I was unaware of my placement in that landscape.
So, I must admit that my love for this album is not on musical terms but the portal entrance to my past, but a history that didn’t exist in my world. Nevertheless, I have a deep appreciation for1960s orchestrated pop music. I’m a huge Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra fan as well as admiring the works of arrangers such as Wally Stott, Reg Guest, and Peter Knight, who all worked on the solo Scott Walker albums from the 60s, as well as Claus Ogerman, who arranged the classic Lesley Gore recordings, and Chris Andrews and Ken Woodman’s arrangements for Sandie Shaw. Vickers did a lot of work arranging music for various artists, even the solo recordings by Paul Jones, the original lead singer for Manfred Mann. I like his work because he has a light touch when working on materials. He thinks like a jazz musician while working in pure pop forms. The music on I Wish I Were… is very much like muzak or elevator music, but something there pulls you into these songs' world. Some have vocals, but they blend in with the other instruments and don’t stand out. It encourages one to sing along with the music, but there will be a flute solo or piano passage that will throw you off the trail.
The music I like tends to be part of more extensive culture. It deals with the visuals, my little knowledge of that culture, and things I can make up in my mind as a narrative of some sort. It’s there, but not there, but we do have this odd and lovely album by Mike Vickers.
