Mike Heron
British musician
James Michael Heron (born 27 December 1942) is a Scottish singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his work in the psychedelic folk Incredible String Band, being the lead singer, playing the guitar, sitar, harmonica and more in the 1960s and 1970s.
Career
Heron was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and attended the Royal High School, Edinburgh and later George Heriot's School in Edinburgh, where his father was a teacher. He spent a year at the University of Edinburgh before leaving to start training as an accountant. He played in R&B and pop bands in Edinburgh, including the Saracens and, in late 1965, successfully auditioned to join a new trio, the Incredible String Band, with Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer. Heron has said that "It was an exploring era in the Sixties and people were rebelling from the boring pop stuff into folk and blues and world music. You couldn't sit down and listen to Buddy Holly and pass the joint around. So we tried to make the kind of music we felt was missing from our lives, that fitted with the hippy lifestyle."
Heron has also released a number of solo recordings, mostly more rock-oriented than the Incredible String Band material. The first of these, Smiling Men with Bad Reputations, released in 1971, when he was still a member of the ISB, took eclecticism to a new extreme, blending rock, folk and world music into an atmospheric whole. Contributing musicians included Pete Townshend, Keith Moon, Duncan Browne and Ronnie Lane (as "Tommy & the Bijoux"), John Cale, Richard Thompson, Dave Mattacks, Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg, Dudu Pukwana, Elton John, and Steve Winwood.
The Incredible String Band broke up in September 1974.
“Mike Heron” enters the record as british musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mike, Heron and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Mike Heron” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mike, Heron and British provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6847220. VIAF identifies the subject as 87969966. The Library of Congress control number is n92104963. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 1965, 1971 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mike Heron” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.