Paul Vickers and The Leg have long delighted in their uproarious array of musical phantasmagorias and fantastical delights. Over four albums of junkyard Beefheartian clatter offset by Vickers’ punk vaudeville howl, Vickers and co have proved themselves to be Edinburgh’s wildest cards.

The release of the band’s fifth album, ‘Winter at Butterfly Lake’ on the 27th of June, sees the quintet move into more grown-up symphonic territory. For Vickers and his dervish-like compatriots, this time it’s personal.

“Heartbreak is the best state to be in to write love songs. Due to incidents in my personal life, I found I had a large bundle of memories that I was pouring into a new set of songs. It didn’t take us long to work out that we appeared to be writing a heartbreak suite. This is the first time as a lyricist I have left my heart and soul so bare. With the songs co-written with Dan Mutch, and Pete Harvey flexing his muscles as an arranger, ‘Winter at Butterfly Lake is a record unlike any that Paul Vickers and the Leg has produced so far.” - Paul Vickers

With Vickers’ roots in shoulda-been 1990s alt-pop maestros Dawn of the Replicants, since hitching up to the sound and fury of fellow travellers The Leg, this unholy alliance has produced a pantheon of off kilter parallel universe mayhem. Throughout, Vickers and his musical troupe have mined a rich seam of baroque grotesquery set to the ferocious crunch of an ever-expanding musical palette.

The ten vignettes that make up ‘Winter at Butterfly Lake’ may be sired from the same fertile mind as before, but the record also lays bare a set of love songs writ large. From the opening string-led flourish that leads into the thundering cello-led gallop of ‘Slow Runs the Fox’ to the closing affirmation of ‘Contents of the Earth’, ‘Winter at Butterfly Lake’ sees Vickers purging old demons on a quest for some ever out of reach holy grail.

Along the way, Vickers and co pay homage to electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, indulge in urgent Brechtian jug band chorales and reference Charles Dickens’ novel, David Copperfield, in swirling maelstroms of yearning. There is a love song to a dog with behavioral problems so bad he has to see a psychiatrist, and an ode to an imaginary four-legged friend that helps see those who dreamt it up through the bad times.

If all this suggests the band are getting soft in their old age, think again. The music at the heart of the Paul Vickers and the Leg experience remains a mercurial powerhouse of avant-pop Sturm und Drang. Composed by Vickers with guitar auteur Dan Mutch, cellist Pete Harvey, drummer Alun Scurlock, bassist John Mackie and guitarist James Metcalfe, the record’s muted chaos explodes into life with a frantic energy that at times sounds like Babel being blown to kingdom come. A final heartfelt rally sees Vickers take stock of the debris he’s been abandoned in before offering hope for some kind of future. As a redemptive Vickers writes, “don’t underestimate your value. Ever.”

Much of the album’s musical largesse is driven by the exquisite string arrangements of Pete Harvey, who recorded the album in the magic wood of his Pumpkinfield studio before drafting in a five-piece string ensemble to take things stratospheric. This taps into the torrent of emotions at the heart of Vickers’ words, until a final purging leaves him to contemplate life’s everyday illusions. On ‘Winter at Butterfly Lake’, a broken heart has rarely sounded so magical amidst the loss.

“When I was on holiday in Tuscany some years ago we visited the square that inspired Puccini to write Nessun dorma for the final act of his opera, Turandot. It was easy to see how such a wonderful piece of music could be created in such a place. It’s an acoustically spectacular circle of houses with washing lines hung from the windows in a higgledy-piggledy manner. It was late at night when I visited the former roman amphitheatre there, and I thought I saw the ghost of Frank Sinatra lighting a cigarette by street lamp, perhaps lost in some wee small hours heartbreak. When I looked again it was just a trick of the light. It was in fact a local vagabond.” – Paul Vickers

- Neil Cooper, 2025