Coffee-Table Notes

Paul Vickers is all tied up in the video for Chieftain of Paradise, the first single taken from Jump, the fourth album by Paul Vickers and The Leg. In the video, Vickers is tethered to a ship’s mast by his band-mates, who thrust assorted pop cultural totems in his face to illustrate the song’s lyrics, in which both Elvis Presley and artist William Turner make an appearance.
At other points, Vickers and co play chess in the spirit of the album cover painting that references Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal by way of characters from Jump. Despite the song’s apparent sing-a-long levity, Vickers is making a serious statement about the state of art and commerce in difficult times.
“The idea of the song is that you can never predict which way things are going to go as far as the zeitgeist is concerned,” says Vickers on the eve of Jump’s launch at an intimate show tomorrow night in an Edinburgh church. “The idea of being the chieftain of paradise is of someone who suffers for their art, but w…

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars
Once upon a nightmare, Chinese writer Pu Songling penned more than 500 supernatural stories that were gathered together and published in a volume eventually translated as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A few hundred years on, Pu’s yarns have been made flesh in Grid Iron Theatre Company’s first ever British stage version of eight of the stories as the brain-child of Pauline Lockhart.
Lockhart appears alongside fellow actors Luna Dai and Robin Khor Yong Kuan in her own adaptation of Ewan Macdonald’s new translations, co-penned and co-directed with Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison in co-production with the Traverse. It starts simply enough, as the story-telling trio appear one by one through the artfully torn gauze curtains of Karen Tennent’s breathtakingly expansive set, addressing the audience directly as they set out the ground rules. The stories they are about to resurrect, they say, are powerful beasts, and must be handled with care.
So it goes with …