Holy smokes, Batman! Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly talks monikers and motivation with TIM HUGHES.

FUSING acoustic melodies with spiralling layers of beats and electronica, Sam Duckworth stands alone among the glut of new-folk artists.

Hailing from the muddy backwaters of the Thames estuary, the guitar-and-laptop-wielding troubadour has also been taken under the wing of local fans as an adopted Oxonian.

Managed by Oxford’s Paul Bonham, Sam cut his teeth at the old Zodiac, in Cowley Road, and at Truck and Cornbury festivals.

Now the artist, better known by his stage name Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly is heading back this way for a show at the Oxford O2 Academy. Oh, and an appearance at the mighty Reading Festival.

Next week’s sets alongside such rock icons as Guns ’n’ Roses, Blink 182 and Arcade Fire will cement Sam as one of the UK’s most exciting singer-songwriters. It will also see him showcase new album, out next month, and named imaginatively (ahem) Get cape. Wear cape. Fly.

Part-Burmese Southend-born Sam first hit our collective consciousness four years ago, with his top 30 album The Chronicles Of A Bohemian Teenager, which came hot on the heels of some frantic touring – indeed, the album was entirely written on the road.

Follow-up Searching For The Hows And Whys (co-produced with Nitin Sawhney) featured guest-spots from Kate Nash and Billy Bragg. A key figure on the Love Music Hate Racism movement, Sam is an intelligent political commentator, his ideological stance shaped by a Southend pub run-in with the BNP (he got away, but only because he’s also a decent runner). And his stage name?

“Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly are levels on a Batman game on the old ZX Spectrum computer,” he explains. “I came up with the name the night before a show. I wanted to get away from the stigma that if you use your own name, you’re some kind of achy-breaky singer-songwriter.”

Partially recorded at his home in trendy Hoxton, his third album is inspired by a new love for hip-hop and drum’n’bass.

“I went through about seven different albums before I got to this one,” he explains. “There were 100 songs knocking about, all kinds of styles. I started thinking, ‘I’m going to do everything; I’ve got a billion ideas; it’s going to be completely different’.”

The problem was having too many ideas. “It was a struggle to get some clarity on where to stop, or what was the right thing to do,” he says.

“We maybe spent three months working on stuff in Brixton that didn’t get used. Then there was a moment that it all just clicked.

“I was listening a lot to Articifial Intelligence by De La Soul and thinking about the beats. I realised there were a hundred thousand things on my track and only two on that. So then I was wading through everything, weeding almost, taking everything out and making sure that every sound was justifiable.”

The record also sees Sam spreading his political wings, holding court on the environment, the greed of the banking system and, his pet hate, the BNP.

“I didn’t want to make a record that was so caught up in problems that it didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel,” he explains.

“There’s as much power in people coming together to dance as there is in people coming together to shout at somebody.”

Not that the down-to-earth Essex boy makes any claim for his own record.

“I don’t really know what it is,” he laughs. “I guess it’s a pop record!”

* Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly plays the Reading Festival next weekend and Oxford O2 Academy on September 19. Tickets are £13.50 from ticketweb.co.uk