Quietly, in the last month, Sam Duckworth has reinvented his Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. moniker. Lacking an outlet for his more electronic oriented music, Recreations is the new name for Sam and his laptop, performing a mixture of songs from his back-catalogue, as well as newer tracks with a beat. Opening with a Recreations set means getting people involved pretty early; one of the songs he requests the audience to join in singing in rounds which actually goes pretty well, for a Wednesday evening at least.

His ‘solo’ set is genuinely the best I’ve seen Sam perform in years – his passion for the music and the messages that they represent seems to have been rekindled, perhaps due to the situation we find ourselves in these days, and it really comes across both in his performances and in his between song talks. Some of the earlier Get Cape songs are re-imagined as complex acoustic pieces, his guitar work having come along massively over his career. At the time I wasn’t really sure about the way both sets appeared to cover such a large part of his discography but looking back it works well; there’s certainly a steep separation between them musically and while some of the more recent tracks demand the depth the electronics bring, older tracks like Glass Houses actually benefit from the acoustic treatment. Either way, it’s good to see Sam enjoying both sides of music, putting energy and passion into it all. I’ve seen Sam live a fair few times now but this was certainly up there with the first time, a good 9 years ago.