Artist Information
Biography
The trouble with being a laptop folk one man band? Too many ideas.
“I went through about seven different albums before I got to this one,” says Sam Duckworth,
perched on a sofa in his tiny Hoxton studio. “There were 100 songs knocking about, all kinds
of styles. Even tracks that made the record went through ten or fifteen incarnations. At first
you start off thinking ‘I’m going to do everything, I’ve got a billion ideas, it’s going to be
completely different’. Then you get into a rhythm of playing about with it.”
Sam Duckworth is Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly., the Southend-born troubadour who named
his solo project after a solution from an old Batman adventure game, surfed the enigma of
it to the Top Thirty with his home-made 2006 debut album ‘The Chronicles Of A Bohemian
Teenager’ (an album written and recorded on a self-discovery tour of the UK). He then
hooked in Kate Nash and Billy Bragg to guest on the similarly successful 2008 follow
up ‘Searching For The Hows And Whys’ (co- produced with Nitin Sawhney), became a
leading figure in the political pop scene (a pub run-in with the BNP prompted Sam to become
heavily involved with the Love Music Hate Racism campaign) and helped spark the new
wave of modern folk heroes that’s brought us Jamie T and Jack Penate.
For many less inspired artists that might be the end of their creative thrust.
But when Sam came to construct his third album over two years between his Hoxton base and
Brixton’s Dairy Studios, he found himself with a mountain of fresh and eclectic material with
no idea how to fit any of it together.
“I’m glad I did everything I did on the second album, partly to get stuff out of my system,
partly because I learnt a lot,” says Sam. I had a lot of time to think about this record. The
majority of it happened in one room, it wasn’t in the studio, there wasn’t a tracking schedule,
I was just playing around with ideas.”
Alongside co-producer Dean James, Sam built tracks around the basic acoustic melodies,
and added reams of electronic layers that saw the tunes spiral off in ever more elaborate
and exotic directions, inspired by a new love for hip-hop and a rediscovered passion for
drum’n’bass.
One of the album’s pivotal tracks, the plaintive acoustic ‘Hand Me Downs’
suggests Sam had hit a creative brick wall: “I didn’t know what was the matter/I didn’t know
where to start/I’d lost my sense of energy and I’d lost my sense of heart”.
“It was more of a struggle to get some clarity on where to stop, or what was the right thing
to do,” says Sam. “We maybe spent three months working on stuff in Brixton that didn’t get
used before writing that track. Then two songs, ‘Nightlife’ and a track that didn’t make the
album called ‘The Earth Moved’, happened in the next day. Suddenly this was the direction.
It was like working within train tracks and then you step out of them and go ‘wow, there’s
quite a big world out here of other things to go on’.
“There was a moment that it all just clicked. I was listening a lot to ‘Articifial Intelligence’,
the De La Soul record and thinking about the beats, and I realised there was a hundred
thousand things on my track and there were two on that De La Soul track. So then I was
wading through everything, weeding almost, taking everything out and making sure that
every sound was justifiable and it wasn’t just there because it sounded interesting. You can
have a record of loads of great noises at once but it’ll sound like a bit of a jumble. It was
like a light switch. Suddenly everything made sense. Now we had a sound and a vibe for the
whole record.”
Scrapping all but the six most melodically accomplished of his 100 songs, Sam completed the
album by writing only another eight tunes. “Stepping away from writing at the computer and
just writing, made a big difference.
The big danger of producing stuff on a laptop is before you’ve finished a song it’s recorded,
and everything else piles on top. I was working with the mentality that if it doesn’t work with
just the vocal and the acoustic all the way through as a song then there’s no point in having
it.”
The record that emerged is the point where Sam dons the cape and truly flies.
It’s as imaginative, broad of genre and adventurous as the best of MIA, taking in big beat
hits (‘Collapsing Cities’, a collaboration with Shy FX), Swedish pop bangers (‘Nightlife’: “I
wanted to do a cruise ship crooner song that’s so cheesy that it’s almost unbearable. And then
to tip it over the edge, put a really old school hip-hop beat underneath it and a swing to the
beat that matches the swing of a crooner”) and a global mash-up called ‘All Of This Is Yours’
which shuffles marvellously along like Gorillaz’ ‘Clint Eastwood’ and featuring vocals from
Baaba Maal, this is an elasticated world music wonder.
“It came out of being involved with the Afrika Express stuff,” says Sam. “I went to Nigeria
and the Congo and out of all the artists I met there, Baaba Maal was probably the guy that
blew my mind the most. Particularly ‘On The Road’, the acoustic record – his playing was
not like anyone else’s. It’s all relative tuning and feel… That thrown-in-at-the-deep-end-
and-learn-how-to-swim mentality [of Afrika Express] is one of the best things I’ve ever
experienced. You either have to step up or walk away, there’s no other option.”
Embedded in this record are an abundance of quasi-political themes, ideas and concerns
and Sam expands on them at length: from the shedding of mankind’s global responsibility
to attacks on the greed of the banking system, the unifying nature of poverty-stricken
communities, the emancipating possibilities of the internet for China and Iran, the BNP losing
every council seat in the election plus the power of the protesters in Kent who forced the
closure of a planned power station in Kings North.
“I didn’t want to make a record that was so caught up in the problems that it didn’t see a light
at the end of the tunnel. I got sick of hearing the political movement and political songwriters
getting so caught up in the weight of what it thought was its own power. It lost sight of the
whole climate of the time, which is that people were back-lashing but they had nowhere to go.
I was of the mindset that there’s as much power in people coming together to dance as there
is in people coming together to shout at somebody or protest against something. It’s how that
energy can be galvanized for a positive force.”
Such positivity shines through the entire album; a breakthrough record spilling over with
invention and musical possibility and hooks like the claws of Cloverfield and difficult to
place in a box.
Sam corrects. “I don’t really know what it is. I guess it’s a pop record.”
A pop record then. A brilliant, brilliant pop record.
For more info go to www.myspace.com/getcapewearcapefly
Instrumentation
Sam Duckworth - Vocals, Guitar, &Vocals
Discography
Albums
The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager (Atlantic Records, 2006)
Searching for the Hows and Whys (Atlantic Records, 2008)
Get Cape Wear Cape Fly (Cooking Vinyl. 2010)
EPs
Split with The Remarkable Rocket (3" CD, BSM Records, 2004)
Split with Dave House (10" EP, BSM Records/Gravity DIP, 2006)
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly (EP) (BSM Records, 2006)
Singles
"I-Spy"/"Call Me Ishmael" (Atlantic Records, 2006)
"Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager (Part One)" (Atlantic Records, 2006) #38 UK
"War of the Worlds" (Atlantic Records, 2006) #39 UK
"I-Spy" (Atlantic Records, March 2007) #37 UK
"Find the Time" (Atlantic Records, March 2008) #33 UK
"Keep Singing Out" (Atlantic Records, 19th May 2008)
"The Uprising" (Cooking Vinyl, 2010)
"Collapsing Cities" (Cooking Vinyl, 2010)
Links
Video
Press
Setlist
Chronicles 2
Monster
An Oak Tree
I spy
Young and Lovestruck
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly
War of the worlds
Lighthousekeeper
I couldve seen it all
Keep Singing Out
Ishmael
Find the time
Chronicles 1