Much of the British folk scene may currently be concerned with the experimental reworking of traditional material, but there is still a place for a guitar-playing singer-songwriter. Our two best-known exponents, Richard Thompson and Billy Bragg, are both in impressive form this year, and the fashionably bearded Sam Carter has all the makings of a major contender. He's an excellent singer and guitarist who writes bleak, well-observed and sad personal songs that are carefully balanced against witty, good‑humoured introductions.

To this he adds the occasional dash of the unexpected – songs influenced by the 19th-century American tradition of "shapenote" gospel singing, or an electric blues. He started with his strongest compositions; a solo acoustic treatment of Yellow Sign, an English urban story of love, violence and jail, followed by the bleakly contemporary Dreams Are Made of Money, and a pained love song, Pheasant, which included the memorable line "you flattened me like a pheasant on a country road". Then came songs about death and divorce, with one boisterous lullaby to redress the balance. When he switched to traditional songs, the subject matter ranged from an unhappy marriage to a hanging.

This was a major event on his current tour, and Carter was joined for much of the set by a rhythm section of double bass and a heavy-handed drummer, with the inspired Sam Sweeney, of Bellowhead fame, adding violin and cello. The best song was a duet in which Sweeney and Carter provided a curiously upbeat treatment of Jack Hall, the story of an 18th-century London execution, which ended with a rousing violin and guitar work-out. Then there was switch to electric guitar for a noisy blues dealing with the 2011 Japanese tsunami and a gospel-influenced a capella finale. An uneven set, maybe, but impressively original.

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