The first thing people tell you about Benjamin Scheuer; singer, songwriter, garlanded playwright, children’s book author, is that he never goes anywhere without his guitar. For those assuming this defines a wandering minstrel, they would be some way wide of the mark. Scheuer is, indeed, imbued with that tradition of singer as social observer and commentator but there is no Dogma-esque belief in the purity of the acoustic expression. Scheuer’s music, currently being recorded for a debut album for Canvasback / Parlophone Records later in the year, may begin with the folk tradition as reimagined by the likes of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, but transforms that starting point into a modernist statement, filtered through glitches and awash with synthesised effect and otherworldly melody.

Benjamin Scheuer’s journey to this debut is also not your standard singer / songwriter story. Well known throughout the theatre world on both sides of the Atlantic for his one-man show THE LION (2014), (which delivered a clutch of awards including a Drama Desk Award for “Outstanding Solo Performance”, an off-West End Award for “Best New Musical”, and an ASCAP Cole Porter Award for Songwriting), Scheuer is also a published children’s author, with his wife Jemima Williams, of Hibernate With Me and Hundred Feet Tall for Simon & Schuster; and the author of Between Two Spaces, which documented his diagnosis with – and successful treatment for – stage IV Hodgkins Lymphoma.

Scheuer is a teller of stories, his own and others. Those stories are about more than a simple narrative, finding magic in both in the everyday and the extraordinary. As with all notable writers, he is both a great listener and a talented orator, bringing his subjects to life and finding the common threads among their personal experiences.