Obligations - the bane of everyone’s life, let alone musicians - and gosh don’t they have a lot.

An obligation to their fans, obligations to their record labels, obligations to themselves. Imagine then if they were given a chance for all of these obligations to just pack up and disappear - a rare occurrence indeed.

An opportunity that Sam Duckworth, the man behind Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly was given on Friday when he played his first ever fully solo acoustic show as part of the iTunes festival in London.

Now the cynics here will say that he has acoustic tracks on his album, how has he never performed a fully solo acoustic set? Well, the answer is simple. Sam has consistently relied on his laptop before he had his band and so has never been thrown in this far into the deep end. He doesn’t drown though and does well as he plays a set of song spanning two albums and three covers within it.

Nerves were apparent from the offset though as Duckworth nervously chattered his way through the first 20 minutes that included first album opener Once More With Feeling, with his voice attempting to fill the space left by an extremely quiet crowd. A not altogether surprising reaction considering the makeup of competition winners, corporate big wigs and special guests. By the end of the evening however Duckworth, with a little help from his friends, managed to win them round.

The beauty of events such as these can be the extremely fragile nature of the performance. This was seen brilliantly when Duckworth’s guitar strap broke and he had to stop half way through new single Find The Time and it was revealed that it was being held on with an iTunes gift card. What followed was a pleaded request for the whole sorry episode to be edited out of the final video of the performance.

The surprises are the best though and they came with the performance of the Alkaline Trio track Radio, introduced as “One of the best songs ever wrote about killing your ex girlfriend”. Duckworth introduced the crowd to a song that they may never have heard otherwise, hammering on the chords as if his life (or his girlfriends) depended on it.

Not that Duckworth was the only artist there, in fact judging by screams alone the support of Angus and Julie Stone was more appreciated than Duckworth himself. So when they came out to help play Hot Chip’s Over and Over, the crowd reacted with suitable enthusiasm.

The cover itself was an impressive feat when you consider they were armed only with guitars, a piano and a tambourine and Hot Chip rely so heavily on their gadgets and gizmo’s although this ad hoc element merely enforced Hot Chip’s mix it up to live performance.