Anyone who managed to tear themselves away from the city centre and take the half-hour bike ride to the Haymakers last Wednesday will have come across two of the most energetically unconventional heroes of American anti-folk: the nerdy comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis alongside fellow New Yorker and self-confessed bottle cap fanatic, legendary 72-year-old beatnik folk extraordinaire Peter Stampfel (a founding member of cult 1960s psych-folk band the Holy Modal Rounders). They recently collaborated on the album Come on Board. This was originally supposed to be a single, but on recording day the duo frenetically whipped up an additional twelve glorious, demented folk songs. Indeed, the madcap pair seem to have been plucked from the pages of Lewis’s comic-strips themselves.

Stampfel – ragged and rowdy on his wild, white violin – is almost a caricature of the archetypal hyper-alert American folk figure Lewis likes to draw. His contagious exuberance and excitement means that I find myself uncharacteristically joining in on a singalong to something called ‘Black Leather Swamp Nazi’. Who could resist? As well as songs and singalongs, Stampfel and Lewis play the part of a sort of frenzied comedy duo, bouncing off one another’s anecdotes and each continually plugging the other’s work.

To make the night even more special, Franic Rozycki of the Wave Pictures accompanies on a spidery mandolin and provides echoey backing vocals to Stampfel and Lewis’s nasally twisted American tunes. On my way to the Haymakers I cycled through Cambridge’s shimmering history, and at the show I bizarrely found myself immersed in the beating heart of American folk music. It was like I’d visited another dimension, far, far away from the ancient spires and lapping river, but buried deep in the mysterious, mythical American Midwest. Lewis played an eclectic mixture of songs from across time, singing a Michael Hurley cover from the 1960s before taking us on a whirlwind trip through the decades right up until the present. What is so astounding is that everything fitted together beautifully, and Cambridge was transformed into a great home for the stories which are being told.

As well as educating us in the traditions of folk, Lewis will occasionally, put down his papier-mâché patchwork guitar to show the audience a variety of educational ‘films’. By ‘films’, he means over-sized flick-books containing his beloved comic strips. First up was the French Revolution, second the Fall of the Soviet Union, and the audience lapped up his inspired, surreally educational visions. Lewis is fanatical about knowledge, learning, history, time, folk, freak folk, and freaks. Although this may not be his hometown or some hip bar in Greenwich Village, Cambridge is in fact the perfect place to see Jeffrey Lewis because it too is steeped in all of these things: the atmosphere of curiosity. Lewis and Stampfel make a very special, unconventional and generous pair – a wizard double act. In a time of so much unimaginative, pseudo-folk ‘sensations’ like Mumford and Sons or Noah and the Whale, they’re a wonderfully playful reminder of what the true nature of folk music is: it’s about sharing, knowledge, togetherness, continuity; it’s about the underdog, about being the underdog, and seeing things differently; it’s about history and about the present; but most importantly it is about experience. The stranger, the better.

Click to see a cartoon inspired by the performance (by Madeleine Morley)