"People often use the word ramshackle about my music," says Johnny Flynn. "It means a lot to me."

Flynn is a 24 year old from private school - who won a scholarship to sing in the Winchester College choir - who also works as a Shakespearean actor. And yet, with his band The Sussex Wit, he's currently performing bouncy rural folk with titles such as Ode To A Mare Trod Ditch and Brown Trout Blues. You can understand why "ramshackle" might be such a treasured complement.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and schooled at the same establishment as fellow alt-folk favourite Emmy The Great, Flynn has followed in the multitalented footsteps of his father, who acted in "lots of Sixties stuff like Dr Who and The Avengers and some really funny B Movies" before becoming a show singer in the West End musicals.

Flynn's rather classier take on his father's career path has seen him tour the world in productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, from New York and Hong Kong to Kevin Spacey's Old Vic, and headline the opening of The Elgar Room at The Royal Albert Hall.

There've been dips too, of course. He recently took a bit part in the Stephen Fry vehicle Kingdom, for instance, playing "a sort of country Pete Doherty - he wanted to be a poet and he had a hat and everything". And then there was that time The Sussex Wit were invited to play at the "divorce party" of a recently-separated friend. Dolly Parton was the theme, and at one point Flynn was informed by one drunken reveler that "if we played faster she'd take her top off. She didn't".

Generally speaking, though, Flynn is doing mighty well for himself - thanks in no small part to a talent for writing instantly engaging songs that sound like James Yorkston in his livelier moments and have a fine line in wistful cheek ("I'm a plough and you're a furrow, I'm a fox and you're a burrow" goes one choice lyric).

"I think we're quite unsentimental but also have a sense of drama that occasionally takes you somewhere pretty unexpected," says Flynn. "My whole thing is storytelling, really. We got our name from this documentary about English folk music where they were talking about this particular sense of irony that you get from traditional rural folk songs from counties like Sussex."

Set to release their excellent single, The Box, on November 12, Johnny Flynn And The Sussex Wit are currently touring as support for Iron & Wine, whose main man Sam Beam is considered one of America's most literate songwriters.

Blending pastoral and religious imagery with something darkly personal, Beam transfixed listeners with the brittle, minimalist beauty of his 2002 debut The Creek Drank The Cradle. With his third album, The Shepherd's Dog, he has introduced a cornucopia of rhythms and textures, and an eight-piece live band to bring this lush, sensual clamour to the stage.

"There's a chaotic sense to a lot of the lyrics," says Beam. "There's a borderline confusion about modern-day America, but at the same time it's not a political record in any way, shape or form."

  • For review, see The Argus on November 2 or visit www.theargus.co.uk/music
  • 7.30pm, £14/£16, In advance from Rounder 01273 325440 or Resident 01273 606312