Six-foot something, sporting a baseball cap, a drip-dry suit and the kind of beard to make an imam proud, Scroobius Pip could be mistaken for Sacha Baron Cohen’s next character. Yet, though he has the dress sense of Borat after a graphic-design degree, he is no invention. Instead, the 25-year-old Essex boy is responsible, with DJ Dan Le Sac, for 2007’s wittiest underground anthem, Thou Shalt Always Kill. (That’s hip-hop slang for nailing a lyric, not a rival MC.) A sarky shakedown of cool commandments, it reminds us that famous groups, from the Beatles to Arctic Monkeys, were “just a band”.

Since the song hit the Top 40 in April, major labels have been sniffing round the duo, while some bloggers have consigned them to novelty status. As it happens, they have plenty of decent material, including A Letter from God to Man, which samples Radiohead’s Planet Telex, and Fixed, an attempt to convince British rappers that all that glitters isn’t good. But Pip and Le Sac are biding their time with festival appearances for now. Their second single, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, comes out next month on Lex, a small hip-hop imprint.

Record companies will find them tricky to categorise. A mainstream parallel might be the artful dodging of the Streets, but Pip’s nimble hectoring was honed during his rapid rise on the UK’s spoken-word scene, which thrives by avoiding pigeonholes. “If you say it’s hip-hop, people generally think of 50 Cent and rubbish like that, which I’m far from,” he says. “But if you say ‘poetry’, people start to fall asleep or think it’s going to be pretentious.”

The term “spoken word” evolved precisely because of this perceived problem with the p-word, as a flag of convenience for a raft of “live literature”. Its antecedents stretch back beyond dub and punk poetry as far as the bebop-crazy Beats, though it has been suffused with fresh vitality of late. The standard spoken-word pose – street-smart, swaggering and usually a cappella – still dominates at competitive “slams”, but many performers are getting more theatrical. Props and dramatisations (such as doing an entire reading from inside a tent) are turning some into stars of their own one-person shows. For others, music is much more than mere atmospheric backing.

Anthony Joseph, whose verse navigates “afro-blue to astro-black and what glimmers in between”, as one fan puts it, also plays “wild island jazz” with the Spasm Band. In her four-piece, 1927, Suzanne Andrade takes creepily plummy vowels to a surreal tea dance. Ape Has Killed Ape, from Oxford, feature Emily Gray’s angsty whispers over Tim Croston’s glinting electronica. The Ex-Men, the Glasgow-based team of Matt Green and Jack Sims, promise “beats, bleeps and bleats”: think Underworld after six pints of mild.

These artists seem equally adept at performing with or without a band, and in or out of character. The same is true of A Poem in Between People, the poetic trio of Musa Okwonga, Joshua Idehen and Inua Ellams, with a shifting cast of DJs and musicians. “They’re the ones who make me feel like going home and working harder,” says Pip. “They organise an amazingly good club night, Poejazzi, that mixes poets and music, too.” Nigerian-born Ellams, with his rhapsodic tales of “old wisdom riding a BMX”, can also be heard solo and as part of the OneTaste collective (see the box on promoters, right).

“We’re in a really creative period,” says Tom Chivers, the industrious 24-year-old behind Penned in the Margins, another promoter, which published Ellams in its Generation Txt anthology. “Hip events are cross-art-form or cabaret-led. The musical element, bizarrely, allows people to be more literate. They can step out of the performance-poetry arena, which had become typecast, with writers expected to do work appropriate to their heritage.”

As the scene has grown more diverse and confident, Chivers adds, it has reclaimed “the literary credibility of poetry” while declassifying its appeal. “The audience for spoken word is wide in terms of race, social background and age,” he says. “Strands of indie music are upper-middle class and very young. In a poetry crowd, you will see older people as well. And it’s not the idea of poetry that puts anyone off, but when it’s kept inside academia or dusty magazines.”

Pip agrees. He is doing a poetry set at next weekend’s Latitude festival, where the bill includes Ellams, the yarn-spinning Brummie Polar Bear and Lemn Sissay, a comparative veteran who once collaborated with the 1990s techno act Leftfield. “Poetry is actually the most accessible sort of expression, because anyone can do it,” Pip says. “You don’t have to be educated or well read, you just have to have had an experience. But I’ve never wanted to be a niche thing – people write to be heard – so if Le Sac’s beats lead to more exposure for spoken word, that’s brilliant.”

Keats, or even Dylan, it ain’t. But in its energy, daring and aliveness to idiom, spoken word does what poetry has always done, which is to “make it new”. Part stand-up, part fringe theatre, it’s neither fish nor fowl. Like Edward Lear’s nonsense creature, Scroobious Pip, the source of its crossover star’s stage name, it revels in being its own animal.

Scroobius Pip is at the Latitude festival

Talk shows

Apples & Snakes The motherlode of UK spoken word for 25 years. www.applesandsnakes.org

OneTaste Balham collective, includes the soul singer Jamie Woon. www.onetaste.co.uk

Penned in the Margins Cerebral, not stuffy. Runs Salt Margins events at Whitechapel Gallery, E1. www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

Renaissance One Produces Sophie Woolley, whose play, When to Run, is at South Bank Centre, SE1, on Tue, Wed. www.renaissanceone.com

Shortfuse Weekly stand-up poetry, with Nathan Penlington. www.20six.co.uk/shortfuse

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