Robyn-Good

ALWAYS HIGHLY regarded by his peers, but largely ignored by the masses, Robyn Hitchcock is a cipher in the hall of fame.

His Soft Boys had butterfly effects on many of the mid-'80s paisley undergrounders (REM have frequently repaid the debt), and the singer's surreal post-Syd lyrical explorations with the Egyptians can now be identified in the likes of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, but as a player in his own right, Hitchcock seems destined to flit through the eccentric peripheries already inhabited by yer Julian Copes and even Mike Scotts.

However, the US college cadre has been kind to the wayward Englishman, and he's found an important ally in the form of director and major fan Jonathan Demme, who lensed Hitchcock's 1997 live show in a shop window on West 14th, New York. This is the album of that show, and serves as a fine introduction to the many who may have heard the name but not the records.

Too zig-zag to be lumped in with post-Costello craftsmen, too fond of melody and a clever turn of phrase to be termed a sonic experimentalist, Hitchcock has much in common with Neil Young at his most warped acoustic, relying on the simple, jolting power of The Song.

In chestnuts like '1974', the singer exhibits a twisted wit, whether quoting The Guardian's summation of the very last Monty Python series as being like "the stench of rotting minds", lamenting Syd Barret's decline, or critiquing the cheesecloth and denim era of the title, in a reedy voice pitched somewhere between Peter Perret and Nikki Sudden.

In Hitchcock's whirlygig worldview (frequently vented through long, batty monologues) humans are masses of messy molecules who live in constant peril, running the risk of being spirited underground by armies of duct-tape-bearing Minotaurs every time they extinguish a candle. Robyn, you suspect, has gobble-gobbled more chemicals than your average battery turkey.

But all this cheery weirdness wouldn't mean diddley-squat if the songs didn't stand up, and they do: the likes of 'Glass Hotel', 'Let's Go Thundering' and 'The Yip! Song' are secret diary entries that will be revered by curious student musos in future decades. One only hopes their author will get his dues before dotage.