There is something fitting about Jonathan Richman's current deal with Neil Young's record label Vapor. The two have little in common musically, but spiritually, they are clearly much closer.
They are apparently locked in a competition to find rock's most bloody-minded artist. Richman gives more interviews than Young, but refuses to talk about himself or his music, preferring to discuss stonemasonry. Young is given to scrawling semi-legibly on his record covers; Richman's own sleeve-notes are equally disconcerting. "Once in a while, a record comes along that is such a departure that some explanation is in order," he wrote of 1991's Having A Party With Jonathan Richman. "This record is not one of those - the style of singing, the melodies and the lyrics are a lot like what I've been doing for the last 10 years."
While Young's career has involved many bewildering stylistic turns, Richman's is predicated on one. His early-70s band The Modern Lovers were proto-punks, scorning hippy culture via Velvet Underground-inspired rock. When the rest of the world caught up, Richman performed a seismic artistic volte-face.
He began performing joyful acoustic songs about aliens, leprechauns and love's vagaries, inspired by early rock'n'roll's naif enthusiasm. He has stuck doggedly to this path ever since. At this gig, even the Modern Lovers' snotty paean to Pablo Picasso (who famously "never got called an asshole") is cheerily spun. The painter avoided the insulting sobriquet, Richman smilingly explains, "because he had self-confidence".
The one constant between the early Modern Lovers and Richman's subsequent work is its obvious sincerity. It stops even his most childlike songs from cloying, and makes him a fantastic live performer. He peppers his songs with explanatory monologues, moves away from the microphone to sing unamplified, and dances gleefully to the drumming of sidekick Tommy Larkins.
But Richman on stage can also execute staggering emotional shifts. The audience laughing at Here Come The Martian Martians or singing the chorus of I Was Dancing In The Lesbian Bar find themselves suddenly plunged into rapt, reflective silence by a heartbreakingly pretty burst of flamenco-influenced guitar or a devastatingly simple anti-war song. At moments like these, Richman's bloody-mindedness makes perfect sense: his refusal to play by the rules has made him an entirely unique artist.
