On the Cutting Edge : The Butcher Speaks With a Sharp Tongue--With or Without Music

Listening to the Jazz Butcher’s two most recent albums, it’s clear that the 34-year-old Englishman has done his time on the emotional chopping block.

In fact, parts of “Cult of the Basement,” from 1990, and most of the aptly named new release, “Condition Blue,” are so downcast that one can imagine some particularly softhearted rock fan going up to the Butcher after a show and inviting the poor chap home for a nice, comforting bowl of chicken soup.

Better make that a nice bowl of vegetable soup. The Jazz Butcher revealed his feelings about chicken consumption a few albums back in a humorously biting song called “The Best Way,” which skewered the poultry industry’s mass-production methods with a degree of disgust only the truly revolted can muster.

“When the dimwitted ask, we always smile sweetly and say, ‘I don’t play jazz and I don’t eat meat,’ ” the Butcher, whose real name is Pat Fish, said by way of explaining his stage name’s derivation.

The Butcher, who plays at Bogart’s on Sunday, was polite enough to volunteer that explanation during a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Vancouver, B.C., before his questioner could damn himself among the dimwitted by asking. At the same time, he was snippy enough to get in that tacit poke with “dimwitted,” knowing that the typical unenlightened non-cultist, confronted by a name such as “the Jazz Butcher,” is as likely to be as curious about it as Eve was about the apple. Overall, the Butcher’s conversation was friendly enough, resembling a more diffuse version of his lyrical style--a witty, if scattered, flow of verbiage with an occasional tart edge.

The Jazz Butcher has been making records since 1982 with a large, ever-changing cast of sidemen that has included David J of Love and Rockets and members of Blue Aeroplanes. “The rotating musicians is the only jazz element of Jazz Butcher,” he said. “It’s immensely convenient, and you get millions of different options when you’re stuck for a player.” Fish’s act, dubbed the Jazz Butcher whether he’s playing solo, in a duo or with a full three-member band (as he will at Bogart’s), has its most enthusiastic following outside his home country.

“In England we’re pretty much history,” he said. “Things move so fast (on the British pop scene). We’re never going to excite a new generation of 17-year-olds.” But in Europe and North America, the Jazz Butcher can rely on a cult following sustained with a steady stream of albums on small, independent labels. “The woodwork creaks, and out they come.”

Fish found himself caught up by the first British punk rock explosion. “I was just 18 and running around London, seeing the Sex Pistols.” But instead of taking up arms and pogoing directly into a rock ‘n’ roll career, he went to Oxford and took up studies in philosophy.

“My teachers said: ‘You ought to go to Oxford. There’ll be glamorous women and intellectual giants, and you’ll really enjoy it.’ I thought, ‘I’ll do what I’m told and see what happens.’ I went up to Oxford . . . and it was even more sedate than I’d been told.” Fish managed to put up with the academic life long enough to earn his philosophy degree. Then he embarked on a recording career founded largely on the ability to lay down a steady, rapid-fire barrage of lyrical witticisms. He ranged widely to find targets for his plucky irony--among them the rule of Margaret Thatcher, the tedium of small-town living, the yuckiness of a carnivorous diet, and his own identification with outcasts and misfits. On late-’80s albums like “Fishcotheque” and “Big Planet, Scary Planet,” the Jazz Butcher seemed to be doing a reasonable job of following Elvis Costello’s formula for staying sane in the face of the ridiculous: “Well, I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.”

The Jazz Butcher’s wit took on darker shadings on “Cult of the Basement.” In fact, that album’s closing track, “Sister Death,” ended on the ultimate note of despair for an artist defined by his zest for words: “There’s no need to talk any more,” sighed the song’s speaker, world-weary to the point of pining for death.

On “Condition Blue,” the Jazz Butcher returned with a sustained meditation on heartbreak. It’s a lovely, deeply emotive record, with complex guitar interplay and sobbing saxophones accompanying the Butcher through a long melancholy drift broken only for a laugh-to-keep-from-crying saunter through the absurdly titled “Shirley MacLaine,” and a lighthearted screed against militarism dubbed “Our Friends the Filth.”

“It’s a very miserable sort of record,” said Fish, who frequently punctuated his sentences with moist, wheezy chuckling. “I was barking mad at the time. I’d absolutely lost it.”

He said the album came out of a period of lonely withdrawal in which a collapsing marriage wasn’t so much the cause of his woes as “collateral damage” wrought by his blue funk.

Fish demurred at going into any true-confessions detail about his personal problems: “You don’t want that,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not Cher.”

In any case, Fish said, he found himself spending a lot of time alone in bars, where he got to hear mainstream stars emoting on the jukebox.

A lot of Michael Bolton was in the air, he said, and “for the first time in my life I heard all these Phil Collins divorce ballads in the pub. Under close examination, they were gut-wrenchingly awful.”

Thus encouraged, a depressed Fish set out to outdo the stars.

“I was there anyway” in a low emotional state, “so I thought, ‘Let’s try to explore and see if we can say anything that has any genuine effect (from) out of this situation.’ ”

Fish says his personal condition is still blue, though not as bad as the worst of it, when “I was basically incapable of getting through the front door to go shopping. With this tour, I just slug it off and have been space-walking through. For the first week (of the tour) I had to be the Jazz Mussolini,” keeping a firm hand on his three new backing players, who hadn’t toured in North America before.

“When I first started (performing the new album), it was hard physically to do some of the songs,” Fish said. “When I’m being flippant, I’ll say (to the audience), ‘Thank you, guys, for paying for my therapy.’ But it’s really all just about beautiful music. It’s not that I want them to shut up and listen about my problems. I want them to shut up and listen to the beautifully cascading guitars.”

The Jazz Butcher plays Sunday at 9:30 p.m. at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica Mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $12.50. Information: (310) 594-8975.