ROCK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN : There’s an Adventurous Tilt to the Music of Robyn Hitchcock and Alex Chilton

Don’t feel too out of touch if you’re a rock fan who has never heard of Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians or Alex Chilton. Both acts are quintessential cult-rock, college-radio items. But if your listening tastes sometimes tilt toward the adventurous, you might want to consider giving this all-acoustic double bill a tumble.

Hitchcock already has provided one of this year’s most memorable pop moments hereabouts. It happened at the Coach House in March, toward the end of an engaging but until that point rather reserved set by Hitchcock and his longtime backing duo, the Egyptians (bassist Andy Metcalfe and drummer Morris Windsor).

Hitchcock stopped playing and began to deliver a sermon about the need for sincerity and depth of feeling in music. It could have been the keynote speech at a songwriters’ seminar, except that, to deliver it, the English rocker assumed the guise and patter-ridden cadences of that oiliest, most suspect and patently insincere creature of the entertainment depths, the American lounge singer.

Hitchcock’s little performance piece raised all sorts of questions about meaning and subterfuge. Should we dismiss the idealistic message because the messenger is so obviously untrustworthy? Are we living in an age so fraught with irony and suspect motives that only somebody as clearly knavish and manipulative as a lounge slickster (or a family-values spouting politician) would try to get away with trumpeting idealistic blather about sincerity? In the best Hithcockian tradition, Robyn’s bit of shtick was hilarious in a cracked sort of way, but it also made you think.

Hitchcock has been making records since 1977, when he teamed with Metcalfe, Windsor and future Katrina and the Waves member Kimberly Rew in the Soft Boys. Along with psychedelic revivalism inspired by the Beatles and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, Hitchcock became known for the strangeness of his conceits. His songs, while sufficiently melodic and well-crafted to be accessible, tended to be eccentric, humorous menageries populated by fish, fowl and ghosts.

Shortly after doing his lounge-singer impersonation at the Coach House, Hitchcock launched into “My Wife and My Dead Wife,” one of his oddest concoctions. What registered as he sang a slow, balladic rendering of the song wasn’t its lunacy, but rather the very depth of feeling that Robyn-as-lounge-act had been so dubiously proclaiming. The song concerns the absurdity and confusion and danger that would result if your deceased ex decided to haunt your happily reconstructed marital life. In Hitchcock’s concert reading, pain, loss, and enduring love overrode the song’s oddities and laugh lines. When you lose someone that close, Hitchcock made clear, you never really get over it.

On their excellent 1991 album, “Perspex Island,” Hitchcock and the Egyptians seemed to be coming down on the side of openness and sincerity, and trying to shed the layers of symbol and absurdity that had sometimes served as a fogging device.

On the fetching, jangly (that’s R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, a Hitchcock fan from way back, joining in jangling) pop-rocker, “So You Think You’re in Love,” Hitchcock urged against reticence and fear and suggested that lovers show their feelings as openly as possible. “Birds in Perspex,” as beautiful a rock song as the ‘90s have so far produced, was a meditation on the things that keep us from unburdening our deepest emotions--barriers so difficult to surmount, they seem inborn:

Well I take off my clothes with you,

But I’m not naked underneath.

I was born with trousers on,

Just about like everyone.

Rather than leave those barriers up, Hitchcock clinches the song with a chorus of rising harmonies and affirmative rhythmic surge, as he declares (or perhaps pleads), “Birds in perspex, come alive” (perspex being a clear plastic suitable for encasing bird figurines and other inanimate objects). The same old quizzical Robyn, singing about fowl yet again? No, this time what he has in mind is wonderfully clear--a yearning for the clarity of naked feeling, with no need for layers of pretense and artifice.

Alex Chilton, who will play solo, may be an even odder bird than Hitchcock. His greatest recordings are characterized not by irony, but by a rich, heart-on-the-sleeve emotionalism. Chilton was but a Memphis teen when he fronted the Box Tops on their urgent 1967 classic, “The Letter.” The records that have made him the cult rocker’s cult rocker came in the early 1970s, with the Memphis band Big Star. Hardly anybody knew about Big Star during its brief existence, but its three studio albums were an amazing synthesis of great ‘60s rock influences--Beatles, Byrds, Stones, Kinks and Velvet Underground. The first two Big Star albums, “1 Record” and “Radio City,” remain available only as imports--one good way to ensure cultdom (the double-CD that contains both is well worth the import premium).

Recently, the Rykodisc label rescued Big Star from great-lost-band status. Now available are “Big Star Live,” a radio concert featuring material from the first two albums, and “Big Star’s 3rd,” a remarkable album in which Chilton took a harrowing and gorgeous excursion into depression. Also available in the Ryko series is “I Am the Cosmos,” a solo album by the late Chris Bell, who was Chilton’s singing and songwriting partner on “1 Record.”

The personal chaos implied on “Big Star’s 3rd” dogged Chilton during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. But in 1985 he emerged with a series of wry and rootsy releases that showcased a fondness for old-fashioned R&B; and a sense of self-irony about life as an underground pop hero. In concert, Chilton tends to use Big Star material sparingly, and anyone wanting to hear Box Tops stuff will probably have to throw money or guess the magic word before he’ll do it. At Bogart’s last fall, Chilton fronted a basic rock trio for a charming, offhanded concert that featured everything from Sinatra balladry to the winsome Big Star classic “September Gurls.”

Who: Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, Alex Chilton.

When: Friday, July 10, at 9 p.m.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal: $16.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.