HE’S A 1-MAN BAND : Richard Thompson Has Everything a Rock Star Needs but Marketability

Once I was playing a live Richard Thompson tape for a musician friend, who, after listening intently to the first song, exclaimed, “They’re playing an incredible lot of music for only two guitarists!”

One can scarcely blame him if his ears were hearing double. On a lone acoustic guitar, Thompson generally manages to keep bass lines, stirring rhythms and inventive lead lines going simultaneously, with that ferocious technique focused into a spellbinding intricacy and emotion. On top of that, he sings with a baritone voice both harrowing and wry, and still has enough brains cells left over to direct his eyebrows to arch comically at the most unexpected times.

The British-born wizard arrives at his shows with one of the strongest song catalogues in contemporary music. Like very few other writers, he can make a four-minute song seem as deep, detailed and moving as a good novel or film. His tunes can range from the absolute saddest love songs on Earth to chafing social and moral critiques to absurd humor to exultant outbursts like his “I Feel So Good,” a tune that sounds downright jolly until you realize that the narrator is a freshly released convict contemplating new mayhem.

His covers can include old Who songs, 16th-Century Scottish reels, Duke Ellington instrumentals and obscure Jerry Lee Lewis rave-ups, and his guitar excursions on each invariably plunge into a thorny musical wilderness.

When Thompson tours with a band, he straps on a battered Stratocaster, and his flights on it push the expressive boundaries of the electric guitar, playing with the emotional abandon of a Neil Young and a keen intelligence all his own. His acoustic shows usually don’t go quite so far on a limb instrumentally, since some of his attention is devoted to also keeping his one-man orchestra going on the strings.

His performance at the Coach House on Sunday may provide the best of both worlds, as his playing will be freed up a bit by the onstage addition of veteran British acoustic bassist Danny Thompson (no relation), who has played with Pentangle, Nick Drake and a host of others.

All of which means: GO SEE HIM! Thompson’s shows more often than not wind up being the most satisfying of the year, in both entertainment and artistry. He didn’t tour here last year and this time around should be particularly interesting because he’ll be debuting several songs off a new album due to be recorded next month.

Though Thompson’s electric work could scrape the paint off your car, his wide-ranging albums are most often found misplaced in the “folk” section of stores. He did start off in a unique tangent to folk music while in his teens. The son of a Scotland Yard detective, Thompson was a founding member at 17 of the group Fairport Convention, which responded to the Byrds’ mid-’60s mix of rock and American folk by coming up with its own brand of folk-rock. Fronted by the haunting voice of the late Sandy Denny, the group drew its rocked-up inspiration from 500 years’ worth of traditional music from the British Isles.

Thompson departed for a solo career in the early ‘70s, and in the same period converted to the Sufi branch of Islam. Though influenced by Dickens and other Western authors, his songwriting also draws from Sufi mystics such as the 13th-Century poet Jalaludin Rumi. He also kind of likes the Everly Brothers.

He and ex-wife Linda Thompson’s 1982 album, “Shoot Out the Lights,” tops many critic’s lists of best rock albums ever. While that recording and the rest of his excellent catalogue have yet to find mass acceptance, it has earned a weighty list of fans in his profession, including John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello, Crowded House and an impressive roster of performers who will be singing his songs on a tribute album due out this spring. Among those will be Bonnie Raitt, R.E.M., David Byrne, Los Lobos, Graham Parker, Bob Mould and Beausoliel. Thompson’s most recent album--not counting his soundtrack for the Australian film “Sweet Talker”--is 1991’s “Rumor and Sigh.” Though Capitol Records had expressed some hope that the album would make Thompson’s career take off as Bonnie Raitt’s recently had, it proved a far thornier bunch of roses to sell. Songs like “I Misunderstood” and “You Dream Too Much” go howling through the gulf between hearts, while “Backlash Love Affair” is a biting allegory likening fame to a dominatrix.

Then there’s the disquieting “God Loves a Drunk,” which, on the surface, can seem a cruel dig at the helpless. But in Sufic poetry, religious rapture is often likened to drunkenness. Some Sufis such as Rumi abandoned a conventional life to live in the streets. Positing that you won’t find staid clerks and pen-pushers in heaven, Thompson sings:

O God loves a drunk, the lowest of men / With the dogs in the street and the pigs in the pen / But a drunk’s only trying to get free of his body / And soar like an eagle up there in heaven / His shouts and his curses are just hymns and praises / To kick-start his mind now and then/ O God loves a drunk, come raise up your glasses, Amen.

It is transcendence Thompson is seeking in his own music. As he told The Times in 1990, “It’s the moments where the composer, player or players somehow just take off. They lose themselves, and the music just flies. Playing, I think you aim to get lost in the music . . . sometimes it gets that way despite you. Sometimes with an audience you’re able to communicate something, almost without interfering with it. Something just flies from here to there, flies around the room. Those are the great moments.”

Who: Richard Thompson.

When: Sunday, Jan. 24, at 8 p.m. With bassist Danny Thompson and opening act Alison Brown.

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

Whereabouts: Take Interstate 5 to the San Juan Creek Road exit and turn left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal: $17.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.