POP MUSIC REVIEW : Two-Sided Thompson : The rock/folk guitarist cuts loudly loose <i> and </i> stays quietly tight at the Wilshire Ebell. He’ll play the Coach House on Friday.

As an electric guitarist, Richard Thompson is a string-bender extraordinaire who defies convention with definably weird, siren-like, jazz-baiting solos that insanely intensify and bite, sting and buzz around the key.

On acoustic, though, he’s something else altogether: a correct English gentleman, doing the most muss-free, careful, elegant, dead-on picking a craftsman could cultivate.

He’s the Jekyll and Hyde of guitar heroes.

Thompson’s show Tuesday at the Wilshire Ebell was a pleasing trade-off between those two equally satisfying sides, as the veteran singer-songwriter efficiently compromised the intensity of his full-band “rock” shows with the dry wit and unassuming nimbleness of his “folk” sets.

Backed by three veterans who come equally adept at hard rock and traditional Irish folk--and whom he occasionally shunted offstage during his solo spots--Thompson afforded fans a rare tour configuration that had him alternately cutting loudly loose and staying quietly, properly tight.

If, subsequently, the wandering two-hour-plus show lacked for momentum--with Thompson sometimes curiously juxtaposing his more emotionally wrenching songs with his wackier ones--it gave good breadth.

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Nine of the set’s 24 songs were from his latest album, “Mirror Blue,” which is by no means one of his most memorable. The 1993 recording’s tunes tend toward the novel but, despite their cleverness, more often than not lack the emotional firepower that Thompson has brought to his best work (and that Elvis Costello seems able to invest in similarly impersonal, third-person storytelling these days).

The dominance of the new stuff might have been a liability, then, hadn’t Thompson the gift for bringing even his relative throwaways to vivid life in concert. The recent album’s “The Way That It Shows,” especially, picked up an instrumental fury in this setting that rivaled the expected chaos of his signature standby, “Shoot Out the Lights.”

The players all go back a ways with Thompson, and while their ability to handle the harder stuff might not have seemed so predestined, their agility on the folkier material certainly was a given.

With former Fairport Convention cohort Dave Mattacks drumming, Danny Thompson (who, Thompson wryly recalled, was a member of a fellow ‘60s “beat combo,” the “rival outfit” Pentangle) on bass, and another frequent collaborator, Pete Zorn, weighing in with penny whistle, soprano sax, mandolin, et al., Thompson occasionally broke the contemporary tone of the set.

He fed the faithful a few choice somber obscurities--including “The Sun Never Shines on the Poor,” “Hokey Pokey” and the old Fairport B-side “Now Be Thankful”--with the band, or at a couple of points without, as they departed the stage to his quips about “a quick union dispute.”

Thompson brings this tour Friday night to the Coach House, where good sound is as much a given as his own excellence. L.A. fans can’t count on the same, as lately Thompson’s shows up north have usually been at the classy but acoustically nightmarish Wiltern.

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The change of venue this time did a world of good, and the singer, who was at his off-the-cuff bantering best here, duly noted same, sincerely pointing out, “It’s a nice place, better than that other W-word--it sounds better.”

Right he is; it’d be nice to see the Wilshire Ebell (an old hall situated in one of L.A. proper’s wealthiest neighborhoods that usually plays host to nothing more rowdy than a string quartet) used for a lot more grown-up pop shows now that the ice has been broken.

* Richard Thompson plays Friday at 9 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $18.50. (714) 496-8930.