Aged, but Not Mellowed

British rocker Graham Parker chomps into each question tossed at him with the ready bite of an underfed Rottweiler on guard duty. Rock radio in the U.S. is “corrupt and arrogant.” On the road again with his first new album in five years, he says, “The brutality of [touring] surprises me every time.”

And the thought of picking up a guitar to rekindle the songwriting craft that’s made him a critical darling time and again? “I absolutely dread it,” he says backstage Thursday at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, referring to his continuing fear that he’ll be unable to find anything interesting to say.

Anyone expecting Parker to have mellowed 25 years after emerging, alongside Elvis Costello, as one of the original angry young men of the mid-’70s British punk/new wave revolution probably wasn’t listening to him anyway. From his 1976 debut album, “Howlin’ Wind,” to his 1981 high-water-mark effort “Squeezing Out Sparks” through his latest, “Deepcut to Nowhere,” Parker has sustained an intensity and passion few in rock can match.

He coupled punk’s energy with his deeply rooted love for American blues, R&B; and soul music, yet despite the critical accolades, he never found across-the-board success.

Among his new songs is “Syphilis and Religion,” which he describes as “two things the world could do without” and is as vitriolic as anything he’s ever sung.

Yet even the “angry young man” tag makes him mad--not because at 51 the “young” part is long outdated, but because it’s simply too dismissive of a multifaceted singer and highly literate songwriter who’s also written love songs as disarmingly heartfelt as the new “Depend on Me.”

Perhaps rarer than the level of youthful energy Parker still packs into his music is how he’s managed to channel that passion all along into adult themes and concerns.

“What’s the song, one of the last Stones songs that goes: ‘One day girl we got to meet ... ‘? You don’t buy it coming from a guy [Mick Jagger’s] age. Even though he is meeting chicks all over the place, you don’t buy it,” he says, straining to be heard over co-headliner Frank Black, who’s down below belting out another of his own emotionally supercharged songs. “There’s always room for another good teenage mating song, but you can’t get away with a whole album of that stuff when you’re pushing 60.”

Instead, Parker sings on “Deepcut” about the travails of a gruff-on-the-outside, sweet-on-the-inside father of a teenage daughter in “Tough on Clothes,” then equitably takes a jab at his own less-than-Dior-like fashion sense in “Socks ‘N’ Sandals.”

“‘Socks ‘N’ Sandals’--you can only write that if you’re an old geezer,” Parker says with a smile. “[To write] ‘Tough on Clothes’ you need a lot of perspective. You need a kid-or two”--precisely the number Parker and his wife have with their teenage daughter, Natalie, and grade-school-age son, Jimmy.

“I’m still using a lot of the same styles of music and the same archetypes I’ve always used. ‘Tough on Clothes’ is a soul song; it just so happens Otis Redding would never have been able to write it because he died when he was 26.

“That’s something I’ve taken--the legacy of soul music--and applied smart, interesting, grown-up lyrics to it. And I’m doing it with rock ‘n’ roll as well....It’s great fun to do that. I hope it doesn’t wear off or run out.”

At the outset of Thursday’s show with the Boston-based Figgs trio, they hit some ragged patches, but soon locked into a tightly focused unit that punched out songs spanning his career.

They opened with “Fool’s Gold,” a career-defining number from 1976 about never relenting in the search for life’s real treasures, then hopscotched across the years.

He didn’t, however, play “Dark Days,” the leadoff track from “Deepcut” that’s easy to mistake as a response to Sept. 11, even though the album came out in August.

“Dark Days” talks of heightening tensions between India and Pakistan, and he sings: “There has been a seismic shift/I felt the whole earth quiver.”

“It’s about a lot of things,” he says. “It’s about a general feeling of apocalypse I’m sure most of us get in this day and age. I don’t think it’s an uncommon feeling. I just happened to have a few historical things right, like India and Pakistan, which happened to be in the news when I wrote it, and back it comes again.

“It’s certainly not a prophecy,” he says. “It’s just one of my songs [about] that dread or the feeling of disaster that we all experience these days. But it is a little spooky.”