In the screwy inner space of British acid-pop cat Robyn Hitchcock, a sexually troubled young man wishes "I was a pretty girl so I could wreck myself in the shower." A widower in Hitchcock's "My Wife and My Dead Wife" can't reconcile his love for both his new earthly housemate and the mischievous spirit of the dead spouse that haunts him. Even a simple downhill ride on a sled ("Brenda's Iron Sledge") becomes a nightmare of exploding grasshoppers and "limbs compressed in icy slush/And freezing in a raw-meat groove."

But the really strange thing about Hitchcock, former leader of the late-Seventies psych punks the Soft Boys, is that he sucks you into his twilight zone with such clever, worldly tunes. Gotta Let This Hen Out! – recorded live at London's Marquee Club last year – is full of them. "All I want to do is be your creature," Hitchcock avows amorously over a ringing staircase guitar figure in the old Soft Boys nugget "Kingdom of Love." "The Cars She Used to Drive" gets its gas from a springy beat and tingling Beatlesque guitar, while "Heaven" soars with a sunny, expansive chorus. Down below, the tight little combo, the Egyptians – which includes former Soft Boys Andy Metcalfe on bass and Morris Windsor on drums – copes with Hitchcock's melodic whimsy and sudden rhythmic swerves with calm assurance.

Although Hitchcock's willful weirdness is deeply rooted in psychedelia (the Soft Boys used to cover Pink Floyd's 1967 freakout "Astronomy Domine"), he is no mere revivalist. Like the Floyd's original space captain, Syd Barrett (before drugs and insecurity claimed most of his marbles), Hitchcock trips you up and out with a heady original mix of witty non sequiturs, delightful bop and eerie real-life, real-love premises worthy of that other Hitchcock. For the uninitiated, Gotta Let This Hen Out! is an excellent introduction to Robyn Hitchcock's offbeat oeuvre, drawing from Soft Boys and solo material right up through last year's woefully overlooked Fegmania! And you have to admit that singing along to a daffy chorus like "Brenda's iron sledge/Please don't call me Reg/It's not my name/Not yet" is probably the most fun you can have without drugs. (RS 469)

DAVID FRICKE