Robyn Hitchcock, the revered British rocker who has made a career of singularly synthesizing the influences of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett, has spent much of the past few years rummaging through the vaults of his recordings. The results include 2006's "This Is the BBC," 14 songs recorded on the air between 1996 and 1999; "Shadow Cat," a British-only release of demos from the 1990s; and the bonanza five-CD box set of solo recordings, "I Wanna Go Backwards," released last year by the North Carolina-based Yep Roc label. This July, Yep Roc will release another box, "Luminous Groove," focusing on Hitchcock's 1980s and '90s work with his band the Egyptians.

What can be learned by listening to all these CDs ��" as well as his seminal albums with the iconic neo-psychedelic band, the Soft Boys, and his recent studio recordings, whether acoustic ("Spooked" with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings) or electric ("Ole! Tarantula" with the Venus 3) ��" Hitchcock says, is that "I don't really change direction much. I have a number of styles I play, if you like, and I kind of rotate, going from a bit louder to a bit quieter.

"I think it's more the instrumentation that makes the difference," he explained in a recent phone conversation from his London home before embarking on a short tour with Nick Lowe that will bring the pair to the Fillmore in San Francisco on April 12. "'Spooked' was done like a traditional Gillian Welch record, acoustically, or like one of my acoustic records, and then the Venus 3 stuff is the same template that goes back to [the Soft Boys' 1980 classic] 'Underwater Moonlight' for me, or R.E.M. at the beginning, or the Velvet Underground, or the Beatles ��" two guitars, bass and drums and some vocals. It's really all branches on the same tree. I'm not sure how much I've drifted from my original template. To me, 'Ole! Tarantula' is very much the same principal as 'Underwater Moonlight,' but with different players and a songwriter twice the age I was when I wrote those songs."

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