Pop music's little boy who never grew up gets to Ireland every once in a while - a few Dublin appearances and, three years ago, the Galway Arts Festival. He performs in Vicar Street, Dublin, on Friday. Still slim and tousle-haired, but these days without his band, The Modern Lovers, the uber-wimp will be 50 next year.
Although he has many die-hard fans who have kept the faith over the years, Jonathan Richman surfaces in mass public consciousness only infrequently: his massive hit Roadrunner in 1974, the instrumental Egyptian Reggae in 1977 and, after 20 years away from the limelight, a funny and successful role as the singer/narrator who keeps the plot of the Farrelly brothers' movie There's Something About Mary rolling along.
He was born in Boston in 1951, and says: "I was very moved by music as long as I can remember.
My parents would sing little melodies to me when I was two or three years old, and the kind of melodies that my mother liked, and her sense of fun and funny rhymes, have found their way into the music I make."
There have been many faux naifs in pop music but there is no one with Richman's mixture of mumbling, gawky nerdiness and bizarre lyrical subtexts. Even though his songs tend to be quiet and surreal, often about children's toys and the like, he was most famous in an era that was musically his antithesis, New Wave and Punk, and was vocally championed by The Velvet Underground.
This was the return of a compliment; Richman first got into the music business, forming The Modern Lovers when he was just 19, because he had been inspired by the Velvets, moving to New York when he was 16 to be near his idols. It was, in fact, John Cale who produced the first Modern Lovers album for Warner Brothers in 1973, a project aborted after six tracks because oil shortages led to a "vinyl crisis" - in reality a good excuse for major companies to ditch less commercially-viable acts.
The following year Richman signed with the new West Coast company Beserkely, and with this label he proved that a boy can indulge his personal preoccupations and have hits too.
Jonathan Richman was a very silly young man and now he's a silly middle-aged one. And there's no reason to suppose that when he's 70, the creator of Ice Cream Man, Hey There Little In- sect and I'm A Little Airplane won't still be delighting us - by then he might really be in his second childhood.
More about Jonathan Richman on http://imusic.com/showcase/indie/jonathanrichman.html