Morrissey has made a career out of voicing the defiant, self-aware misery of adolescence, even in his 40s. It's part of what makes him mesmerising, writes Dorian Lynskey
Steven Patrick Morrissey is, to quote one of his songs, a handsome devil. He looks iconic. His quiff is as vertical as it was when he fronted The Smiths, 20 years ago, his sideburns laced with a distinguished steely grey. He wears an expensive-looking grey striped shirt over a white vest over a broad chest, coloured pink by the sunshine of his Californian home.
The 44-year-old is surprisingly brawny, but if you closed your eyes and just listened to his languid, mellifluous voice you'd imagine he was built like Alan Bennett. The words sigh out of him. What does he feel when he looks in the mirror? He considers his response. "Extreme reluctance." Morrissey slides into the sofa of his palatial suite at a swanky London hotel. Visibly, his wilderness years are at an end. He has finally finished You Are The Quarry, his seventh solo album and his first since the disastrously received Maladjusted, from 1997.
That year he and guitarist Johnny Marr lost a court case against their former Smiths colleagues Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, at the end of which Judge John Weeks branded him "devious, truculent and unreliable". Shortly afterwards he relocated to Los Angeles. He toured frequently but got through a string of managers and aborted record deals without releasing a note.
He admits he was unsure if anybody still cared. "I doubt that on a monthly basis, and I'm always surprised when they listen. In the midst of the seven-year gap I went through great gulps of doubt, wondering whether there was actually any point to it." And yet he is hardly crippled by excessive humility. Later on he says: "I think if I was shot in the middle of the street tomorrow a lot of people would be quite unhappy. I think I'd be a prime candidate for canonisation."
As it turns out Morrissey's absence has made hearts grow fonder. His home-town comeback show, at Manchester's MEN Arena, sold out within hours and his cultural stock is sky-high. The best young bands in Britain, Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines, can trace their prickly intellect and pop flamboyance to The Smiths. Small wonder, then, that Morrissey has booked both of them for his Meltdown shows at the Royal Festival Hall in London, in June, along with such personal heroes as the New York Dolls, Alan Bennett (naturally) and Maya Angelou. So far only Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste Of Honey, has politely declined. And You Are The Quarry is up there with his best solo work. All in all, life is good. "I've found a very nice label [Sanctuary] and I've made an album that I really love, and it changes my life and pushes me forward," he says. Does he need to be making music to feel happy? "Well, yes, because if you're not making music then what are you? I mean what am I, anyway? I don't know what I am. I've been trying for 30 years. I feel undefinable actually." He chuckles to himself.
Morrissey intends to remain undefinable. He's a conversational escapologist, eluding any attempt to pin him down. Take his sexuality. It's 20 years since Rolling Stone magazine described him as gay, much to his annoyance, and he still refuses to specify. Often he denies any kind of sex life at all. That's his business, but it's a long time to maintain ambiguity.
Actually, he's not so much an escapologist as a verbal fencer, thrusting and parrying. Sometimes when I think he's being serious he says he's joking, and vice versa. He contradicts things he's reported to have said in previous interviews, then claims he never said them. He plays with the wording of questions or suddenly interrogates me about my private life. Even his body language is a choreography of discomfort. He fidgets around the sofa, crossing his arms, chewing his lip and wearing a curious smirk that could mean either that he's having a high old time or that he's never hated an interview more.
Not that it matters. He has never liked anything anyone has written about him. I ask if he thinks interviewers miss the point. He fires back: "What point?" So there's no point to Morrissey? "No point whatsoever, but they think there is, which is extraordinary." Does he mean everything he says? He looks incredulous. "Nooo. I'm not that silly. But some people do, which fascinates me. It's like being a scriptwriter for Blind Date. But I suppose some people find it frustrating."
Even now he's dogged by statements he made years ago. Morrissey's greatest fear is being caged. That's how he felt back in Manchester before meeting Marr - raging against school or the dole, playing his beloved records, dreaming of escape - and perhaps it explains his flightiness in the years since.
These days he feels "as free as a bird". At first it seems perverse that the poetic voice of drizzle-damp England would choose the eternal sunshine of Los Angeles, but it is a good place not to belong, because nobody belongs in Los Angeles, a city with neither heart nor history. "I don't think anybody feels at home there," he agrees. "Everybody has come from somewhere else and belongs somewhere else, and quite rightly so." He says he ended up there by complete accident, but how can you buy a house by accident? "Oh, you do," he smiles. "Life's full of tricky snakes and ladders. I decided earlier that I would revolve through the 40th door somewhere else other than England. And I did. I just didn't want to turn 40 sitting in the same old armchair by the same old window." He loves the weather and the landscape and the "endless drives into nothingness".
And England? "I miss the drab everydayness, and I miss the common experience that everyone has. And I quite like the absurdity and ridiculousness of British people." You have to ask yourself if he misses the real England or the long-gone, three-channel, Sunday-closing England that he sings about.
The Smiths were always a band out of time, which is why they have aged so well. Their record sleeves celebrated icons from Alain Delon to Yootha Joyce, and many of Morrissey's lyrics were rooted in the past, whether his wretched schooldays at St Mary's Secondary Modern or the Moors Murders that cast a pall over the Manchester of his childhood. It's remarkable how witty and strange these songs still sound. The Smiths' four studio albums, three compilations and 17 singles between 1983 and 1987 comprise arguably the most consistent body of work in British pop.
Morrissey is famously weary of people asking if the Smiths will reunite. I don't bother, because he only has to start talking about his erstwhile bandmates to make the very idea absurd. He refers to the band's drummer, venomously, as "this Joyce character", as if he were some malevolent stranger whom Morrissey had never met.
The subject of the court case, which Morrissey raises without prompting, has a transformative effect. His usual droll wordplay is replaced by earnest, fluid monologues about the frightful behaviour of judges and former Smiths. To sum up: Joyce and Rourke sued Morrissey and Marr for 25 per cent of the Smiths' performing royalties (rather than the songwriting ones), not the 10 per cent they were paid, even though they never officially appeared on a contract. Judge Weeks found in the rhythm section's favour, and Morrissey's subsequent appeals have failed.
Like his hero Oscar Wilde, Morrissey feels persecuted by the legal establishment. "How a judge can offer a judgment with 50 mistakes is absolutely unbelievable," he fumes. He says it's now impossible for him to remember the Smiths fondly. "It's destroyed. It really is destroyed. Because Joyce and Rourke and Marr could have stepped in and said something in my defence. But they didn't. They let the judge say the most extreme and hateful things about me, which they knew weren't true." So no reunion then.
He feels the press victimised him, too. On his new single, Irish Blood, English Heart, he sings of "standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or partial". He's referring to his notorious performance at Madness's Madstock weekender, in 1992, when he wrapped himself in a Union Jack and was branded a racist by the music press, casting a long shadow over his solo career. Four years later Noel Gallagher emblazoned the flag on his guitar without censure, an irony that did not escape Morrissey.
Could he not have simply explained his intentions? "Well, you know, I haven't just arrived from the village," he snaps. "I did think of all these things. I knew the people I was dealing with, and there was no point in reaching out to them. . . . I think it was a couple of journalists who couldn't stand the sight of me and wanted to topple me. And they tried. And now they're gone. And I'm sitting here in the Dorchester talking to you." He smirks triumphantly.
Morrissey is thin-skinned but hard-headed. He was devastated when Marr left The Smiths, effectively finishing the band, but bounced back with his excellent solo début, Viva Hate, just six months later. Not that he has ever forgiven Marr, whom he didn't see again for years afterwards. Does he find forgiveness difficult? "I treat people the way they treat me, to be honest. I feel very open at first, and you just wait for people to betray your trust. And they do."
Is that why you've cut so many people loose over the years? "Well, no, there have been many reasons for the departure of many people, and many people go willingly. But friendships aren't necessarily meant to last. People come and go. Don't you find?" Not really. Not yet. "Give it a few more weeks."
Morrissey's attitude to relationships is not entirely slash and burn - he has been friends with the performance artist Linder Sterling since 1976 and retained his guitarists and co-writers Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer for more than a a decade - but the picture he paints of life in Los Angeles is one of splendid isolation.
"I'm not really that hot on the human race to be honest. Very few people have anything to offer." Offer you? "Offer offer. Offer the world. Offer themselves." Sometimes he gets visitors, such as Nancy Sinatra, who will be covering one of his new songs, the yearning Let Me Kiss You. God forbid he should invite anybody round, though. "I'm not part of any Hollywood set," he insists. "Quite the opposite. In a way I lead a very British life. It's still very much inanimate objects and a television screen and jolly old books and things like that."
I suspect Morrissey likes his own company because he considers himself the only person who's halfway good enough. He concedes he refuses to compromise but regards it as a virtue. "We feel that there's a shame to being uncompromising and there's a terrible sadness to solitude, but none of the great poets ever thought that." It's the sort of thing you can imagine the 17-year-old Morrissey saying, and part of his appeal is the way he retains his teenage intensity and stubbornness into his fifth decade. No other lyricist has so well voiced the defiant, self-aware misery of adolescence.
He took antidepressants when he was 17 to help him sleep, and he has had therapy intermittently since then, but he is almost proud of his black moods. "I think if you're remotely intelligent you can't help being depressed. It's a positive thing to be. It means that you're not a crashing bore. I mean, you don't get support groups for rugby players, do you?"
I decide to broach the subject of his sexuality and mention his splendidly titled All The Lazy Dykes, a song about the liberating effects of coming out of the closet. "Trying to get somebody to," Morrissey corrects, smiling. "And telling her if she came to join the lazy dykes she'd be one herself. And she needed me to tell her, of course, because she can't come to that conclusion herself." Doesn't that invite speculation? "No. Andy Williams could have sung that song. It just happens to be me who's singing it." This is nonsense, but let's press on. Does he believe in love? "Um. I believe it does exist, yes. I've skirted it on a few occasions." But never plunged in? "Plunged? I think I've plunged, yeah." Were all these people women? "They seemed to be, as far as I knew. They would all be women if they had a choice." He laughs as if to say that's all we're getting.
What is both admirable and exhausting about Morrissey is that he doesn't change. While other musical heroes get their teeth fixed, date models and accept honours from Queen Elizabeth, Morrissey remains proudly remote from the throng. It means he is still a vital lyricist, a mesmerising performer and a perplexing human being. He is much as he was. "Dear God, if only I could change," he says theatrically. "We'd all be so relieved. But not yet." You're stuck with you, I suggest. "Despite massive discouragement, I remain myself," he says, invisible Wildean quotation marks popping into the air. "Somebody has to be me, so it might as well be me." Who could do it better? Who would dare? - (Guardian Service)
• Morrissey plays Dublin Castle on June 5th. You Are the Quarry is released on May 17th by Attack