Morrissey may be without a record deal but the bequiffed one can still sellout the Albert Hall, writes Brian Boyd
A music industry party in Los Angeles: a record company executive gets talking to Morrissey. "So what do you do?" he asks him. "I'm a singer," replies Morrissey. "Really, have you got a record deal?" "Well, not at the moment," comes the reply. "Have you any demo tapes done up," the executive says. "Yes," says Morrissey, "there's 22 of them down in Tower Records".
But will there be a 23rd?
"Well I've two albums worth of new material recorded," says a chatty and convivial Morrissey who is on rare form the morning after two sold-out appearances at the Royal Albert Hall. "But you know, I'm just a bit too long in the tooth now to give them to any record company in this climate - I mean, have you looked at the top 30 recently. The industry, I believe, is now certifiably insane."
While those Pop Idol creatures and the other lamentable stage-school karaoke outfits were hardly ever going to take the fancy of a man whose 22 albums include some of the most memorable music recorded and have established him as the leading lyricist of his generation, Morrissey is more bemusedly aggrieved by how the marketing bean counters have taken over the music industry asylum. While they would dearly love to release his 23rd work, they're asking him to jump through the sort of promotional hoops that one never thought would have existed when he formed The Smiths in Manchester, after "walking home alone in the rain too many times".
"I find it mesmerising, I really do," he says. "I go into meetings with these record company people and they will sit there and tell me that they still have a piece of my shirt that they tore off me during a gig in 1988 and then they will ask me about the new songs I have recorded and they'll say: 'Will they blend in with what's happening now?' and I'll say: 'Jesus, I hope not', and that seems to be that."
It's five years - the longest break he's had - since his last album, Maladjusted, a record Morrissey claims was effectively killed by his then label. "I think the amount of work done on that album amounted to one hand bill and a very small poster," he says.
In the meantime, he has toured all over the world, without label support (more difficult than it sounds), drawing the sort of audience who on a bad day are fanatical and on a good one, hysterical. At the Albert Hall, he ran through a chunk of his solo work, some Smiths numbers and three new songs - The First Of The Gang To Die, The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores and Irish Blood, English Heart before sparking a riot during the encore by playing There Is A Light That Never Goes Out before exiting to the strains of Sinatra singing My Way.
"Those two nights were untoppable," he says, "and it's why I still do it, it's why I'm still involved. As long as I can do it without looking too dreadful . . . And I've always done it in spite of everything, in spite of no radio play, no MTV, in spite of a million critics . . . you know the last time I played the Albert Hall was with The Smiths in 1985 - that's 17 years of pain, anguish and sorrow."
It's the latter type of expression that has always led to Morrissey being misdiagnosed. Far from being the "solitary miserabilist" of popular lore, he is a past-master in the use of arid humour and wry epigrams. Even the most cursory glance at his lyrical output would bear this out - Hairdresser On Fire, Last of the Famous International Playboys - but people want, and expect, the Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now version.
He speaks in a measured, economical manner, flirting between the sublime and the ridiculous. One moment talking about his greatest poetic work, Late Night Maudlin Street, then moving to his latest dealing with a record company: "They were saying: yes, we'll sign you, but first we want you to record an album with Radiohead or with Tracy Thorn'. It's amusing, I suppose."
You sense it's important to him how the music industry has deteriorated not least because of his contribution over the years.
"It's worth remembering The Smiths were responsible for putting independent music into Woolworth's, into the High Street, that really is the legacy, before that there was nothing. That whole indie scene which in the late 1980s and early 1990s became the mainstream, is now gone. It worries me that the industry is now like what it was back in 1975 (pre-punk). There is no investment in new projects, it's all in the marketing of the release. You hear of $1 million being spent to get a single into the charts - and the quality of that single is immaterial - I know these bands find it baffling to see their song rise in the charts but when they play live there is no crowd there."
He is not enamoured of doing the equivalent of vanity publishing and releasing his new album on his own label or even making it available over the Internet. "That's too much like a private concern," he says. "It would be like talking to yourself in a corner."
His label-less state comes at a time when his critical stock hasn't been higher. His shows sell out within minutes and he was recently voted in the New Musical Express "the most influential artist of all time" over and above The Beatles.
He has a shrug-of-the-shoulders attitude to the latter accolade. Reminded that in the recent film about the Manchester music scene, 24-Hour Party People, the protagonist, Tony Wilson, opined that his only regret was that he "never signed Morrissey", he says: "I was never offered to him . . . I haven't seen the film but I believe it to be an exaggeration - I mean, I was there when Joy Division were playing in Manchester and there was hardly anybody at the gigs. Tony Wilson . . . hmmm."
He lives now in Dublin and Los Angeles. "The people who criticise Los Angeles I find are the ones who have never been there. Yes, certainly the people are clinically insane but I find that the warm weather expands me. And Dublin, it's because of the people. I believe you could drop a H-Bomb on Dublin and the people would still be the same."