Morrissey: Still miserable now?

The former leader of the Smiths hasn't made a record in six years. He's been accused of arrogance, self-pity and even of racism. So how come he's still named regularly as the most important songwriter of our time? As Morrissey prepares to return to the London stage, Fiona Sturges explains why he remains such a potent cultural icon

''Fame, fame, fatal fame/ It can play hideous tricks on the brain," went the words to the song "Frankly, Mr Shankly". That's true enough, but even the writer of this lyric couldn't have anticipated quite how his celebrity would turn sour.

As a spokesman for the alienated and a shameless narcissist, Morrissey, the frontman of the Smiths, was as charismatic as they come. Few musicians attract the kind of idolatry he did – in the early days one fan in Denver held up the local radio station at gunpoint, demanding they play only Smiths songs. He just wanted to hear Morrissey's voice. Fans would regularly turn up at the singer's house in Manchester clutching books of poetry. They didn't want to bed him – they just wanted to be his friend.

In their brief five-year career the Smiths embodied an intellectual spirit, offering a welcome respite from the aimless thuggishness of punk and the silly melodrama of New Romanticism. Morrissey's lyrics brought the miserable and mundane to glittering life. His songs were filled with poignant self-loathing ("As I climb into an empty bed/ Oh well, enough said" he crooned in "I Know It's Over"). He sang of trysts at cemetery gates and in the backs of cars; he offered snapshots of fairgrounds, iron bridges, high-rise estates and humdrum towns, of big girls and their big mothers and vicars in tutus. Morrissey's view of England in the Eighties was every bit as vivid as those offered by Alan Bleasdale in the TV series Boys from the Blackstuff and Mike Leigh in his film High Hopes. He found affinity with misfits, outcasts and undesirables. As the band's guitarist Johnny Marr once pointed out, the Smiths spoke to those who couldn't get laid.

Before I go on, you should know that I'm writing as a Smiths obsessive. This means that discussing them in a balanced and objective way requires an immense effort of will. Ever since a girl named Suzy Tatum sat me down with a tape recorder at school and played me the album Hatful Of Hollow, my life was irrevocably changed. I was 13 at the time and, for the following four years, no other band got a look in. Even my father, who never bought a record in his life, instantly knew the sound of Morrissey's voice ("Oh, please no," he would say as I whipped out a tape for a car journey, "not that miserable sod again!").

For true Smiths fans, though, some things – such as Morrissey's status as the greatest lyricist pop has ever known – are a given. For us, no pop band, no matter how good, will ever better the Smiths. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. They're not a band you grow out of either. I've been listening to them for 16 years (though I do now own records by other bands) and I'm just as much in awe as when I first heard them.

And apparently I'm not alone. Fifteen years after their split, the Smiths still have a loyal and fanatical following. Earlier in 2002 they were voted the most influential band of the last 50 years in NME. In the endless polls compiled before the millennium, the band's 1986 album The Queen Is Dead was held up as a masterpiece on a par with the Beatles' Sgt Pepper and Dylan's Blood on the Tracks. Many of today's bands, among them Coldplay, Idlewild and Suede, cite them as a major influence. Nerdy music magazines still carry lengthy disquisitions on their career (this month's edition of Uncut has a piece arguing that the Smiths' final album, Strangeways Here We Come, wasn't the feeble swansong everyone said it was). It's true that Morrissey the solo artist is a considerably more difficult beast – many Smiths fans began to desert him after his second solo album, 1990's Bona Drag – yet, even now, his status appears undiminished. It's six years since he last released any new material (bizarrely, he doesn't even have a record deal at present). Yet within days of the tickets for next week's London concerts going on sale, this most idiosyncratic icon managed to sell out the Royal Albert Hall. Twice.

Part of the enduring fascination with the Smiths lies in the fact that Morrissey has proved irreplaceable. It has already passed into music-press legend that he was, somehow, "the last pop star". For him, just being a pop star was a craft in itself. He was an impossible act to follow.

Yet Morrissey was always the unlikeliest of icons. The paisley shirts, the floppy quiff, the see-through vests, those ghastly cardigans – if anything, he was anti-pop. He was sad-eyed and effete; he was wilfully ordinary, resolutely old-fashioned. He practically invented geek chic. This was a man who managed to turn NHS spectacles into a fashion accessory (though he was less successful with the hearing aid – his efforts to make it fashionable led to accusations that he was mocking the afflicted).

Morrissey has always been a mass of contradictions. He wrote songs about repressed desire yet professed to be celibate. He was at once an introvert and an extrovert, bashful and brazen. A recent exhibition of Smiths photographs in London showed pictures of the singer wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his own visage. No, there was no one more caught up in the myth of Morrissey than Morrissey.

He sang about being "criminally" shy, but he was always ready with an off-the-cuff quip or Wildean epigram (Oscar Wilde is one of his many heroes) – "I would never do anything as vulgar as having fun" is one favourite. He claimed to dislike interviews, though on the rare occasions that he granted them, he was unstoppable. He was the king of the soundbite before the word was invented. While there was a part of him that shunned the limelight, he was intensely ambitious. He told one interviewer in the mid-Eighties: "I realised that in order to have friends and impress people, I had to do something extraordinary."

In other words, he had a plan. However much he looked as if he'd just been dragged out of bed, you knew that it was all painstakingly thought out. The gladioli that often dangled from his back pocket weren't just for decoration. They were a bold statement of gender ambiguity – "not for me, traditional notions of masculinity," they said.

Morrissey's sexuality was elusive, to say the least. He was intrigued by gay iconography, while lyrics such as "a boy in the bush is worth two in the hand/ I think I can help you get through your exams" (from "Handsome Devil") implied homosexual desire. But Morrissey always professed to be celibate. "Sex is never in my life," he told one interviewer. "Therefore I have no sexuality." To another he said: "My genitals were the result of some crude practical joke."

It's hard to imagine what teenagers today, weaned on the Spice Girls and Popstars, would make of the young Morrissey. Given the Smiths' aversion to promotional activities – they refused to make videos – they probably wouldn't have survived a week in today's PR-dominated industry. Heck, they barely even got played on daytime radio; the only time they got into the papers was when Morrissey had rubbed somebody up the wrong way (which, as it happened, was quite often). Perhaps the closest icon we have to Morrissey is Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, a charismatic singer with similarly insular preoccupations. Yet, in these post-modern times even Jarvis, with his glasses and anoraks, is deemed cool. To call Morrissey cool seems disrespectful, a debasing of his intellectuality.

Before forming the Smiths, Steven Morrissey was a local enigma best known for his tenure as president of the fan club for the cult punk band the New York Dolls. Even as a child he was an eccentric with a feverish imagination – he was obsessed with James Dean, the Kinks and the Buzzcocks. He fancied himself as a writer, too. At the age of 12 he fired off reams of scripts for Coronation Street and so impressed the producer Leslie Duxbury that he started a correspondence with this strange, intense youth. The Moors murders, which took place near his home, also had a profound effect on the young Morrissey. He later wrote a song about them entitled "Suffer Little Children" and even arranged a meeting with the mother of Lesley Ann Downey, one of the victims, to explain that the song was an expression of compassion.

It's not much of a surprise to discover that Morrissey had a close and complicated relationship with his mother. The formidable Mrs Dwyer (she reverted to her maiden name after a messy divorce from Morrissey's father) was a librarian who retired when her son found success in order to help manage his affairs. She introduced him to Oscar Wilde, sparking an infatuation that has lasted for decades. Morrissey stayed with her until his early twenties (he once revealingly remarked: "If you're still living with your parents at 19, you're considered some club-footed bespectacled monster of repressed sexuality – which is in every case absolutely true!").

But Morrissey's most significant relationship, at least musically, was with the Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr. It was often said that they had a teacher-pupil bond – Morrissey was several years older than Marr – although the channels of admiration ran both ways. The pair initially formed a songwriting partnership before bringing in the drummer Mike Joyce and the bassist Andy Rourke in 1982 to form a band. Marr's pop sensibilities and Morrissey's highbrow tastes proved a perfect combination, and their first single "Hand In Glove" went straight to the top of the indie charts. But it was all to unravel. When Marr quit the band five years later, there could be no more Smiths. Morrissey was devastated.

Morrissey's solo career had its highs – with the albums Viva Hate and Your Arsenal – but also catastrophic lows. Often it was Morrissey's mouth that got him into trouble, such as his suggestion in an interview that Margaret Thatcher would be better off dead. He even wrote a song about her, "Margaret on the Guillotine", that ended with the sound of the blade dropping.

But it was his exaltation of all things English that got him into seriously deep water. Morrissey had always been fascinated by archaic notions of Englishness – it was manifest in the grainy black-and-white album sleeves, in the desolate urban imagery of his lyrics, in his cultural references. Along with Oscar Wilde, his heroes were Nico, Terence Stamp, Sandie Shaw and Shelagh Delaney. His early Nineties fascination with skinheads expressed in the songs "National Front Disco" and "Bengali In Platforms" (the latter containing the line "life is hard enough when you belong here") seemed to hint at a growing intolerance towards immigrant communities. In 1992, Morrissey appeared on stage at Finsbury Park in London draped in a Union flag. He was met by a vicious hail of coins and bottles, and the press branded him a bigot. The singer's reluctance to explain himself or his actions (he has since said he didn't want to dignify such accusations) simply added fuel to the fire. Fans were forced to take sides, and many abandoned him.

This was just three years before Britpop exploded and the music industry wallowed in national pride. It's significant that Geri Halliwell got away with wearing a Union flag dress at the 1997 Brit Awards – not that a Spice Girl's choice of frock could be construed as a political statement, of course.

Morrissey's reputation was further damaged in 1996 when he went to court over the Smiths' royalties. The judge famously found Morrissey to be "devious, truculent and unreliable" and ordered that he and Marr pay the former drummer, Mike Joyce, £1.25m. Morrissey was quoted as saying that he considered the other two members of the group, Joyce and Rourke, "as readily replaceable as the parts in a lawnmower".

It seems that one of Morrissey's principal downfalls was his inability to build lasting friendships. Being self-absorbed comes at a price. Since the early days with the Smiths he's had major fallings-out with countless managers, producers and record label bosses. He could be unreliable, too – in 1996 he agreed to play with David Bowie on tour, only to bail out after a few concerts. More famously, he dropped out of an appearance onWogan at the last minute, though on reflection that was probably wise.

In the end, Morrissey was pretty much run out of town. America, where his popularity as a solo performer has continued to grow, exceeding even that of the Smiths, is now his home. He lives in Los Angeles, next door to Johnny Depp, in a house designed by Clark Gable. There he is regarded with affection – his fans even send him books of poetry, just like in the old days.

There have, of course, been reports that he's lonely, that he longs for the relative sanctuary of his native Manchester – but then we all prefer to think of Morrissey sitting under a black cloud in run-down bedsit land. It's a lot easier than imagining him lying on his sundeck, tequila in hand, congratulating himself on his fabulous life.

Try as we might to get to the bottom of Morrissey's racial standpoint or sexual identity, or thoughts on fame, he's proved almost impossible to pin down. The lyrics may still routinely be put under the microscope, the interviews pored over, but the mystery and the myths remain.

Even with his reputation tarnished, Morrissey's absence from the pop landscape is still keenly felt. This champion of the underdog, the boy with the thorn in his side, has always thrived on his sense of victimisation – it is what gives him that indomitable self-belief. And where would Morrissey be were he not misunderstood?

Morrissey plays the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 on 17 and 18 September. Both concerts are sold out