ROCK / Only the lonely

TRANQUIL and melting, the first 10 seconds of Morrissey's Vauxhall and I (Parlophone) are a joy. The 39 minutes and 44 seconds which follow work the swoon glands to the limit. For Vauxhall and I is a sumptuous listen that unites the pastoral and the urban in lush arrangements. Never mind his best solo album; this is up there with the Smiths.

Gone is the rockabilly of his last album, Your Arsenal; now succulent guitar lines dart around velvety singing. There is a dramatic hush about much of it, as he sings despondently of death, loneliness and the darker side of notoriety. Only on the first two songs does he wax celebratory, in fruity approbation of quick-witted urchins, rapscallions and 'loafing oafs'. .

Then it's soul-baring time, on what is, for him, an unprecedented scale. Disregard the arch self-confidence of the single, 'The More You Ignore Me, the Closer I Get'. That's not typical. 'Why Don't You Find Out for Yourself', 'I am Hated for Loving' and 'Hold On to Your Friends' are composed in pain, despair and sheer bloody-minded defiance. They send the listener away feeling for the man.

'Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning', a sticky kiss of a whisper over clarinets and gentle bass, is a genuinely stunning song, while 'Speedway' pits him against a daunting Wall of Sound. He responds heroically. 'In my own sick way,' he sings at the end of the album, 'I'll always stay true to you.' Maybe it's the death last year of three close friends that has shocked him out of his complacency, but he's never sounded more human, nor less unflappable. And with this lovely, compassionate music he's once again master of his art.

Did anyone forecast disaster when Mark E Smith, The Fall's irascible poet, agreed to a 'conversation' at the ICA with novelist and journalist Michael Bracewell? If so, they were nearly right. It was a tryst at best fitful, at worst embarrassing. Smith is one of the country's most undervalued writers (once you burrow beneath The Fall's mighty cacophony), but also one of its most unpredictable personalities. Bracewell's Late Show style of interrogation drew little more than slurred grunts and shrugs. Although Bracewell seemed to know his Fall, Smith, he soon learnt, rarely thinks about their importance and prefers to express himself in a gruff, faintly menacing manner.

He tersely fire-bombed Bracewell's tentative forays into the world of theatre ('The theatre's even shittier than the music business, I find') and the cinema ('I'm into Fellini and shit like that'), and replied to a harmless enough query - 'Can you remember 1982?' - with an edgy 'Do you think I'm retarded or something?'

It got worse. Bracewell, exhausted, said he may as well admit that this man to his right was every bit the artistic equal of Wyndham Lewis. Smith was typically effusive: 'He's all right, yeah.' Bracewell turned helplessly to the audience. 'You're watching a man drown here, I hope you realise that.'

Finally one annoyed punter plucked up some courage. 'Do you write pissed?' he asked, in a clear reference to Smith's questionable equilibrium. Smith tensed. 'No, I write in the mornings,' he sneered, before planting a kiss, Brian Clough- style, on Bracewell's cheek and aiming unsteadily for the door. A re-match is not expected.

Tori Amos walked on stage at Her Majesty's Theatre to the genial clip-clop of Frankie Laine's 'Rawhide'. It was the only moment of levity to be had. Her performance was a gruelling one, and not even in a redemptive sense. Alone at a gigantic piano, she swivelled and lurched into the songs as though they were concertos, cooing and trilling to the point of irritation. In fairness, her sense of self-worth took a horrible battering in her youth, with the rape that she describes on 'Me and a Gun'. That song was delivered in a punishing (for everybody) a capella.

But the preciousness she brought to 'Icicles', with its cloying, Nanci Griffith-like preamble, and her version of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' dragged the mood down to somewhere below tepid, only to resurface when she let the backing tapes propel her through 'Cornflake Girl'. Otherwise, a real old trudge.

(Photograph omitted)