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“I’m in terrible pain and want to die”

Whenever Morrissey releases a new album, music journalists face one big problem: there’s too much to say. Explaining the background to Morrissey is like having to condense the history of guitar music since 1983 to the present day into a single page of text. How much can I skip? Do I have to explain that his real name is Steven Patrick Morrissey? That the band he used to sing with, The Smiths, had an unimaginable impact upon popular music and culture? That, after breaking up in 1987, they were recently offered five million dollars to reform for one single gig – and turned it down?

And it’s not just the music: writing about Morrissey necessitates painting a picture of one of the most complicated, withdrawn and enigmatic men in pop music. He announced his celibacy in the 80s; honked on about Animal Rights for decades; was accused of racism; is a suspected homosexual who refuses to talk about his sexuality at all; with a public personal this intriguing, it’s no surprise that Morrissey has been, over the years, the subject of numerous explosive interviews, and is renowned for being a spectacularly temperamental interviewee.

However, this is all froth on the surface of his character. The thing that Morrissey is really know for, both on record, and in real-life, is his reputation as the most miserable man in pop music. Like the British poet Philip Larkin, Morrissey is able to write lyrics that describe the crushing, oppressive boredom of existence. Withdrawn, isolated and oscillating wildly between self-hate and self-importance, Morrissey is like a continual reminder of our adolescent selves. He’s like the man in the street with the sandwich board that reads: ‘The End Is Nigh!’, only he does it with such humour and poetry that he instils admiration, rather than ridicule. In fact, most of his lyrics are so unrelentingly gloomy that to read them, its hard not to break into a smile: this, after all, is the man who wrote songs about discussing literature in the cemetery, about a girlfriends in coma and was inspired by child abuse and serial killers. Some might argue that it almost descends into parody – making up fake Morrissey lyrics can actually turn into an entertaining after-dinner game, in which you and your friends can pen lines such as “I’m in terrible pain and want to die”. I made that up, by the way – though it sounds worryingly like something that Morrissey might have written.

It’s this persona that’s won Morrissey his fans, as well as his enemies. He’s undoubtedly the pop star that you’re most likely to find a shine dedicated to in the basement of your house – there’s something about his music that brings out the obsessive fan in people. Its this trait that has also, more recently, secured his incredible global popularity. Despite the glory days of The Smiths having passed almost twenty years ago, Morrissey is currently at the peak of his commercial success. His last album, ‘You are the Quarry’, (2004) was his biggest selling LP ever, outselling anything he’d ever done with The Smiths, and singles from the album gave him four top ten hits in the same year.

And so, unlike so many artists whose band split up twenty years ago, unlike so many singers who decide to ‘go solo’, a new Morrissey album is always an eagerly awaited event. Ringleader of the Tormentors is released on April 3 rd and has had a terrific amount of hype surrounding it. The single ‘You Have Killed Me’ even seems to be filling the Romanian airwaves, with certain stations putting in on fairly heavy rotation. The good news is that the new LP certainly doesn’t disappoint.

With song titles like ‘Life is a Pigsty’ and lyrics such as “I see the world, it makes me puke”, the album treads some reassuringly familiar territory. However, in many ways its also a radical departure. Morrissey in fact relocated, from LA to Rome , during the production of the record, claiming to have fallen in love with the Italian city. And by the sounds of the LP, that’s not all he’s fallen in love with. The most miserable man in music, the famous cynic and celibate, seems to have discovered love. In one of the stand-out tracks of the album, entitled ‘Dear God Please Help Me’, he even goes so far as to write about (gasp!) sex, and (double gasp!) even uses a pronoun to describe his lover. A man or a woman? Boy or girl? I’m not going to spoil the surprise. Buy the album and find out for yourself.