Still bearing more grudges than lonely high court judges, Morrissey speaketh unto us anew with his new solo album - and we may still get a Ballad Of Reading Gaol out of him yet if he continues with the sort of J'Accuse type material he's wallowing in these days. One of the songs on the new album, which is charmingly called Maladjusted, is a very bitchy attack on his ex comrade in arms, Smiths drummer Mike Joyce. Morrissey, as you probably know, had to cough up a very large amount of money indeed last year when Joyce took both Morrissey and Marr to court over a complicated legal spat involving payment of back royalties. Morrissey, bless 'im, obviously never read the Oscar Wilde book of court etiquette before entering the witness box; and the judge in his summing up had some very choice, and very nasty, adjectives to describe the veracity of Morrissey's evidence.
Strangely enough, the new 11-song album is only going to contain 10 songs on this side of the Atlantic. The anti-Joyce tirade ominously called Sorrow Will Come In The End (echoes of "Reggie Kray, do you know my name?") is only being released in the US.
Back to the music: there are some scholars in the Smithonian institute who rather unwisely subscribe to the notion that the jingly-jangly, lyrically robust genius ended with Strangeways Here We Come in 1987. This is patent nonsense: over his 10-year solo career, Morrissey has at times surpassed anything that The Smiths brought out on the Rough Trade label. Exhibit A is a song called Everyday Is Like Sunday, the John Betjeman-influenced piece of beauty which is one of the finest three minutes 30 seconds ever committed to vinyl. Other ditties to be taken into account include the wondrously spiteful Hair- dresser On Fire (Morrissey's response when his hairdresser cancelled his hair appointment - let's face it, we've all been there); the bit of rough trade that goes under the name The Last Of The Famous International Playboys, the historically resonant Piccadilly Palare and most everything off Vauxhall And I; but most particularly the song Now My Heart Is Full, which includes the Graham Greene-isms of "Daller, Spicy, Pinky and Cubitt" from Brighton Rock.
Maybe the last album Southpaw Gram- mar wasn't as match-fit as it could have been, but Maladjusted is yet another significant contribution to a body of work that makes Morrissey as relevant and indispensable today as he was when he was telling us that he would go out tonight but he hadn't got a stitch to wear.
ELVIS COSTELLO once remarked of Morrissey's work that the song titles were enough in themselves (which is true), and all present and correct here is the mordant wit that is too frequently interpreted as self-pitying depression by the terminally stupid: song titles like Trouble Loves Me and the hilarious Satan Rejected My Soul are almost worth the admission price by themselves.
The eerie thing about Maladjusted is that no matter how much you swing along to tracks like Alma Matters or how much you smirk along to the "Confessions Of A Window Cleaner" like Roy's Keen, you are constantly referred back to track four on side one, a song called Trouble Loves Me which is one of the best things Morrissey has ever done. "Ready wit, ready wit, still running around on the flesh rampage . . . show me a barrel and watch me scrape." Welcome back Moz, we've missed you.
