"In him, today's youth discovers itself," said Francois Truffaut. "Less for the reasons usually advanced - violence, sadism, hysteria, pessimism, cruelty, and filth - than for others infinitely more simple and commonplace. Modesty of feeling, continual fantasy life, moral purity without relation to everyday morality but all the more rigorous, eternal adolescent love of tests and trials, intoxication, pride and regret at feeling oneself "outside" society, refusal and desire to become integrated and, finally, acceptance - or refusal - of the world as it is."
Truffaut was talking about James Dean, but he could just as easily have been describing the appeal of Steven Patrick Morrissey. Humour, arrogance, self-pity, pride and pitiful yearnings - in Morrissey's music, the adolescent soul sees its own reflection. The comfort of books, the farce of teenage sex, the loathing of teachers and bosses - "Same old jokes since 1962" - all adolescent life is there. He sings of getting beaten up at bus stops, of trysts by cemetery gates, of the impossibility of true love and the agony of intimacy. In those who care for him he inspires a fanatical love, because, once you fall under his laconic spell, it is impossible not to believe that Morrissey understands. He sings of what life is like in England in the second half of the 20th Century, but it is brilliant, shining, made mythic - never has the mundane fabric of ordinary lives had such an eloquent spokesman.
His big mouth and his love of the theatrical gesture have always got him into deep shit and no doubt will continue to do so. He makes an unlikely Heinrich Himmler, though that is the role that the high priests of Indie integrity have assigned to him. But the reason he is attracted to shaven-headed machismo has nothing to do with right-wing tendencies and everything to do with the grudging admiration he feels for lives that can be lived without angst. The attraction is not political but psychological. Why does Morrissey like macho, working-class youth? Because he knows he will never be that free.
"Above all, I envy their sense of freedom," he once said of "ordinary boys". "They don't need to use their imagination all that much, they act upon impulse - and that's very enviable. Theirs is a naturalness which I think is a great art form, which I can't even aspire to. I don't feel natural even when I am fast asleep. The only impulse I have ever served is making records and doing sleeves. That was the opening for it all. Before that, it was all twisted."
At his London shows just before Christmas, the queues started forming early in the morning. Needless to say, there were no boot boys waiting to pay homage. There were sweet looking long-haired girls and a flock of lookalike boys with the lantern, comic hero jaw, the Billy Fury quiff shaved above the ears and the Jimmy Dean glasses. They looked like the "high IQ misfits and fervent introverts" that Rolling Stone described as his constituency.
He can seem without conscience - what about the Asian Morrissey fans who heard 'National Front Disco'? But though Morrissey has all the thoughtlessness of the very young, he also has their integrity. He makes a stand on issues more contentious than famine in the Third World.
That he is the grand master of the theatrical gesture should not disguise the fact that beyond his more extravagant statements - and his desire to wind the bastards up - there are some genuine and deeply held beliefs. He sees McDonald's as the definition of evil. "It is the death industry," he said. "I just feel rage that they will promote themselves from every possible angle, but they will not show the process by which the hamburger is made, they will not show the cows' throats being slit, the bull trying to commit suicide by banging his head against the stone floor."
Though he is the champion of the underdog - and the lab rat - there is no doubting that Morrissey is a true star. Though there is much bitching every time he makes a politically incorrect move, it is always worth remembering that he is not some little Indie hero - the man is a global artist. Simply Red would give their left testicles for the reaction that Morrissey gets in America. He seems destined to be without honour in his own land.

He eschews most of the benefits of stardom - the blow jobs from models, the famous friends, the celebrity love affairs - and gets by with just a white Porsche and a friendship with Michael Stipe that works, he says, because they never discuss music. The rings that most stars of his wattage jump through - inviting Hello! into their beautiful home, chatting with Terry Wogan - he can live without (he famously dropped out of the Wogan show at the last minute). Above all, he despises the intrusions that stardom brings. The wish that Johnny Rogan, his unauthorized biographer, meets an untimely death in a motorway accident came because a control freak like Morrissey will never accept that his life is public property. But he is no Garbo. He will talk about almost anything - if you can get to him - and he can be more touchingly honest about himself than any artist since Lennon.
"What happens if you never saw your parents kiss or you never saw your parents hug each other?" he once asked. "If, as a small child in an environment where your own parents don't actually get on, you believe that this is a microcosm of the rest of the world - that this is how life is - it's quite crippling. Even if you can overcome it, it's very debilitating."
He can seem as spiteful as a child tearing the wings off a butterfly but it is always in retaliation. Morrissey never casts the first stone. But he is never afraid to hit back. His statements that Tony Wilson is "a man trapped in a pig's body" and that "the day somebody shoves Wilson in the boot of a car and drives his body to Saddleworth Moor is the day that Manchester music will be revived" was a response to Wilson calling him "the Jeanette Winterton of pop, a woman trapped in a man's body".
And his view that The Smiths' rhythm section, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce, would never have got any further than the Salford shopping centre without him was - apart from being absolutely true, of course - only aired in response to their constant whining about how little money they got out of the band. But Morrissey is never given the benefit of the doubt.
"There seems to be a specific quality of judgement applied to me which is not applied to anyone else," he has said, and it is hard not to agree with him. It wasn't so long ago that Eric Clapton, now a national institution on a par with the Queen Mother, announced that he planned to vote for Enoch Powell. Morrissey would be hung, drawn and quartered for a milder remark than that.
Morrissey claims that all the sexual encounters of his lifetime could be crammed into a rather dull couple of hours. But though he certainly sings songs for the lonely and the misunderstood, there is sometimes a beautiful, unabashed romanticism about his work. "Send me your pillow - the one that you dream on - and I'll send you mine," he sighed, soft as a prayer. Perhaps you have to distance yourself from the grubby realities of humanity to write a line like that. He says that most nights he goes to bed with a book and - though wild rumours sometimes insist otherwise - that is almost certainly true.
He no doubt thinks that, at 33, it is too late in the day for true love to come along. If he was honest, the fact that he would rather curl up with a hardback than a hard-on probably makes him feel more than a little superior. "Most people keep their brains between their legs," he sings on Beethoven Was Deaf.
Though he only became Morrisey when Indie fame landed on his doorstep, he was never Steve. Growing up in the'60s, all the tough guys were called Steve. The biggest brutes, the most vicious bullies, the most Neanderthal pinheads. Removing his Christian name has been a gesture as premeditated as anything that Michael Jackson has experienced under the surgeon's knife.
Steve was a hard man's name in a hard man's world. And if you were not fortunate enough to be knobbing Julie Christie in the King's Road, then England in the '60s was a violent place to be. This was an age when a little Altamont was waiting around every corner. It is said that Morrissey stopped watching Manchester United when somebody stole his red and white bobble hat. Worse, he has recalled standing by a speeway at a fair in Streford Road and being approached by an older youth who headbutted him in the face and walked away without a word.
But there was always pop music. Morrissey, born in 1959, was the perfect age to become fluent in the language of pop. He was just starting school when the Beatles broke, growing up as Dusty and Marianne and Sandie and Cilla were pining for their perfect boys. He was reaching puberty when the Bowie was announcing his bisexuality and the New York Dolls were making that legendary appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. He was leaving school when Patti Smith mixed the poetry of the French Symbolists with the riffs of The Velvet Underground. And he was dreaming of glory when the Buzzcocks sang of love being left out for the dustbin men.
His pop education lasted from the birth of The Beatles to the death of The Sex Pistols. Morrissey is steeped in pop history - up to his quiff in it - in a way that nobody will ever be again. And until the Dolls and Patti Smith came into his life, his taste was almost totally British.
"Most pop has that transatlantic tinge, but I prefer the camaraderie of the North," he has said. "Audiences need to feel that this country is important. I like America - in its place - but I was never influenced by rock'n'roll singers like Presley or Little Richard. I preferred the disposable cheap types - Billy Fury, Sandie Shaw, Dusty Springfield. I worship every belch of Cilla Black."
He comes from a time when pop music was the centre of young lives, from an age when it was considerably more than just entertainment. Morrissey's music has such power because he believes - he knows for a fact - that it can change lives. He still believes in the dream.
In songs and in conversation, Morrissey is a virtuoso of the English language. He can make words do exactly what he wants. Though he is notoriously wary of the press, he always brings more to the interview than his interrogators. He fulfills stardom's ultimate criteria - no matter how much is written about him, he remains unknown. Even though Morrissey seems prepared to speak frankly, Mr Shankly, about every aspect of his life, there is still the assumption that he is hiding something.
"I don't feel like a freak," he said, saying that he had slept with both men and women. "I never lived in a small town with petty morals. Not all our lives are as cut and dried as they should be."

Morrissey has now been a solo artist for longer than he was a Smith. It shows. His latest live album, Beethoven Was Deaf, consolidates his position as the most electric artist these islands have produced since David Bowie. He has much in common with Bowie - a sexuality that transcends gender, a stardom that is somehow untainted by success and a love among his constituency that knows no bounds.
But, unlike Bowie, Morrissey never changes. Though the man is full of surprises, his peculiar worldview stays the same down the years. On Beethoven Was Deaf, his Get Your Ya-Yas Out, the author's message remains exactly what it has always been - boot the grime of this world in the crutch, dear.
This year looks like it will be a quiet one for Morrissey. He is writing new songs though there is no new album or tour projected in the immediate future. There will be more private meetings with other superstars and more public homage paid by young bands. The music press will continue to vilify him. Even if he does nothing but lie in the sun, the legend will grow.
He has had a run of bad luck. Just when he showed he could live without Johnny Marr, he has to learn to live without Nigel Thomas. Wherever Morrissey is now, it must be very lonely. But then, wasn't it always?

This article was originally published in the April, 1993 issue of Vox magazine.
Reprinted without permission forpersonal use only.