Morrissey doesn't look happy. But then, of course, appearances can be deceptive. He's sitting in the bar of Rome's Hotel de Russie (grand 19th century façade, modern interior), sipping a Gray Goose vodka and tonic, and pondering the MOJO photographer's suggestion that, tomorrow, we might shoot him next to John Keats' grave in the city's Protestant cemetery. It's striking how, in the flesh, at 46, Morrissey bears almost no resemblance to that gauche, willowy '80s Catholic boy in the Evans shirts and baggy jeans who wondered exactly when nature would make a man of him. Today, heavy-set, sharp-eyes, sporting bespoke shoes, tailored blue shirt, enviable cashmere jumper and dark blue jeans, he looks more like one of those square-jawed British leading men of the '50s like Anthony Steel or Kieron Morre, forgotten cockleshell heroes who sat out the uncertainty of a new swinging decade in a rented flat behind Harrods, armed only with a sharp quiff, the right profile and a wry, haunted smile. It's a look entirely in keeping with the pervading mood of splendid defeat when we last met him, in June 2004. After seven years of ascetic exile in Los Angeles, following the release of the bone-weary Maladjusted ("It's my life/To wreck my own way"), we were in the heady swirl of a Moz renaissance, on a new label, Sanctuary, with a new album, You Are The Quarry (his best since 1994 masterpiece Vauxhall and I), and a Channel 4 documentary that saw a cavalcade of top-drawer celebs (Bono , Nancy Sinatra, Alan Bennett, Noel Gallagher) singing the praises of the jammy Stretford poet. It should have been a celebratory homecoming, but it all went a bit Pinter. Talk soon turned to unsettled scores, hatred of the music industry, and grand conspiracy theories, all arising from the Jarndyce and Jarndyce-like machinations of the 1996 high court case where Judge John Weeks ordered that Morrissey and Johnny Marr pay former bassist Mike Joyce £1.25 million in back earnings. Struck down by migraines and meningitis, here was an artist not at full fighting strength, flinching from praise like a wary rescue-dog receiving a kindly pat on the head.
Then in May 2005, following Quarry sales in excess of one million, a series of stunning live dates and the release of the definitive Morrissey live album…At Earl's Court, Sanctuary announced that Morrissey was scheduled to play, and then would not be appearing at, June's Isle of Wight Festival. The singer issued a statement asserting: "I have not ever, at any time, agreed to play the Isle of Wight Festival. The announcement that I would play was made by Sanctuary - and it was their error. I am very angry about [this], but I can't control Sanctuary. There will be a new signing for the new album, so please wait until you hear the news from my lips. Everything else is just gossip." The impression was, as ever, that you cross Morrissey at your peril.
And now, in the manner of politicians, popes, and gangsters, he is having a soft, conspiratorial whisper in the ear of an aide de camp. Keats is on our side, but the…another secretive exchange. "It's very beautiful there," he avers. He'll be happy to do it. Oh yes, 'Happy'. Odd as it may seem, that's a word we'll be seeing a bit of over the next few pages. He leans in to MOJO. "Have you seen Rome before? It's incredibly beautiful, every corner you turn."

Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer: Morrissey at Keats' grave, Protestant Cemetery, Rome, January 2006.

Maybe it was Keith Cameron's parting words of advice to Morrissey in the last MOJO feature "Be yourself, free yourself" - but something has happened since those tormented times of 2004. One listens to the new album, Ringleader Of The Tormentors, is enough to convince. Recorded at Forum Music Village in Rome with legendary T.Rex/Bowie producer Tony Visconti, Tormentors is certainly the ex-Smith's most uncompromising full-band record since The Queen Is Dead. But there's also an invigorating, if not downright shocking, freshness to Morrissey's lyrics. Gone are the wearying court case references and fecund images of exhausted defeat, replaced by songs of emotional uplift and generosity, attack and defiance, and, on the Ennio Morricone-scored Dear God Please Help Me, disarmingly explicit references to, well, yer actual sex. As if to confirm that the old Morrissey is dead and buried, the album ends with a melodramatic, Shangri-La's drama, At Last I Am Born, which finds the Artist Formerly Known As Unhappy informing us that, "I once thought that I had numerous reasons to cry/And I did/But I don't any more/because I am born." In htat eternal Romantic battle between thought and feeling, ROTT finds a Morrissey who has finally escaped the prison of the intellect, and given himself up to fire, passion and - gulp - flesh. What's gotten into him?
"It's Rome," explains Morrissey, matter of factly, sipping on another Grey Goose and tonic. We're sitting in a typically austere hotel boardroom, all flipcharts and complimentary Hotel de Russie pencils, but the mood is surprisingly warm, Morrissey having already discovered MOJO's previous employment as a film lecturer and enthused about Godard's Bande À Part and recommended a 1955 Jimmy Cagney and Doris Day musical, Love Me Or Leave Me ("Oh, you can buy it anywhere for £3.99 His best ever performance!"). "A year ago I came to Rome and became obsessed with the place. I'd been a few times before but it have never triggered with me. I just drifted through and saw nothing and noticed nothing but this year was completely different. I think it's because I'd spent the last sever years locked in Los Angeles, a very frightened city, everything geared toward avoiding human contact. I left the house I lived in because too many people knew where I lived. Every day there'd be people outside. Which is nice but…difficult. I just everybody so free and stylish in Rome. Nothing matters, tomorrow doesn't matter and people will bump into you in the street and not even say anything, whereas in Los Angeles it's a horrible infringement."
There is one downside, the face that Rome is the fur-wearing capital of the world. "It spoils the city," he says, "and perhaps the country, because it's not necessary. But it's fascinating the way that the women who do wear fur just look really stupid."
Fur aside, however, he was completely overtaken. The past, and Los Angeles, "completely evaporated". "It all happened in north central Rome," he says, "where we are now. That's where the album was recorded. Everything just slipped into place." The elements that slipped into place included Visconti, Morricone ("He'd said no to everybody…but he listened to the song and said, Yes!"), and Alanis Morissette's Texan guitarist Jesse Tobias who co-wrote five of the album's 11 songs. "He's an incredible addition," enthuses Morrissey. "You were asking earlier about new muses? We, of course, it's Jesse as well."

Are you an easy person to work for?
Yes. Not looking for any jokes or silly punchlines, but I feel I'm absurdly easy, very undemanding…But so did Mussolini.

Now you said no jokes. You can't resist it can you?
Not really. I was born to be on The Benny Hill Show.

The new record seems influenced by the welcome for the last album. It's more confident, less defensive…
Well, when you're slapped about the face there is a weakening of spirit. And you don't feel welcome or that people are that keen on hearing what you're about to say. But when people make you feel more welcome you feel stronger and more confident.

How easy was that acceptance to come to terms with? Weren't you a little suspicious?
Of course. I couldn't relax entirely and I'm happy about that. I'll always remain suspicious. I'm not one to bask in any sort of good fortune. When things are going a certain way somebody has to break the spell.

One the whole Isle of Wight kerfuffle you issued a statement saying Sanctuary would not be the home for the next Morrissey album. What brought you back?
Somebody at Sanctuary said that I'd do the Isle of Wight. An understandable mess resulted from that and nobody from Sanctuary was speaking up for me. I'm not the kind of person you lead into certain situations. I know what I want to do and what I don't want to do and that was a mess, but I think it's largely forgotten now.

Did they say sorry?
Absolutely! But I was out of contract anyway. It was a one-album thing and I was basically finished with Sanctuary, but after the Isle of Wight they made and offer and , erm, here we are. But there's been a few messes in my life…

"I just find everybody so free and stylish in Rome. Tomorrow doesn't matter."

Do you ever wish you'd had the cigar-chomping, tough-line manager?
Yes, I do, to a certain degree. I've always wanted somebody I could really look up to who could walk ahead of me.

At one point you were looked after by Neil Young and Bob Dylan's manager, Elliot Roberts. I don't imaging they're easy rides…
I think he managed me for seven days, and he was terribly nice but there was just no point, really, because you can't mould me. I'm not what I'm not. And I can't help that. I'm simply me, unfortunately. I really can only follow my heart and do the things I passionately believe in and that's difficult in the music industry. It causes problems. I'm not trying to imply I'm above everything but…I feel it!

So, in the end, you just think, I'd be better off it I did this myself?
Absolutely!

My initial impression fro the album is that this is a man who is…cough, 'happy'?
Well, I'm glad you coughed.

You've changed the way you write, there's more a sense of openness…
Worldliness? Well, there it is. When I began I was horrendously parochial. A slave to England.

The legal case isn't referenced on the album? Is that exorcised from the soul?
It's reasonably exorcised. If I keep rabbiting on… I was finding that if I talked about it at all it became the central piece of the interview… Enough is enough. But it doesn't mean I've softened.

Are Morrissey lyrics like pages in a diary? 'Why should I stand by what I wrote in 1987?'
Exactly. The emotions were expressed. It happened. It was there, but I don't feel tied to it, or trapped, and I don't feel like the same person. I'm not carrying on a sequence of events.

But was there every a period where you were carrying on a sequence of events? The accepted media image of Morrissey is that you have always been someone who thrives on unhappiness….
(He interrupts) Please, that's a compliment. They think they're criticising me and they're not.

OK, Let me insult you then. You could argue that you've made your greatest albums when you are content and loved.
When was that?

Well, at the height of The Smiths, when you realised when you were working with a great band? The rallying round of people on the making of Vauxhall And I and this album?
Yes, yes. Is there something wrong with that?

No. So Morrissey works best when he's…
(Whispers) Happy… there's a massive grain of truth in that. But only a grain.

The children's chorus singing "There is no such thing as normal!" on The Youngest Was The Most Loved must have been a high point.
Especially, when you see all theses seven-year-old Italian children singing it, and quite happy to do it, full of meaning and not needing to have anything explained to them. A perverse joy.

Would the world be a happier place if we all embraced that idea?
I think we have to because we're all so obsessed with it and so obsessed with it that it's an absolute waste of time.

Listening to this album was a bit like watching a Hollywood film after the relaxing of the Hays Code, a world of decorum suddenly awash with sex. I never expected Morrissey to say such things as [in Dear God Please Help Me]: "He motions to me with his hand on my knee…And now I'm spreading your legs, with mine in between…"?
(Laughs) It's funny to hear you say it…Well, I didn't really think there was ever something I couldn't write about, but unless it was a strip of me then I didn't really want to venture into anything. The song has to be true, otherwise it's pointless. And it is, it's very true.

Wasn't there a time when, even if it had been true, you wouldn't have written about ti? That you wouldn't have gone there.
Well, previously I wasn't invited. I can't speak for everyone but it's been a gratifying journey and I didn't quite think I'd live to be this…old. At least I'm living proof that things can get better.

Why didn't you think you'd live this long? Death from boredom, exhaustion, or just wanting to pack it in?
All of those things. And more.

Morrissey today (left); as he was 20 years ago (right).

It's odd, isn't it. Right from the start with The Smiths you learnt to be flippant about the deadly serious so as not to sound tedious. Did you feel that you gave away too much of yourself in those interviews?
I did but I felt it couldn't be any other way otherwise we'd have been The Nightengales, The June Brides, or The Jasmine Minks. Jolly as those groups were, the world didn't need another. I felt that I had to simply dive in and to hell with what might happen.

As a result, though, we'll talk flippantly about your depression..Were there genuine points where you thought, Sod it, I've had enough?
Well, I think there was a certain stage when so many bad things were written about me. The Smiths trial was certainly something to go through. And I think anybody of lesser steel would have slipped under. And so from that point onwards I thought, Well, just say it, just do it, just be it, just live it and, I am. I mean, when so many people tell you that you'll never dance again…

And you come back at the end of the last act, a star!
Oh God, am I really that trite?

What are your defence mechanisms?
Sudden illness. It never fails.

There's a great critical tradition in associating artistic creativity with depression. Would you take a pill that could make you happy all the time?
I'd take the bottle. You joke, but I'm no fool!

You wouldn't worry that you'd lose your edge?
To hell with the edge!

But what songs would you write then?
Oh, I wouldn't! I'd be too busy.

On You Have Killed Me you announce "Pasolini is me!" and refer to two of his films, Accatone, and Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma. What is it about this discontented Marxist Catholic…?
Well, many things really…I've seen all the films…There's nothing flash about them. You're seeing real people without any distractions, just the naked person, with everything taking place on the streets. An extreme genius. But he also looked great and he didn't seem to be impressed by other people. He didn't have to be anybody else, he was being himself in his own world and even though he was obsessed with the low-life, that was all he wanted. He didn't want anything else.

Might there be another point of connection? Do you feel that even if you don't practise, you'll always be a Catholic?
I don't think you have any choice. It's sandblasted into you. And it will take one hell of a blowtorch to get rid of it. That will never happen, regardless of what your feelings are, regardless of what your intentions are.

Which songs are most obviously a result of your Catholic upbringing?
Everything. There's absolutely nothing else.

What's your attitude to psychoanalysis? Did you see a therapist out in LA?
Nooo, not at all. Well, I did before I left, because I was leaving for LA. And they said, of course, "Please don't do it." I don't see anyone now. I think we're all a mess. And it will all end eventually so there's not really any point wasting money on therapists. What is there to talk about? You're unhappy? Who's happy?

But that's Morrissey Now saying that. Surely there was another Morrissey who thought, It might help?
Did I ever say that? No, but I did actually see a therapist for a while. I wasn't very impressed.

They sat there and said nothing?
What else could they do? They just simply hand you a bill. But therapy is releasing and purging the self and allowing everything to trail out…

Don't you have that already?
Exactly.

Pursuit of love seems to be one of the key topics of the last two albums.
Well, sub-topic...

Have you found love?
Yes I have, yes I have. I mean, it's completely false, of course….

What? All love is false or the love you found was false?
The latter. But everything's fine. Have you found love? How do you know it's love?

Because I felt incomplete without them.
Well, that's always the exchange. You have something I don't have and I have something you don't have. Which is OK.

There's still a cold rationalism there, isn't there?
Well, we overexamine it, I think.

Does that mean you will never fall in love because you will always…
I'm 80! There's not much time left.

Don't you worry that you'll end up like John Osborne or John Fowles, one of those cynical diarists chronicling the decaying world?
God willing. God willing.

But how does that make the person you love, or fall in love with, feel? Because they must know that.
Well, yes, because I write to them and tell them.

The next day, in the lobby of the Hotel de Russie, Morrissey presents MOJO with "a small present": a DVD of Jimmy Cagney in Love Me Or Leave Me. Later, wrapped in a heavy wool overcoat, Morrissey is walking with MOJO through the crumbling landscape gardens of Rome's Villa Borghese, a beautifully dishevelled world of 17th century rococo grandeur, natural decay and modern graffiti, gifted to the people of Rome in 1901 as a state-owned public park. "If this were Britain," murmurs Morrissey, "we'd be looking at numerous 'Keep Off The Grass' signs and lots of brooding teenagers. Tell people not to do something and they want to do it so much more. Here they're free so they don't care." Morrissey has always taken a notebook on such constitutionals ("I never carry less than five"), jotting down snatches of overheard conversation. "I'm a dreadful eavesdropper," he admits. "Everytime people speak to me I see it written down." Later, at the graveside of Keats in the Protestant cemetery, prior to the photoshoot, Morrissey lingers over the gravestone inscription (relishing the line about "the malicious power of his enemies") while a trio of benign feral cats, part of 300,000 gatti now protected by Rome city council as part of the city's "bio-heritage", pad contentedly around his feet. "Do you know how to tell if it's a genuine tabby?" he whispers. "they have an 'M' marking on their forehead." Recently, on the True To You fansite, Morrissey was asked how much environment affected his work. His reply? "none of these things affect me. I am an island." This, I suggest, is rubbish. The Smiths never sounded like an East Anglian band, but were clearly Northern, and this album is obviously a product of his love of Rome.
"Yes, that's quite true," he concedes, "but then I do feel like an island, to the extent that I could be almost anywhere, unaffected yet massively affected."
Growing up in '60s Manchester, Morrissey holds that the muse struck him when he was seven or eight. "You won't believe me," he explains later, back at the hotel, "but I was certainly hatching something and I felt in my own misguided way like a little work of art. All the memories I have of life are not of people but of songs or films. When I was a child I was obsessed with You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', the way the two voices were jumping around, and, when I saw it on Top Of The Pops, the way [Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield] would not look at each other and sing those two parts was extraordinary. All the things that influenced me, in film and music, were quite haphazard and strange, and I felt that they could be gathered, blended and the final result would be something unique."
If a catalyst were needed it came with the November 1973 appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test of The New York Dolls, which spurred the teenage Morrissey to pen letter to the Melody Maker and NME in praise and defence of the much-mocked lower Manhattan glam heroes. "I was a nuisance for a while," he says, "I'd write letters and long to be in the press but I was a complete failure. Of course, being a pop star when you're 11 and a half and covered in acne is also ludicrous [but] in those days it seemed such a powerful thing. I was incredibly clumsy, and determined, but knew, deep down, that I was reasonably glamorous, even if nobody else could see it."
When This Charming Man was released in 1983, many thought it was Morrissey, as opposed to Jean Cocteau protégé Jean Marais, on the cover. "It was, spiritually," says Morrissey today. Whether it was '50s British character actor Sean Barrett (on the cover of How Soon Is Now) or the late Patric Doonan, namechecked on 1994's Now My Heart Is Full, the impression was that this deep down conviction of his own glamour resulted in our hero seeking out 'the Morrissey look' in other faces, other people… "Yes, I think I did," he says, "I think I do. Do you know much about Patric Doonan? He killed himself in a road in Chelsea called Margaretta Terrace, just off Oakley Street, number four I think. He gassed himself in the basement. I wrote to the people and (laughs) I said, Do you know anything about the fact that Patric Doonan took his life in your basement…?"
And they said, 'How did you get this address? Please stop writing to us'? "No, they didn't even bother to say that much, unfortunately. The feeling was that, surely, the things I feel, the people that I see great beauty, value and glamour in, can't possibly amount to nothing."
Morrissey has never fallen out of love with his heroes. As host of the 2004 Meltdown Festival, he invited the surviving members of The New York Dolls to perform live. It appeared a true moment of vindication for the Manchester kid with the weird taste who'd never given up. "Have you see the Bob Gruen DVD [All Dolled Up]?" he asks. "It's astonishing, and confirms what I've been saying about them for years. David Johansen so so clever for a 19-year-old; so witty, literate, unstoppable and here, finally, it is, on film. It was always frustrating to me, that the rest of the world wouldn't take the things that were setting me alight. So it's fascinating that in 2006 it all seems to make sense."

His grand return: Morrissey at Meltdown, 2004.

Given how much your early songs were influenced by such inspirational writers as Shelagh Delaney and Elizabeth Smart, what was the frist unfettered song you wrote, where you thought, these people have helped me but now I can fly free?
It's a good question and it probably didn't happen until very late because a spark of me was always very, erm, unsure and that's when I think you rely on other people's ideas. I mean, I know I overdid it with Shelagh Delaney. It took me a long, long time to shed that particular one. [But] no one is ever quite as original as they think they are. I always considered the great mesh of all my influences had emerged in me as something that was (unique enough).

The first significant piece written about The Smiths was by Dave McCullough in Sounds in 1983. How did it feel to read that?
Fantastic because he was ablaze with excitement and there was a fantastic run of photographs of me and I had always believed until that second in my life that I was…not remotely photogenic, so I was amazed to see this strange creature…I couldn't believe I inhabited this body and I was here doing this thing. It was just unspeakably exciting.

Daft question: Could The Smiths only have happened when they did?
Absolutely, while the rest of the world wasn't looking. That's the only way you can surprise people. You can't surprise people if your arrival is trumpeted by a record company. You have to tap them on the shoulder and catch their expression when they turn round. As I do frequently.

Is it time for your version of the story? The autobiography rumours…
Well, they're not rumours. But, unfortunately you can't really do something like a serious autobiography if you travel and your time is constantly interrupted by a change of environment. I've agreed with myself to do it. But there's no deal at all. I read stories in the daily newspapers that I'd been given millions. And demanded more! That's absolute crap. I've never been offered anything! And I've never had any dialogue with a publisher.

How do you feel when these stories seemingly spring up by themselves?
It's always very annoying because, in my case, the wording's always so extreme and I always seem to appear to have an extreme reaction to something that, in the first place, is completely fabricated. It's infuriating but you reach a point where life just doesn't really belong to you.

In William E. Jones' film about US Morrissey fans, Is It Really So Strange?, the fans were saying that because your lyrics in the past have rarely been gender-specific, it's allowed a wide variety of different groups to identify with them. Now, with something like Dear God, Please Help Me on the new album…gender-specific.
Yes.

Why?
Am I running scared now? Whatever people invest within you, that's what you are and there's nothing I can do about that. People can say what they like. I can't really control how people view a situation so why obsess about it? And why set out to correct everybody on the planet with the view they have about you? That would be exhausting. And it's impossible.

But it does take a strong and content Morrissey to now be gender-specific in such a beautiful, well, love song?
Many of the great love songs of all time are non-gender specific. Mine are, truthfully, innocent expressions of a somewhat primitive person. This innocence stops you from going any further. If you write in a non-gener specific way, you can be considered to be avoiding the bold truth, or speaking in code, or giving a knowing wink - I understand all of that, naturally. But I don't hink I'd be any less ofa conundrum to people if I actually worte or sang in a deafeningly specific way. As I said earlier, I am simply inexcusably me.

What has maturity brought you?
Well, it's certainly surprised me. I always thought that the pathway to 30 was horrendous and the pathway to 40 was almost bearable but within recent years I feel that there's some kind of joy to be had in life.

That's probably a statement you never imagined yourself saying.
Never. But I never imagined being this age.

You would have decided to make an exit?
I would have been asked to leave.

What would you compromise for?
Nothing. What would there be?

Someone else?
They'd have to be incredibly good at darts.

On the new album's To Me You Are A Work Of Art, you sing, "I see the world/It makes me puke/But I know that somewhere there's a someone who can soothe me." Is that the essential core of Morrissey today?
Yes.

I never thought I'd hear you say it.
Stick around. It gets worse.

So, does that mean you've finally met the special someone you'd wait outside the shops for?
Yes…Santa.

And in the future?
I never see beyond seven days. I can't understand why, but I never have.

Is it a coping tactic?
Well I try to care so much less than I once did. It's a fantastic defence mechanism.

Will you be staying in Rome for the foreseeable future?
Yes. It's in my nature to overdo everything.

You once said you'd run a mile if confronted with the Steven Morrissey of 1983. How do you think he'd respond to meeting you now?
I think he'd be terribly impressed. I really do.

And that's it. Our time is up. I tell Morrissey that I really enjoyed it ("I bet you'd say that to Jimmy Krankic") and ask if there's a way to get in touch with him again. "It's a punishing life," he mutters, and the man who once only communicated with collaborators or management by fax, scribble his e-mail address at the top of my list of questions. "Keep it under your Stetson," he says. It's all gone eerily well and I leave with my Cagney DVD, a passable knowledge of tabby cats anda astrange hunch that the man I spoke to, the real Morrissey, is finally, cough, happy. more surprisingly, a fortnight later, as we go to press, MOJO receives nine different e-mails from Morrissey, apologizing for lateness and happily answering a list of follow-up questions. Worldly, co-operative, content? Let's face it, Steven Patrick Morrissey would run a mile.

A lion in winter, and Morrissey. Borghese Gardens at dusk, January 2006.