1 Everyday Is Like Sunday

“Whoever says the Smiths have split shall be severely spanked by me with a wet plimsoll,” harrumphed Morrissey in 1987. Presumably, in the following months, he must have been blighted by major cramp as he thwacked rump after rump with soggy footwear: the group had already disbanded by the time their swansong studio album Strangeways, Here We Come hit the shelves. Morrissey ploughed on as a solo artist despite still hankering for his old band: unlike Johnny Marr, he’d never wanted the band to end, and the title of his first solo album, Viva Hate, made it clear that anger and bitterness over their demise was fuelling his new career. But anyone scouring his work for snarky clues of old grudges and grievances won’t find any in Everyday Is Like Sunday; the reason it’s one of his strongest early singles is because it exists in a masterfully imagined, ennui-laden world of its own. Here, in the “seaside town that they forgot to bomb”, there’s no acrimony or draining divorce – just drudgery in the world’s snooziest holiday destination. The jaunty, happy-go-lucky bounce of Vini Reilly’s guitar rubs like wet sand against Morrissey’s bored despair: a lyric inspired by Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, which imagines the citizens of Melbourne waiting for nuclear armageddon, but transformed to the grizzle and drizzle of the British seaside. “Everyday is silent and grey,” he sighs, a perfect imitation of every poor sod who’s traipsed from pier to promenade in some godforsaken coastal hangover.

2 Late Night, Maudlin Street

If there’s just one maddeningly tedious repeated view of Morrissey, it’s that he’s too much of a misery guts to stomach, that all he ever does is wallow in his woes and blub his way from song to song. For starters, a morose Moz is a masterful Moz – I’m yet to meet anyone who thinks the crushing loneliness of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want, for instance, is inferior to the ooh-what-lovely-bloomers vaudeville farce of Frankly Mr Shankly, and I sincerely hope I never do. More importantly, Morrissey’s often at his laugh-out-loud funniest when he’s dropping one-liners in among the gloom, as shown by the tremendous Late Night, Maudlin Street. One of Morrissey’s longest and strangest compositions, it’s a 1972-set waltz that’s both brooding and darkly humorous. “I was born here and I was raised here/ And I took some stick here,” he sings in tribute to the grim and grimy streets of his childhood. And just as it all gets overwhelmingly poignant – the old places and the old faces, the lost loves and the lost fights and the loneliness – he contemplates removing his pants for some passion and scoffs: “Me – without clothes? Well, a nation turns its back and gags.” Even here, at his most beautiful and moving, he’s self-aware enough to chuckle at himself.

3 You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side

A tellingly titled riposte to the humdrum patchiness of Morrissey’s second LP Kill Uncle, on which he was forced to work with a makeshift band after severing ties with producer Stephen Street and found himself adrift in a no man’s land of rinky dink cabaret. It wasn’t a mistake he’d make again: for album number three, Your Arsenal, he teamed up with former Bowie sideman Mick Ronson and struck upon a sound far fiercer and tougher than anything the Smiths had done. This, then, is the sound of a Morrissey unhampered by what he termed the “session musician embalming fluid” that had dulled Kill Uncle, and boosted by finding himself a like-minded mucker once more. It’s a stompy, stroppy glam romp, all spiky guitars and bullet-hard snares rattling on a relentless, bulldozing loop, while Morrissey tuts as if his plate of chips has been doused with piss. “And here I am! Well, you don’t need to look so pleased,” he pouts like a long-suffering patsy, but he’s not on his own any more and he sounds all the better for it. Even indie’s archest loner needs someone in their corner occasionally.

4 Speedway

The Smiths often dallied with strange, theatrical sound-effects, with hit-and-miss results: the happy hubbub and chattering crowds of Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me does wonders in making the lovelorn loneliness bite all the harder; the mournful, bovine mooing on Meat Is Murder, meanwhile, sounds a little like a collaboration with a particularly sulky Ermintrude. But none of them can match Speedway and that violent chainsaw buzz that splits the song in two in the opening 20 seconds; the way that, by yanking a rip-cord, he shreds the intro to pieces and slices apart everything you were so sure the song was going to be about. Speedway’s a song that’s forever toying with you, pulling you this way and that, lurching from the verse’s queasy guitar to the chorus’s shuddering euphoria. And then there are Morrissey’s lyrics: none of the usual snideness or sniping, and admitting that all his enemies may just have a point after all. “All of the rumours keeping me grounded/ I never said, I never said that they were completely unfounded,” he confides. But, just as he seems on the verge of grand confession, he stumbles upon a scrap of pride, some strange and unexplained victory, and stubbornly declares: “I could have dragged you in, guilt by implication, by association/ But I’ve always been true to you.” It’s only when it’s done that you realise that, for all the grandstanding, the big secret remains untold – and that even here, at his seemingly most candid, he’s still too slippery to be caught out.

5 Jack the Ripper

Morrissey’s fondness for cutthroat criminals has always been puzzling: here is a gladioli-swinging iconoclast who despises macho posturing, and yet he’s often been besotted with shady underworld figures, whether it’s Hector the thieving scallywag from First of the Gang to Die or Reggie and Ronnie Kray in Last of the Famous International Playboys. Part of that, of course, is probably down to his admiration for the downtrodden and outcast antihero, but Jack the Ripper is something far creepier: a song about London’s most notorious serial killer that grows increasingly uneasy as it dawns that this isn’t Morrissey’s compassion for the poor victims, but Jack’s own demented worldview. “Oh you look so tired/ Mouth slack and wide/ Ill-housed and ill-advised/ Your face is as mean/ As your life has been,” he croons dangerously over ragged guitar and woozy, helter-skelter slaloms of noise. And then the chorus, in which the Ripper tries to turn murder into a romantic clinch. “Crash into my arms/ I want you/ You don’t agree/ But you don’t refuse/ I know you.”

6 Seasick, Yet Still Docked

One of Morrissey’s simplest, sparsest tracks, which makes it one of his most stunning, too: a delicate, mournful and oh-so melancholy lament that could squeeze a teardrop from a glass eye. Ever since the Smiths, Morrissey has presented himself as a melodramatic deity, who treats his pangs of the heart with such excessive vigour and doomed brio that he comes on like a provincial Byronic hero; most obviously, in How Soon Is Now? he recoils from rejection like a wretched, misunderstood creature, rather than a mere man who’s not much cop at flirting and fails to pull at a nightclub. Seasick, Yet Still Docked, though, strips away the myth and the drama to expose something very naked: a Morrissey who’s so lonely he’s ill and doesn’t even have the heart to dress it up as something showier. “Wish I had the charm to attract the one I love/ But you see, I’ve got no charm,” he sings over a wistful acoustic strum and curls of eerie noise. It’s his payoff that makes it really tingle, as he bitterly spits “My love is as sharp as a needle in your eye/ You must be such a fool to pass me by” – only even he doesn’t believe that, either.

7 I Have Forgiven Jesus

It’s never enough for Morrissey to make a bog-standard return after a period of radio silence. Mere songs or albums aren’t enough on their own. He has to come back and prove he’s still the same old iconoclast. And so while his new album World Peace Is None of Your Business was hyped up beforehand with that eyebrow-raising spoken-word video with Pamela Anderson, so I Have Forgiven Jesus made 2004’s You Are the Quarry more than just a comeback album; here, in nearly four minutes of swirling, grandiose pop, was an act of grand sacrilege designed to shush anyone who doubted he was any less of a wag (and if there’s any suggestion it wasn’t intended as an act of jocular provocation, note how it was released in December as a Christmas single, and that Moz dressed up as a vicar for the video). Rather than make confession or kneel at the altar and ask for atonement for past sins, then, Morrissey decides to forgive Christ for his wicked practical joke: creating a human and loading him with fiery desire, but condemning him to a life of celibacy. For all the self-flagellation, though, he saves the best until near the end, when he runs down the torment of his weekly schedule and its joyless, sexless activity: “Monday, humiliation; Tuesday, suffocation; Wednesday, condescension; Thursday is pathetic.” Later, on the album Ringleader of the Tormentors, he’d go a step further and hint at a spot of how’s-your-holy-father with God himself.

8 Hairdresser on Fire

And now for a less fearsome foe for Morrissey to train his ire upon: his pesky hairdresser, who’s so popular he can’t find the time to trim that beloved quiff. For someone so routinely dismissed as a navel-gazing misanthrope, Hairdresser on Fire is probably the greatest example of Moz poking fun at his own reputation as a harbinger of doom: it’s intentionally ridiculous, the bathos of the grand, sweeping swings and chiming bells used to soundtrack a fusspot having kittens about his hair. And there’s an obvious humour, too, in how Morrissey – the unloved youth who used to roam around graveyards spouting Keats and Wilde – is having a diva-sized tantrum, because he can’t get an appointment at his favourite salon. But there are also hints of dangerous obsession in his strange infatuation with his hairdresser (“I sense the power within the fingers”) and condemnation for the preening peacocks of London who have all the gear but no idea of life’s real treats (“You are repressed/ But you’re remarkably dressed”). If in doubt, just note the longing and the resentment in how he pouts “And you’re just too busy/ To see me” – as if he’s been let down, as if a special relationship has been sullied, as if his hairdresser having other clients is akin to treacherous adultery – and try to maintain it’s still merely a silly, knockabout song.

9 Life Is a Pigsty

The brooding, epic centrepiece of 2007’s Ringleader of the Tormentors rolls all Morrissey’s classic themes of love, loneliness, death and rejection into one storm-soaked ball of unlikely redemption. Over seven-plus minutes of moody atmospherics, ranging from delicate, softly-softly keyboards to sound effects of lashing rain and rumbling thunder, he goes from the brink of despair to desperately scrabbling at a sliver of hope. Halfway through, the eerie swirl of sound breaks into an acoustic strum with cavernous drums before building to a guitar-scraping, gong-crashing climax as Morrissey, pushing his voice to falsetto, shrugs off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and croons: “Every second of my life/ I’ve only lived for you.” Finally, on the cusp of joining the silent majority, he declares: “Even now in the final hour of my life/ I’m falling in love again.” It’s a graveside address from the last of the famous hopeless romantics; a farewell from someone who still believes in the possibility of love, despite all the evidence to the contrary. There is a light, Morrissey once said, that never goes out – and here it is now, flickering on and away and still burning even as it comes dangerously close to being extinguished for good.

10 I’m Not a Man

The standout track from Morrissey’s 10th studio album, released earlier this month, and a withering assault on the boorish bravado of macho chest-thumping that’s forever been a thorn in his side. Musically, it’s delightfully camp, with nearly eight minutes of Willy Wonka-style fantasy orchestration, occasionally dissected by searing electric guitars, and it allows Moz to thumb his nose at the masculine culture he’s always felt alienated from: the endless rules of “ways to sit and ways to stand” and the mean-spirited “locker room” banter that crushes anyone who’s different. Yet rather than play the victim, this is Morrissey’s Eureka! moment, in which he realises how pathetic and pitiful such posturing is: “Wolf down T-bone steak/ Wolf down cancer of the prostate,” he retorts, before the climax of weird screams and squiggles of noise reaches a crescendo as he proudly declares: “I’d never kill or eat an animal/ And I never would destroy this planet I’m on/ Well, what do you think I am? A man?” For so long, Morrissey has felt ostracised by his peers; now, if the alternative is thuggish knuckle-dragging, he’s decided he’s not all that fussed about claiming that place in the human race after all.