The original pop geek

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Morrissey with The Smiths

Last month, Coldplay's Chris Martin announced to a sell-out crowd at Earl's Court that his band's commercial triumph was proof "that geeks can succeed". But 20 year ago Morrissey, lead singer of The Smiths, became the first pop geek with his NHS spectacles and gladioli.

The first major indie band to cross over into the mainstream, The Smiths jemmied open the floodgates for future battalions of swaggering misfits. The affected androgyny of Suede's Brett Anderson, the nerdy gesticulations of Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and the world-weary paranoia of Radiohead's Thom Yorke all owe a debt to Morrissey's paradigm of the socially alienated pop-star weirdo.

Born in Manchester in 1959, Steven Patrick Morrissey's life reads like the ultimate nerd's revenge. While his teenage peers were out fumbling in the back seats of Ford Cortinas, the taciturn and reclusive Morrissey was alone in his bedroom, stewing himself in books and films. Those years of self-nurture bestowed The Smiths's repertoire with a literary wisdom that plunged far deeper than their Smash-Hits-cover-hogging peers.

In 1983, the year of the group's first single release, the competition was spiky-haired dross such as Kajagoogoo, who offered little more than Ooh To Be Aah. Morrissey, on the other hand, brought with him a vocabulary appropriated from early Sixties British kitchen-sink cinema, the poetry of Oscar Wilde and a rich seam of English literature.

Duran Duran would never score a hit that paraphrased George Eliot, as The Smiths did with How Soon Is Now? Nor can one imagine Spandau Ballet ever penning a homage to Virginia Woolf (1985's Shakespeare's Sister). Morrissey's was a new pop sensibility: highly literate, but with the common touch.

His critics would disparage this cultural looting as worthless plagiarism, whether it was the multiple steals from Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey (responsible for the Smiths line "I dreamt about you last night, and I fell out of bed twice") or the 1972 Michael Caine movie Sleuth (the root of the phrase "jumped-up pantry boy", later woven into the chorus of This Charming Man). Yet Morrissey never made any secret of his sources, excusing these and other appropriations as acts of "spiritual shoplifting".

If anything, he exploited his fame to promote such fancies like some unorthodox teacher, setting an esoteric curriculum for fans to investigate. Through the lyrics, and iconic "cover stars" who adorned each new record release, Morrissey - and The Smiths - gave us Jean Cocteau, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Smart and Billy Liar. Nik Kershaw offered his audience the snood. There really was no contest.

But what of Morrissey's subsequent fate? Sadly, recent events paint a particularly vulgar picture of the hellish catacombs within his perplexing psyche. Once the archest wit in pop, who dismissed the chart hierarchy of producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman as "Stock, Face-Ache and Waterbed", Morrissey's eccentricity is no longer a laughing matter.

The band broke up in 1987 at the peak of their artistry, forcing Morrissey to go solo. After an initial honeymoon period of even greater chart prosperity, his post-Smiths career of mixed critical and commercial fortunes finally ran aground at the end of the Nineties.

In 1996, a High Court judge labelled him "devious, truculent and unreliable" after it was revealed that, with co-writer and guitarist Johnny Marr, he had drawn up a contract that would deny bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce an equal share of performance monies. Joyce was awarded a reputed £1 million compensation. Seven years on, Morrissey has yet to pay up, insisting he was "a victim of British justice".

In an act of transatlantic ostracism, not witnessed since the self-imposed exile of Quentin Crisp, Morrissey relocated to Los Angeles, where he set himself up beyond the court's jurisdiction and has remained without a recording contract. Back in 1986 it would have been unthinkable for Morrissey to ever excuse himself from the pop rat-race for so long. As his hero Oscar Wilde noted, the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.

Maybe this is why, in the continued absence of a new album, he is instead treading water with a Channel 4 documentary (The Importance of Being Morrissey, to be shown in June), and the release of a various artists CD, Under the Influence, a selection of the music that inspired him.

From a man who once made The Smiths cover a rare Cilla Black B-side, it's a typically eclectic assortment, including tracks from Diana Dors and The Ramones. As an insight into his enigmatic mind-set, it's mesmerising; but a glorified mix-tape is scant substitute for an overdue return to the heights he once scaled as the greatest lyricist of his generation.

There is another twist in the Morrissey saga. Without a record deal, his cult status has survived on a fastidiously loyal international following centred on the unofficial US website, Morrissey-Solo.com. Three weeks ago, the site posted a story speculating that members of his road crew had yet to be paid for his world tour of 2002.

Morrissey is now suing Morrissey-Solo.com - effectively turning his wrath on the very constituency that has sustained him for the past six years, attacking his own fan-base for daring to suggest that he is anything other than an infallible messiah.

Heaven knows he really must be miserable now.

• Simon Goddard's The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life is published by Reynolds and Hearn. Morrissey Under the Influence is released by DMC on Monday.

 

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