In 1987 a troubled young man carrying a handgun walked into his local radio station in Denver, Colorado, and took the disc jockeys and producers hostage. Cowering and terrified, they asked him if he had any demands that they could try to satisfy. The answer they received was unexpected: he wanted them to play records by a four-piece Mancunian band called The Smiths, whose lead singer, Morrissey, like to pose for press photos sitting next to graveyard headstones that bore his name. For more than four hours, the airwaves of the American Midwest were filled with songs such as Half a Person or Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.

Mark Simpson believes that if Steven Morrissey had many strange fans, they were only responding to his own strangeness. Born in Manchester in 1959 to working-class Irish Catholic parents, he was a shy boy, clever but unacademic, who spent most of his time locked in his bedroom firing off letters to national music papers, listening to 1960’s girl bands, and writing wildly enthusiastic books about James Dean and those early glam-punks the New York Dolls. His own records, co-written with the guitarist Johnny Marr, were hyper-literate, spectacularly introverted and drenched in bitter sweet nostalgia.

Morrissey was the first pop star to tell the world that the best days lay in the past. Record sleeves featured the likes of Viv Nicholson and pat Phoenix. He sang about loneliness, incompletion and sexual longing with a candour and wit that listeners felt as lightening bolts to the heart. He waved gladioli on stage. Where other star spoke of orgiastic excess, he proclaimed himself celibate and a vegetarian. His persona was spectacularly ordinary, from the unassuming name of his band to his NHS specs and Johnny Ray-style hearing aid. His lyrics invoked Keats and Yeats, and were life-affirmingly morbid: “If a double-decker bus rashes into us / To die by your side is a heavenly way to die.”

The Smiths were seen as both sexually threatening and as making music for wallflowers and blubberers. You could get beaten up a school for liking them. Mainstream media shunned them, not least because they recorded for an independent label and refused to make videos. Yet they were also a lifetime for many isolated, yearning teenagers. Morrissey represented an alternative 1980’s, the antithesis of the glossy, overblown, success-at-all-costs ethos of Duran Duran or TV series such as Capital City. “Rejoice!” proclaimed Thatcher. “No, thank you,” said Morrissey, before writing the song Margaret on the Guillotine.

Damon Albarn formed Blur after watching a South Bank Show about him. Jonathan Coe, Douglas Coupland and Willie Russell have all written novels that quote copiously from his lyrics. In 2002 New Musical Express voted him the “most influential artist ever”. Now Mark Simpson has written a “psycho-bio” of the man he calls “the greatest ever lyricist of desire”. It’s an amusingly partisan work, glistening with hyperbole and extravagant phrases, but always acute, especially when it comes to the topic of Morrissey and national identity.

For after The Smiths split in 1987, Morrissey’s solo career was going great guns until he appeared on stage in front of a bunch of skinhead fans while draped in a Union Flag. The music press crucified him as a racist, citing songs such as The national Front Disco. His career never recovered and he eventually relocated to Los Angeles. Simpson sees him as a modern-day Oscar Wilde, another self created, gay artist of Irish descent who behaved like an intellectual aristocrat, delivered brilliant epigrams and was ultimately exiled from England.

Controversially, Simpson also compares him to Margaret Thatcher, a fellow “rebel-patriot with chips on both shoulders, whose resentment against the British-English Establishment was a strong, if not stronger than her love for England”. She believed in Victorian values; Morrissey imaginatively in thrall to the black-and-white world of terrace houses, kitchen-sink drama and early Coronation Street. Simpson compares him to Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett, “Northern artists who did something very few other writers bothered to do before them: they listened to the way northern women talk”.

Morrissey devotees who want to read scrupulously researched accounts of the genesis and recording of individual songs would do well to stick to Simon Goddard’s The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life. And for a creative take on how The Smiths saved the life of an American teenager it’s worth reading Joe Pernice’s touching Meat is Murder. But it’s Simpson’s book that is the most provocative. The Ecstasy-fuelled club culture of the 1990s had little time for someone who celebrated repression and bedsit melancholy and who hated most dance music. But dance music itself has waned in importance recently. With the release in April of his first album in seven years, Morrissey may find his time has come again: ol’ big-mouth always said it would.