On Sunday, July 20, 1986, the Smiths performed at Salford University, a rather grim academic institution within walking distance of the centre of Manchester. The concert had been laid on for those unable to get in to the previous night's show at the 10,000-capacity G-Mex centre -and whereas that venue was cavernous and impersonal, this one was wonderfully intimate; the kind of place that, in commercial terms, the group had long outgrown.

I was 16 and a proud member of the passionate fan-cult that the band had spawned.

By some stroke of luck, four friends and I had got our hands on tickets for the Salford concert -and in anticipation of some sweat-soaked epiphany, we positioned ourselves just in front of the stage. Within the opening moments of the first song, however, we were frantically trying to push our way to the back of the hall.

To this day, I have never experienced anything like it: massed fervour that, in the midst of the heaving throng, felt little short of life-threatening. It certainly doesn't happen at Coldplay concerts.

That was the best part of 18 years ago. Mrs Thatcher was the Prime Minister, the singles chart was home to such irritants as Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red, and a new kind of conspicuous consumption -brick-sized mobile phones, red Ferrari GTOs -defined a large swath of pop culture. The Smiths, by contrast, were the flag-bearers for a different view of the world: fiercely left-wing (that year's album was entitled The Queen is Dead), in thrall to a vision of a damp, anti-climactic England, and keen to assure fans that -contrary to the 1980s' blow-waved garishness -to feel short-changed by life was only rational. "There's a club if you'd like to go," went a song called How Soon is Now?, "You could meet somebody who really loves you/ So you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own/ And you go home, and you cry and you want to die."

The words were written and sung, in tremulous, sensitive tones, by a Mancunian of Irish extraction named Steven Patrick Morrissey. If a good deal of the Smiths' success was down to the soaring melodies and arrangements provided by the guitarist Johnny Marr, nearly all the group's fans were Morrissey disciples, fond of his recommended reading and viewing material -Oscar Wilde, Allan Sillitoe, such gritty cinematic fare as Billy Liar and A Taste of Honey -and, when it came to the hardcore, staunchly vegetarian. The Smiths' second album was called Meat is Murder -I have friends who have not eaten flesh since its release.

Though his songs occasionally oozed a self-obsession that verged on the solipsistic, in outlining a life of crushed hopes and doomed romance -witness such songs as Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, Still Ill, and I Want the One I Can't Have -Morrissey spoke for his public. Not since David Bowie prompted suburban adolescents to toy clumsily with their gender identity by dyeing their hair orange and stealing mum's mascara had Britain seen such a devoted subculture; so, though the Smiths rarely made the Top Ten, they made a greater impact than almost all their contemporaries.

They split up in 1987, and Morrissey embarked on an up-and-down solo career, founded on a largely unchanged creative universe, that last bore fruit with a disappointing 1997 album entitled Maladjusted. The lion's share of his original followers have surely long since exited their box bedrooms and student garrets, and stopped fretting about the things -sex, relationships, self-esteem, you name it -that played a large role in drawing them to him. Yet their affection for Morrissey, shared by those who came to his music long after his artistic peak, is still palpable. Why else would this 44-year-old be in charge of Meltdown (his own two-week run of events at the Festival Hall in June), be about to play some of the largest British concerts of his career, and poised for a celebrated rock comeback? If, by the late 1990s, his solo career seemed to be stuck in an underachieving rut, the past seven years, in which he retreated to -of all places -Los Angeles and didn't record a note, have served him well; not simply in terms of a creative rest, but in leaving his home crowd to realise belatedly how much they have missed him.

The more awkward aspects of his post-Smiths progress have largely been forgotten: no one is reviving the controversy that erupted when his emphasis on Englishness led to onstage dancing with the Union Jack and a song called The National Front Disco, nor to dredge up the 1996 court case, brought by the Smiths' former drummer, in which a judge concluded that Morrissey was "devious, truculent and unreliable".

In one of those turnarounds traceable to both the simple passage of time and the eternal British talent for smothering any lingering controversy in sentimentality, he is now hailed as a true cultural monarch; "the Mozfather", as the New Musical Express is now fond of calling him.

The other week, I was summoned to the West London HQ of Sanctuary Records to hear his new album. Entitled You are the Quarry, its sleeve features its author awkwardly cradling a machinegun, as if announcing that this time, he might just mean business. His record company is so concerned about bootlegs that critics are given just two hours in a listening bunker.

As drizzly Wednesdays in Kensington go, this was actually pretty thrilling: tapping into the love of the Smiths' music that has never much dimmed, and recalling my fondness for the cream of Morrissey's solo records, I had worked myself into a state of credulous excitement. Better still, the titles of the songs I was about to hear suggested that he might be in rude creative health: who else could fill an album with compositions called The World is Full of Crashing Bores, All the Lazy Dykes and I Have Forgiven Jesus?

As with much of his post-Smiths work, unfortunately, this new material isn't nearly as musically rich as the stuff of his glory days. Whereas Johnny Marr led the charge into music that could be melancholic, menacing, euphoric, breezily playful, Morrissey's solo work has tended to return, time and again, to a generic middle-ground that finds his supporting musicians approximating the Smiths, but conveying none of their virtuosic grandeur. On You are the Quarry, he's assisted by Jerry Finn, the sometime American producer of the huge-selling punk-pop band Blink 182 -who stuffs the music with the kind of surging guitar sound that MTV likes. It can invest the music with a simple power that makes up for its shortcomings; sometimes, however, one gets the sense of width winning out over quality.

This being Morrissey, the album's success is tied to his lyrics. "There is a theme," he recently announced, "and the theme is me." That comes as little shock - but whereas he first snared the attentions of his public by evoking a world much the same as the one in which they lived, 20 years of fame, not to mention living in California, have put him in a rather isolated place. "The critics who can't break you/ They sometimes help to make you," runs a self-pitying treatise on success entitled You Know I Couldn't Last. Earlier on, there is a no less self-referential piece called How can Anybody Know how I Feel? -but as long he is dispensing cold, unsympathetic stuff like this, the question answers itself. The component parts of his world -"legal eagles" and "accountants rampant", as his lyrics would have it -are his and his alone. Any poet who sidelines love and loss in favour of such arcana is in a perilous place.

Cut off from his beloved England, seemingly short of much to sing about besides his own affairs, his vocabulary often seems as prosaic as his subject matter. When he takes a rare glimpse out of his window and talks about the USA, we get this: "America/ It brought you the hamburger/ Well, America/ You know where you can shove your hamburger."

In the aforementioned The World is Full of Crashing Bores, he surveys the pop competition but can dispense nothing more ornate than "Thicker than pigsh**/ They're so scared of intelligence/ It might smear their lovely career."

When his attentions, inevitably, revert to himself, the air of thoughts scrawled in a fifth-form exercise book becomes overwhelming: "How can anybody say/ They know how I feel/ The only one around here who is me/ Is me."

After my allotted listen, I headed for the bus. The memory of that terrifying, thrilling Salford University experience was freshly pushed back to its rightful place -nestling next to the more remarkable episodes from my teenage years and only one of the couplets from You are the Quarry had stayed in my mind. The album's last words are these: "Your royalties bring you luxuries/ Oh, but the squalor of the mind."

The single Irish Blood English Heart is out on May 10 (Attack); You are the Quarry is out on May 17

The pope of mope

Hand in Glove (1983)

The Smiths' debut single and something of a manifesto: "If the people stare...I really don't care."

How Soon is Now? (1985)

"The Stairway to Heaven of the Eighties", according to the boss of their US record company. Johnny Marr's sumptuous arrangement and Morrissey's words combine perfectly.

There is a Light that Never Goes Out (1986)

From the Smiths' best album, The Queen Is Dead, a morbid obsession:

"If a double-decker bus/ Smashes into us,/ To die by your side/ Is such a heavenly way to die."

Everyday is Like Sunday (1988)

His wonderfully affecting second solo single, set in some hellish coastal resort and narrated with echoes of John Betjeman: "In the seaside town/ That they forgot to bomb/ Come, come, come, nuclear bomb."

We Hate it when our Friends Become Successful (1992) From the Your Arsenal album, Schadenfreude in reverse: "And if they're Northern, that makes it even worse." JH

(c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2004