So the Smiths split, and then there’s the solo career with its boxer/villain æsthetic, and the court case where Smiths drummer Mike Joyce squeezes a million pounds out of “devious, truculent and unreliable” Morrissey (the judge’s words) and the music press flap about skinhead imagery and waving the flag (“My lawyers are poised,” an unrepentant Morrissey tells the NME), then the sweaty and hysterical US tours, the incomprehensibly adoring Latino fan base, and finally the strangest apparition of all: the exile nibbling toast in his LA mansion that looks, in Simpson’s words, “like a gingerbread windmill.” For Simpson, Morrissey is a world-historical figure: the Last Popstar, and possibly the Last Englishman. The fraught and delicate condition of Englishness, dynamited first by Thatcherism and then by Ecstasy, is deceased, its remains being curated exclusively by Morrissey. So his argument runs, and the fact that I disagree with it entirely did not interfere in the slightest with my enjoyment of his book.

It might have interfered a bit, however, with my enjoyment of the new Morrissey album, his eighth, Ringleader of the Tormentors (Sanctuary; out April 4), recorded in Italy and written with the assistance of new guitarist Jesse Tobias. All Morrissey’d up, as it were, by Simpson, in a big lather of Morrissey-hood, I listened to Ringleader with pointy ears and found it to be . . . ghastly. Ghastly! The production by Tony Visconti, who in his prime worked with Bowie and Bolan, made no sense to me at all: cruelly shrill singing children, cack-handed allusions to his illustrious past (like the T. Rex chug that opens “In the Future When All’s Well”), random splashes of Ennio Morricone, and an outsize Moz voice horning through the mix, flapping dirty-sheet lines like “I see the world, it makes me puke.” And no tunes. Tunes, Morrissey, tunes! Like “Dagenham Dave.” Remember?

But I was going at it all wrong. You mustn’t listen to Morrissey in the context of himself: you must listen to him in the context of everything else, of KFC and James Frey and The Apprentice. Silhouetted against universal stultification, Morrissey regains his magnificence. Who but he can saunter the streets and piazzas of Rome, tremendously serenading his own balls? “There are explosive kegs/Between my legs,” he sings, with real feeling, in “Dear God, Please Help Me.” Ringleaders does suffer from a lack of hooks. “The Youngest Was the Most Loved” has a good one — “We hid him from the world’s glare/And he turned into a KILL-ER” — and the single “You Have Killed Me” reveals itself upon third or fourth listen to be a stone-cold Moz masterpiece: “As I live and breathe/You have killed me, you have killed me/Yes I walk around somehow/But you have killed me, you have killed me.”

But elsewhere Visconti allows his man a windy, decompassed latitude — the band thrash and wallow through glam chunkiness, scuffling Mozzabilly, and torch-song sprawl, and the singer goes yodeling off into solipsism. “The Father Who Must Be Killed,” some sort of abuse/homicide drama or Oliver Stone operetta, may be the worst Morrissey song ever. “Just as motherless birds fly high/Then so shall I.” Good Lord. “Life Is a Pigsty” improves things somewhat, as the Moz appears undecided as to the wearing of a cardigan: on or off? “I’m too cold/Now I’m too warm again/Can you please stop this pain?” The closing track, “At Last I Am Born,” sprinkled with space squelch and creaking, dislocated Morricone strings, is simply very, very odd. “The spectral hand . . . blah blah blah,” mutters Morrissey into an echo box, as his band search half-heartedly for that elusive resolving chord. In a couple of weeks I might think it’s fantastic.