The story goes like this: sometime in the autumn of 1987, Stephen Streetsubmitted some very basic demos to Morrissey with the suggestion that he mightwant to use them for his first solo record. But the demos were so simplisticand banal that they were unusable, and so Vini Reilly was drafted in to polishthem up and help turn them into songs. The album was recorded, Street got fullcomposing credits for the music and Reilly was paid £800 for his work; a fairlyreasonable sum by 1988 standards but nowhere near what he should have received.For his own part, Reilly is sanguine; interviewed in Rogan’s Morrissey And Marr: The Severed Alliance,he says that the songs weren’t up to much and that he wasn’t asked to doanything particularly challenging – his view was that getting in a decentsession guitarist would have done just as well.

One could say that Morrissey is key in terms of raising Viva Hate out of the seabed of banality;his vocals on the record are among the most playful he ever offered, and whilesome Smiths songs, even at their best, sometimes resembled blurred photographsof pop songs rather than the thing itself, “Everyday Is Like Sunday” is amajestically frightening pop record – the “strange dust” landing on “your handsand on your face” (Morrissey’s “you”s throughout the record can be interpretedas a conversational “you,” meaning “himself”) reminds us that the song’scentral inspiration was not Betjeman on Slough but Nevil Shute’s On The Beach. On this coast, theapocalypse has already happened, and he is the glumly stumbling survivor.

Equally, “Late Night, Maudlin Street” is one of the first andbest of Morrissey’s habitual long-form meditations on love and history. DrummerAndrew Paresi in particular never settles for the obvious beats here; theoverall impression is that of an indie rejoinder to John Martyn’s “Small Hours,”though filled with entirely comprehensible lyrics which, like so much of Viva Hate, concern themselves withsaying farewell to, burying and running as far away and as quickly as possiblefrom the past ('1972, you know'). And “Alsatian Cousin” is perhaps the most disturbing and radicalbeginning of any Morrissey record, Reilly (and Street’s) atonal industrial hiphop scrapheap soundtracking a keenly and desperately echoed vocal in which thesinger seems intent on exorcising all demons, including those van and cardrivers – those semi-spoken incidents - referred to in the record’s othersongs, including the one about the forgotten sixties television star, which in light of what we now know is perhaps the record's scariest song as well as its shortest (the chunky Duane Eddy guitar underscoring the '1969, ATV' references suggest somebody in Crossroads).

What the album isn’t, however – not even “Everyday Is LikeSunday” – is a band record. Would Viva Hate have sounded any different, oreven have existed, had the Smiths continued? The band who recorded Strangeways was a band clearly at theend of its tether. The problem with VivaHate lies in its presumed advantages; Morrissey free of the Smiths, on amajor record label with larger recording and marketing budgets than Rough Trade– the single of “Suedehead” charted higher than any Smiths single had managed in its first week of release – but alsoa Morrissey without a Marr, without anybody to check his lesser instincts.There are no more “cover stars”; merely the man himself.

And so Viva Hatesounds simultaneously indulgent and tentative; the singer is clearly unsurewhere to go, and so we get routine sub-Smiths offerings like “Dial-a-Cliché” or“Angel Angel,” whose “Eleanor Rigby” strings introduce an element ofsentimentality that had been entirely absent from the Smiths’ work, or “TheOrdinary Boys” which only engages attention by virtue of Reilly’s nearlyunhinged guitar work (which Lena compared to a “very compressed Eddie van Halen”).“Break Up The Family” trudges over wearily familiar Morrissey mores to a lightAoR background that could almost be latter-day Fleetwood Mac.

However, Viva Hateis also a record filled with threat. It is hard to discern what exactly “Suedehead”is about – pace the video, itcertainly isn’t about James Dean – other than the singer desperately and vainlytrying to dissuade somebody else from looking at his diary. The pages are read,the illustrations are seen, the truth is revealed, the person presumablyrecoils in horror, and so Morrissey is left to croon “It was a good lay, goodlay” with some embarrassment. But it doesn’t grip the listener.

Whereas “Margaret On The Guillotine” is out of keeping witheverything the Smiths had stood for. The song sounds like “Meat Is Murder” butwhere Morrissey had once sung “This beautiful creature must die,” he now booms “Pleasedie.” Finding he has little to say – although what he does say might be a crudecondensation of what most recent TPLentries have been covertly trying to say – he exits the picture and leavesReilly to turn the song into a Durutti Column piece, as backwards effectsslowly turn reality into dream, before an abrupt chop brings proceedings to aclose. But the song’s notion is an essentially foolish one.

And few songs in this tale carry more foolish notions than “BengaliIn Platforms” which is the album’s stumbling block that I cannot get past. Itis what Lena describes as “every shade of wrong” and actually throws the restof the record, and Morrissey himself, into deep question; if he wants Thatcher gone,is this what he proposes to put inher place? It is an idiotic piece of work which probably found favour in those thentwenty-something Oxbridge types who are now running, or plan to run, thecountry, and induces me to think: if you get this wrong, how and why should we trust you with anything else?Then I remember his comments in the 1986 MelodyMaker about the charts, the radio and black musicians, and one’s facefreezes. 1988 was a colourful, zany, rip-it-up-and-start-again year for music,and Morrissey felt and still feels out of place in its lit cloisters. Clearlythrown together rather quickly and superficially, Viva Hate, which made number one at a time when one of Morrissey’sspiritual ancestors, Kenneth Williams, had barely three weeks to live,represents the planting of a rather self-satisfied flag. Released in the sameweek, also on EMI, but only reaching number three, was Talking Heads’ finalalbum Naked, on which Johnny Marrcollaborated. Its air of colourful relaxation and engaging adventure contrastsrather starkly with Viva Hate’sdeterminedly monochromatic moonscape.