CONTRARY to his miserable reputation, Steven Patrick Morrissey is a happy camper these days, certainly when it comes to his new album You Are The Quarry, which he say is 'absolutely the definitive Morrissey album.'

"I think it's the best I've ever done, absolutely," he recently observed. "Of course, only time will tell, but even at this stage, I've never felt so excited. I get myself home at night and I play it and I just feel fantastic. I am in love with life!"

The trouble with such assertions, of course, is that, more than ever, people start to pore over the lyrics on the album to try to find clues to the 'real' Morrissey.

"I'm actually an intensely private person, he says, "so juggling that with revealing interviews is very, very difficult for me. To be honest, I'd rather say nothing. I'd rather, absolutely, let the music speak for itself."

The album track Irish Blood, English Heart is, he says, "very self-explanatory. The lyrics are crushingly basic, no trickery involved. I'm not hiding a mysterious verse anywhere that hasn't been revealed to anybody.

"But there are lots of people in central Manchester who are of Irish heritage or have Irish parents but were first-generation English."

Such as, of course, Noel and Liam Gallagher. "Very like them, yes. We are a type and we refuse to be trampled on."

Morrissey was certainly at the receiving end of a certain style of 'trampling on' at the end of the mid-Nineties High Court case involving alleged non-payment of royalties to certain former members of The Smiths, when Judge John Weeks notoriously referred to him as 'devious, truculent and unreliable'.

"I coped by believing I would have enough resolve to pull myself out of the situation," he recently reflected. "I always believed there would be a better time ahead, and there was and there is."

Nonetheless, there is still a phenomenon that can only be described as `The Smiths industry' and, as he candidly admits, "lots of people won't let The Smiths die.

"I'm extremely proud of the music but people don't really talk about that and I find that very sad."

It wasn't that, though, or the bizarre accusations of racism that once dogged him in his solo career that prompted him to move to Los Angeles.

"It was simply time to change the furniture and change the landscape. I had to go somewhere reasonably far flung to meet my undiscovered nature, which I did - and what a shock that was! That's truly the best explanation I can give.

"Every second of life is about timing and the atmosphere of the present. You think the past is a place you can return to but it isn't.

Although they do say, don't they, also that it's never too late to have a happy childhood. But I suppose you could have that without returning to anywhere.

"You can have your childhood in a different place. It's never too late to rectify those nightmares in your mind.

"This strange life is just something we have to sit through and we just hope that somewhere along the line something exciting will happen to us.

"Most people hope for romance and that's really all that keeps most people going."

Morrissey is at the Manchester Evening News Arena on Saturday, May 22. Tickets are sold out.