Morrissey live is more prickly and guarded than Morrissey on record. This concert seemed designed to smother the hints of contentment he lets slip on his new album Ringleader of the Tormentors.

So there was no room in the setlist for “Dear God, Please Help Me”, a song in which rock’s most famous celibate outs himself as a sexual being (“Now I’m spreading your legs/With mine in between”). Instead we were treated to an old Smiths number, “Still Ill”, whose lyrics are more characteristically ambivalent about physical relationships: “Does the body rule the mind/Or does the mind rule the body?/I don’t know.”

The gig’s centrepiece was an ornate, moving rendition of Ringleader’s most self-pitying song, “Life Is a Pigsty” (majestic music, bathetic lyrics), which appeared to fit the singer’s frame of mind as he complained about radio stations refusing to play his songs and fretted needlessly about the venue’s sound quality. The fact that his new album has been well reviewed and went to number one in the UK charts seemed to offer not a jot of consolation. As a live performer, Morrissey is a curious mix of insecurity and narcissism, misanthropy and romanticism. He needs to feel both loved and unloved.

In his post-Smiths career, his persona has often proved more dramatic than his music. But Ringleader, produced in Rome by Tony Visconti, David Bowie’s former collaborator, is better than most of his solo records. Brought to life by a taut if none too subtle backing band, the swaggering, Led Zeppelin-style hard rock of “I Will See You in Far Off Places” and the T-Rex boogie of “In the Future When All’s Well” sounded vigorous and urgent, while Morrissey’s vocals were as fluid as ever. Ever the contrarian, his querulous mood and refusal to perform an encore failed to dampen proceedings. Despite himself, he put on a fine show. ★★★★☆

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