Morrissey, Autobiography, first review - Telegraph My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets upon streets. As fans, we approach musical autobiographies with trepidation, fearing that, stripped of melody and rhythm, our lyrical heroes will reveal themselves in lumpen prose to be unremarkable artists and shallow thinkers. But from the opening lines of Morrissey's autobiography, as he evokes the grim backdrop of "Victorian knife-plunging Manchester" with relish, you know you are in good hands. Manchester is the old fire wheezing its last, where we all worry ourselves soulless, forbidden to be romantic. With typical pretension, Morrissey's first book has been published as a Penguin Classic. It justifies such presentation with a beautifully measured prose style that combines a lilting, poetic turn of phrase and acute quality of observation, revelling in a kind of morbid glee at life's injustice with arch, understated humour, a laughter that is a shadow away from depression or anger. As such, it is recognisably the voice of the most distinctive British pop lyricist of his era. It is certainly the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan's Chronicles, and like that book it evokes a sense of what it must be like to dwell within such an extraordinary mind. The Smiths don't make an entrance until a third of the way in, and their whole career is over in 75 pages. Given that he has been involved in long lawsuits with two of them and dismissed all notions of a reunion, Morrissey is surprisingly generous in descriptions of his band mates. Rather than descend into rancour, he sketches his mysterious break-up with co-writer Johnny Marr after four classic albums as being almost accidental, a product of exhaustion, happenstance and miscommunication. He saves score settling for others: teachers, record company bosses, judges (legal tribulations take up 50 pages) and Margaret Thatcher ("neither iron, nor a lady"). As in most musical autobiographies, it is the origin story that holds greatest fascination. The making of Morrissey unfolds in swift brushstrokes and pithy vignettes through the forces of quite disturbing working-class poverty and appallingly unsympathetic education, with only the warmth of a large Irish family as protection. The sympathy he gains sporting a bandage for a bad burn teaches him "all I shall ever need to know about attention and style." Music and television provided succour, and he writes elegantly about both, but the real revelation is how his fascination for poetry helped him develop such a distinctive voice, leading him from the sharp and cruel nonsense couplets of Edward Lear and Hilaire Belloc to Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Stevie Smith, WH Auden and John Betjeman, "a monument to the sadness of human virtue." I am not sure anyone is an entirely reliable narrator of his own life but Morrissey seems, at least, to have a comprehension of what makes him both so fascinating as an artist and difficult as a human being. He demonstrates how depressiveness and narcissism can be survival tactics without being so crass as to spell things out, noting, in passing, that "sadness is habit forming."