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To mark the return of Morrissey and the release of his Greatest Hits, we go back 20 years to the unveiling of his first solo album Viva Hate. In these excerpts from a fascinating 1988 conversation, Simon Reynolds quizzes the ex-Smiths frontman about hate, Englishness, the 1970s, and the execution of Margaret Thatcher. Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director

Viva Hate feels implausibly fresh: the music's breathing again, free of a certain stuffiness and laboriousness that had set in seemingly irreversibly in the Smiths' twilight period. All due respect to Johnny Marr (though the haircuts never get better...) but, like most people "blessed" with skill, there was a tendency to be used by one's versatility rather than use it. Songs were getting written to accommodate guitar conceits, pointless feats and smotheringly unnecessary elaboration. With his producer's rather than instrumentalist's sensibility, Stephen Street is inclined to give a song only what it needs. And I never much cared for the bumptious, muscular side of The Smiths--"What Difference Does It Make," "I Started Something I Couldn't Finish" anyway--so I welcome the spaciness Vini Reilly brings as new guitarist, whether it's the lurid wig-out of "Alsatian Cousin" or the dew-and-moonbeam ECM iridescence of "Late Night, Maudlin Street."

What do you feel about the album? Whenever you have a new record out, you generally opine that it's the best thing you've ever done...

"It's quite different for me now--and this might sound absurd--but there really isn't anything to judge it against. Times are very different and my life has moved on, since the Smiths, in very specific ways, and Viva Hate is in no way the follow-up to Strangeways, Here We Come. So in a sense I do feel that it is the first record."

Are these changes personal, or artistic...?

"Certainly in a personal way, it's entirely changed. All the people that surrounded me 12 months ago have entirely changed, whether it's the group, the people around the Smiths, or Rough Trade. Practically everybody that surrounds me now wasn't there a year ago. And, yes, I'm very pleased with what I find."

Stephen Street is one constant, though...

"But working with Stephen as a producer is quite different from writing with him, and even his personality has changed dramatically, within this sphere; he's more relaxed, and more exciting."

What are the respective merits of Marr and Street?

"Johnny was very hard, as a musician: he played in a very interesting, aggressive way. Stephen does not. But the gentle side of Stephen is something I find totally precious."

Why Viva Hate? What's the thinking behind the title?

"Like many other titles, it simply suggested itself and had to be. It was absolutely how I felt post-Smiths and the way I continue to feel. That's just the way the world is. I find hate omnipresent, and love very difficult to find. Hate makes the world go round."

Does that sadden you? Or do you have a need to hate? Is hate one of the things we do to reinforce the sense of our own identity, our separateness?

"I do find people quite hateful, naturally. I think people feel hate very easily, and they need it in their lives, they need to distrust and to criticize."

Is that bad? Natural?

"Well, it's just there, really. But then I always thought the human race was very, very over-rated--by rock critics generally."

What is this love/hate relationship you have with Englishness?

"There are very few aspects of Englishness I actually hate. I can see the narrowness, and love to sing about it. But I don't hate Englishness in any way. All aspects of affluence, I find very interesting and entertaining. And it's still, I feel, cliché as it may seem, the sanest country in the world."

On the same subject, there's the line in "Bengali In Platforms": "Shelve your Western plans/And understand/That life is hard enough when you belong here." Don't you think the song could be taken as condescending?

"Yeeeees... I do think it could be taken that way, and another journalist has said that it probably will. But it's not being deliberately provocative. It's just about people who, in order to be embraced or feel at home, buy the most absurd English clothes."

"An ankle star that blinds me... a lemon sole so very high..." - this is the first of the many '70s references that permeate the album. Presumably your adolescence always was conterminous with the '70s... but why have you now started to make explicit references to power-cuts and suedeheads? Why is it that you and everyone else have embarked on this reassessment of that decade, all at the same juncture?

"It's a great accident. I just felt the need to sing about 1972."

So what was the zeitgeist, the vibe?

"The '70s were like two decades, really, the first half and the second were like two different times. And obviously the middle was dreadful. The first half was curious. Obviously it was still very much linked to the '60s, an extension of them. But [the] glam rock explosion was, for me, fascinating. It had never happened before and that made it so intriguing and so despised. And then, in the mid-'70s, it became discofied and easy and American. And then, in the late '70s, there was once again that sense of great obstreperousness, which made life so interesting--which it hasn't been since. There was a great deal of talent and imagination and that doesn't happen very often. It was also very privately English, which I thought was very helpful, because, once again, it was a matter of the rest of the world catching up with England, instead of the reverse. And it was a national thing, it brought the provinces alive, and people began to focus on Manchester and other places in a very intense way. Punk was very fair."

"Where the world's ugliest boy became what you see here, I am--the world's ugliest man". Isn't that a little coy? You must be fairly confident about your looks, by now?

"Well, thank you, but no--if I see a picture of myself in a magazine, I quickly press on and get to the classified ads. And if by some quirk I see myself on television, I instantly change channels."

The line "Women only like me for my mind" is clever...

"It's the final complaint, I suppose, in the long list of complaints about the past."

The last track on Viva Hate is a rueful little ballad with the self-explanatory title "Margaret On The Guillotine," which describes "the wonderful dream" (ie, the gory and spectacular public execution of our P.M.) that all "the kind people" harbour. The chorus, repeated five times, is the plaintive, rhetorical question: "When will you die?" You realise all of this will cause you no end of trouble?

"Anything that's very clear-cut and very strong causes difficulty, doesn't it? But why should it? I'm not looking for attention. In this case, attention is the last thing I really need. I don't want to be in the Daily Mirror. There is something in this above controversy and outrage and all these over-familiar words. It's too easy to be controversial."

So you mean it? You'd like to see her dead?

"Instantly."

In a cruel, bloody sort of way?

"Yes."

Would you carry out the execution?

"I have the uniform ready."

Read more Morrissey/Smiths articles, and hear an audio interview with the great man, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.

Simon Reynolds' Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop is published by Faber. His Blissout blog is at www.blissout.blogspot.com