Vast chunks of Morrissey's early lyrics and design work borrow (or should that be 'steal'?) so much from the literary influences of his younger days that The Smiths and early-solo-period Moz act as a kind of bizarre longform English lecture. (Bibliophile fans may wish to pause for a moment to imagine Moz passing out tatty school copies of Up The Junction whilst saying "pay attention, there will be a test later. But first, A Taste of Honey performed as an abstract music piece with Guitar and Voice") Oscar Wilde's name is dropped frequently in articles about Moz, perhaps most tellingly in the rapid-fire pen portraits of photo captions or listings information asides, e.g. "the Oscar Wilde of the barios is back", or "Morrissey, Levenshulme's answer to Oscar Wilde". Wilde is readily assumed to somehow have a place in Moz's esteemed inspirational canon because... well... just because.

Which is odd, because Wilde can't really be termed a literary influence on him at all. There's no evidence anywhere that Moz has adapted Wilde's prose style in any of his lyrics (which is a good thing too as it's far too high-falutin'... where Moz uses the word 'butterfly', Wilde would have felt compelled to name the precise species) and Wilde's areas of interests in areas of the arts such as Greek classicism are way off Moz's cultural radar. Wilde's prose is full of characters and situations so far removed from the Morrissey sphere (well-to-do men and women exchanging witty remarks in elegant domestic spaces) that it's almost impossible to imagine someone less immediately influential. The favoured Wildean word weapon, the aphorism, echoes in many of Moz's interview statements, and the doom-laden message of 'De Profundis' might have a parallel in the melodrama of early Smiths material particularly (sinister rocking cradles, jumped-up spurned love, lovers being pinned and mounted), but that's a stretch. Interview-wise, Wilde could only really be termed an influence if we seriously considered that Moz practiced his answers in advance, seeing them as just another part of his job. While you can certainly believe that of his imitators (Martin Rossiter's sub-Moz drag act in any mid-90s issue of Melody Maker for instance), Morrissey himself appears to be behaving utterly genuinely, his massive brain and sharply honed sense of timing simply working far ahead of his interrogators. It's probably true to say that Moz can be compared with Wilde in the way he uses words as an aesthetic for self-defence, or attack, but it's hard to shake off the suspicion that many journalists use the Wilde comparison because, hey, he's a poof who knows long words, so he must be like Oscar Wilde, right?

(On a tangent, Stephen Fry, the cuddly Moz from a parallel universe, was wheeled onto TFI Friday once to get laughed at by Chris Evans because he actually, gasp, had a favourite word. This was about the same time Fry was finally getting his Wilde biopic made, and some time after Evans had invited a self-confessed "raving Soho queen" into the studio to be roundly mocked in a "but-he-calls-HIMSELF-a-queen!" fashion by the likes of Danny Baker. It wasn't quite the Marquis of Queensbury court case but let's just say it caught British pop culture's less flattering side. Hell, Richard and bleedin' Judy gave Fry and his movie more respect.)

So, not a literary influence at all then, but that isn't to say Oscar wasn't an influence at all. Oscar Wilde, as a character and a self-copyrighted invention (and like Moz an Irish export determined to out-English the English) has understandably fascinated many a bookish young boy and girl since he first scandalised society by being not only Alien, but cleverer, wittier and more fiercely (by being more casually) convinced he was right in everything he said or did than his establishment peers. In other words, by being the original Ambitious Outsider. Moz may admire Wilde's writings - his poetry, his criticism, his essays, his stories and plays. Then again he might not. By contrast we definitely know that he admired the work of, say, Delaney because there's demonstrable evidence of that in his lyrics. Wilde's sole presence in the Smiths canon is as a terrible pun title to an instrumental track, and he only crops up in the solo years as a reference, a ghost, in certain photographs (the hand-scrawled 'I have nothing to declare but my jeans', or the 'Campus Oscar Wilde' boxer shorts in Morrissey Shot).

It's far more likely that Moz loves Wilde just ('just'!) for what he implies, for what he stood for (and still stands for). In striding around his teenage Manchester with long coat and flowing hair, might not Moz have been conceivably cultivating a Wildean image? (when those unintentionally hilarious pictures are shared by fans today it's usually assumed that it's a Bowie/Dolls thing, but wouldn't it be more Morrissey-like to take as his inspiration somebody old-fashioned, dead and literary? Also, it was around this time he was cultivating his waspish conversational style in his bedroom journalism, so maybe this contradicts what I said earlier about his literary debt to Wilde. Is this the link we're after, a conversational or journalistic influence rather than a lyrical one?) Even in this day and age, Wilde serves as a rough template that can be adopted and adapted by those who set about experimenting with their own relationship to the world (and to words); those who have decided, or had decided for them, that they possess a cultural otherness and that they must use it, like Wilde did, as both disguise/mask and as a weapon. This might explain Moz's attraction to the man. Albert Finney, member of the hallowed Cover Stars club, starred in the 90s film A Man of No Importance which used Wilde as a metaphor for precisely this sort of thing. (Finney's character was a Wilde fanatic and closeted gay man who finds self-acceptance only by admitting his otherness - at first he does this over-literally, by dressing up as Wilde to go "feasting with panthers", then later by opening up to his sister and his friends. The 90s was a good time to be a TV-viewing Wilde fan, incidentally - there were myriad documentaries, mostly on the BBC, including one by Michael Bracewell that approached Wilde as 'the first pop star'.)

In one particularly famous early magazine photo we see Moz on his back, happily surrounded by his collection of Wilde books. It resembles nothing less than an illustration for a newspaper story - 'Bookshelves Fall on Man. Man Dies (Happy)'. This is, nakedly, Wilde as an object of fan worship. In the photograph Morrissey can be seen gleefully and unapologetically transforming a favourite author into a fetish, just as many of us do with Moz himself. What matters in the photo isn't that he admires Wilde's works, that is to say - not his works purely, otherwise why have a shelf so full of multiple editions of the same texts? What matters is that Moz has identified Wilde as his fan favourite, and once a fan identifies such an object, the process of fetishising that object begins, by collecting and collating as much as possible about that fetish in an obsessive, instinctive (and only slightly perverse) drive to get somehow closer to it, ideally to merge with it or become it/him/her (certain obvious comparisons with Moz fandom need not be made at this point! But interestingly Moz is one fan who has, in a way, succeeded in getting nearer to/becoming his idol, in that like Wilde he is now a bona fide icon.)

It's not that Wilde is of relevance to Moz fans only from this fan perspective, and it's not as if Wilde is some flamboyant footnote purely in a Smiths biography. His 'Aphorisms for Use by the Young' are camp, iconoclastic jabs at consensus morality that ideally should be included in every school syllabus (but of course aren't). The Portrait of Dorian Gray is an uncanny fantasy that can freak out even the modern reader with its transgressive and subtly implied body horror, and it even acts as an evil twin to Wilde's own work, in that the settings are the same as ever (drawing rooms, mostly) but the situations enacted in those settings are creepily different. It's interesting to note that in the years since Morrissey first twirled his way menacingly into the public consciousness, the literary academia that helped keep Wilde alive has in some small way followed him... and just as most contemporary books on Noel Coward seem obliged to mention his influence on the Pet Shop Boys, Morrissey and The Smiths can often be found pirouetting proudly in the index of most discerning Wilde biographies.

Only his genius, indeed.