And with this, and a Bon-Jovi style bow before there’s even a note played, Morrissey appears in a commuter belt lesiure centre on the umpteenth date of his umpteenth tour, this time to support his umpteenth No.1 album. But all things aside, Moz really is a wilfully perverse bastard – as if he was anything but.

Twenty three years into his career, on his twenty third album, he’s chosen a long and arduous two month tour of suburban shitholes. At first baffling, but on closer inspection it’s a perfect choice - Moz, queen of the kitchen-sink-drama-as-modern-pop-song, and an unreconstructed traditionalist pining for an England that never existed – gets to spend months in his spiritual home, the derelict British town. Because no matter where you move, London, LA, or Lower Italia, you can’t escape from yourself. You can create a world around you, but you’ll always be the star in the bad movie called "Your Life". “You can never go to Hulme again”.

The Hexagon is a nondescript concrete lump on the edges of the city centre, set to the side of a shopping centre, and tonight adrift in rain. The perfect setting, one would think. With a miniscule capacity of around 1400, it can’t help but feel tiny. I’ve worked in offices bigger than this. In fact, the walk from my bedroom to my bathroom is longer than the one from the stage to the toilets here. During “At Last I Am Born”, I can move from front row to the toilet, have a conversation about football, and return to the front before the song finishes. It’s bafflingly small.

In many ways, it’s a way for Moz to create that most elusive and desirable of circumstances : the long sold-out, gone-in-an-instant tour. The type of thing that far too many bands do these days – play under demand, feed Ebay scum with inflated ticket prices, and send genuine fans into an apoplexy of rage when the ShitTickets.com server melts in the heat and only a fraction of fans are pleased pleased pleased to get what they want :the chance to exchange £32.50 for 75 minutes of Morrissey singing.

These things aside, aside from the knowingly ironic pop-art that adorns the venue (I doubt Moz has even had to play in the vicinity of a portrait of Mr T staring at him, or sell his incredibly overpriced T-Shirts underneath a Pop-art painting of David Hasselhoff before), it’s also apparent that for Reading, everyday is like a Sunday. The sadly provincial elements of the crowd perk up for the somewhat typical, slender selection of singles in tonights set four of Moz’s 33 solo singles are included, and the three Smiths songs are those which wake up the generally, oddly adorant atmosphere. People aren’t here for a concert : they’re here to worship Moz as if he were some kind of weird, skinny singing Jesus.

Later on, when he throws his shirt into the crowd during the final crescendo of “How Soon Is Now?”, it’s the site of a vicious, almost evil scrum. Imagine the gatefold to the Rank album, recreate live in front of your eyes, then add punching. It’s touching and also pathetic. Grown people fighting for a slice of clothing worn by a singer. In the olden days, the ladies would faint as the singer went down on one knee and wiped the sweat from his brow with a towel he would hand to them. Moz really is an intellectual elvis, fighting constantly between the demands of the body, and the lure of his mind, flitting like an errant lover between the body he’s trapped in and luxuriating in it, and the mind so rich and ready with ready wit. And I suppose, like Jesus, it’s not Moz I mind so much, but some of his so-called fans. His shirt however, cannot cure the lame - only the lảme.

Twatsatgigs.blogspot.com would have had a field day : behold Mr Glued-To-His-Missus-Charging-To-The-Front who seems to make a habit of whacking everyone around him as he waves his hands in the air. You would think he was drowning. Smell the two Breakfast-Club rejects in front of you with hair bigger than B-52’s. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt about Reading, judging from last night, it’s the brand of Shampoo every woman in the city uses : something sweet and acrid like strawberry napalm. Like a bomb shaped like a toy and painted in pretty colours in a field in an Asian warzone.

Aside from all this, the perverse choice of songs, the wilfully stubborn choice of venue, the provicinicial crowd, and the determined lack of atmosphere : if you must, compare the “Kill Uncle” tours, a joyous, wonderful celebration of a returning hero, to this : just another gig in a town hall.

And yet.. and yet… Morrissey himself is as good as he’s ever been. His band, coiled like a spring, ready to pounce with a venom and a telepathy that comes only from years in battle. And the man himself : he preens and pirouettes, his voice, a wonderful, otherworldly instrument that uses words the way a painter creates with a brush. During the jaunty singalong of “Girlfriend In A Coma”, the deadpan humour of the moment, the tragedy of the moment, makes it one of the wittiest and most important songs ever written. That in the darkest night, Moz can see the light. And in the summers day, he can see the darkness of the coming evening.

Whilst the set is topheavy with selections from his new album, “Ringleader of The Tormentors”, the new material is executed with a brilliant aplomb : the only two gripes are not the quality of the songs, nor the performance, but the songs not yet chosen (nothing from the first 9 albums of his solo career). And the length : at 75 minutes in length, tonights performance is most definitely that of a clock-watcher.

But to complain about the lack of quantity is to be churlish : the quality compensates for this. And nothing that star that sings twice as bright sings half as long.  Despite the curtness of the set and the perverse surroundings of tonights performance, the preening, pouting Thinking Man’s Northern Sinatra that is Morrissey is a genius despite himself.

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