On December 11, 1996, the High Court of Justice ruled that Smiths drummer Mike Joyce was entitled to 25% of the band’s mechanical royalties. It was the culmination of seven years’ legal wrangling, during which bassist Andy Rourke — who was once dismissed from the band due to his heroin addiction — settled for a lump sum and 10% in perpetuity. Joyce argued that, while there was no doubting Morrissey’s and Marr’s roles as primary songwriters, the band’s royalties and concert profits were paid into a company, Smithdom Limited; as one-fourth of the band, he asserted that he had rights to one-fourth of the profits. After a well-publicized trial in which Morrissey proved alternately evasive and combative upon examination, the judge agreed. A number of the next day’s headlines gleefully quoted the judge’s opinion that Morrissey was “deviant, truculent and unreliable.” Of the major papers, only the Guardian ran a photo of co-defendant Johnny Marr.

Combined with 1995’s less-than-triumphant tour with David Bowie — in which Morrissey played for half-empty arenas — and a singles release skein, which Morrissey considered bungled, that couldn’t place any song in the top 20, this was enough to put Mozz in a rotten mindstate. Yet Maladjusted is, on the whole, a standard Morrissey midperiod success whose reputation was perhaps scotched by one notorious track. While not as ambitious in structure as Southpaw Grammar, the now-veteran songwriting team of Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer offered reliably robust arrangements with more than a couple nods to the aging Britpop scene. Whyte dominates the record, in fact, composing seven tracks, including the festival-size anthem “Trouble Loves Me” and the defiant, galloping “Alma Matters,” marred by a chintzy synth hook in the refrain.

The strongest sonic link to the previous record, “Ambitious Outsiders,” is also a measure of how Morrissey had evolved as a songwriter since the Smiths. Where the maudlin “Suffer Little Children,” written about the infamous Moors Murders, was sung as if from the victims — a disembodied conscience, passing judgment on Manchester — “Ambitious Outsiders” is a tender screed sung by a child murderer. Sure, it’s grotesque, a crawly slice of chamber gauchery that wedges in elegant pizzicato and a bit of “I Am the Walrus”-style aural chaos. But bad taste still offers its own pungent charms. Not so, sadly, for “Sorrow Will Get You in the End,” a spoken-word re-prosecution of the Joyce suit that was left off the UK edition for fear of a libel suit. “You lied/ And you were believed/ By a J.P. senile and vile,” Mozz intones as Boorer tries to work a clarinet without the instruction manual. One imagines the singer pacing a richly furnished study, hurling a “Bigmouth Strikes Again” twelve-inch into a malevolently crackling fireplace. It is, by far, the worst thing he’s ever recorded.

One would think that the rest of the record would sound better by comparison, but that’s not how things work. A shame, too: for every “Wide to Receive,” a wilting-violet ballad with a mindboggling, first-grader-on-a-recorder solo, there’s “Ammunition,” wherein Steve Lillywhite flawlessly transitions a backmasked drum part into Whyte’s squalling guitar feature. The twinkling “Alma Matters” was the lead single, and it returned Morrissey to the Top 20. An eight-country, three-stage tour followed; after, Jonny Bridgwood and Spencer Cobrin quit, creatively and physically exhausted. Having moved Maladjusted from Mercury to Island in a vain attempt to get “Sorrow Will Come For You in the End” released in his native country, Morrissey ended the tour without a label. Undaunted, he recruited a new rhythm section and embarked on two major world tours. The first, the cannily named “Oye Esteban” tour, brought him to his South American fans for the first time. And throughout his hiatus, he enjoyed life as an expat, living semi-anonymously in Los Angeles, plotting his return.