The gladioli are in flight. On the stage of the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, a slender man in heavy 1950s style eye-glasses, floral shirt, white jeans and pompadour hairdo is energetically hurling a bunch of gangly blooms into the audience whilst singing something about spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. In the auditorium, tough-looking twenty-somethings in cuffed jeans, baseball boots and voluminous quiffs, sing word-perfectly along, their eyes shining as they strain to catch the somersaulting stems like blushing bridesmaids outside a country church.

Gradually, the adoration turns into unabashed devotion, as people try to clamber onto the stage. Those that make it past the heavy-set bouncers cling desperately onto their pop idol like lepers begging for a miracle. As the singer up on stage leads the bacchanal of flailing bodies in a rousing chorus of “Hang the DJ! Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ!” the scene resembles something of a cross between a room full of lagered-up soccer hooligans and The Sermon on the Mount.

Displays of unencumbered emotion have been a regular characteristic of pop concert audiences ever since Elvis scuffed his Blue Suede Shoes. Watch virtually any piece of crackly live concert footage of the Beatles and you’ll witness at least one young woman behaving like a latter-day, mascara-bedribbled Julian of Norwich — the Medieval mystic who passed out every time she thought she saw Jesus. Scenes of rabid fans clawing the clothes off a pop star or trying to rush the stage are as unremarkable as spotting the words “Radiohead Rules” or “My Bloody Valentine Forever” scrawled in permanent marker on a scruffy schoolbag.

But the aura surrounding Morrissey, vocalist and wordsmith of 1980s British pop group The Smiths, now turned solo artist, is of a wholly (holy) different order. In the wake of the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, which film spawned renewed debate about the cultural appropriation of religious icons in pop culture, this aging and comparatively marginal British singer is blurring the lines between what it means to be a pop icon and a religious icon.

Morrissey is hardly a household name. Despite becoming well-known as lead singer of The Smiths, a band that during its shortish lifespan between 1983 and 1987 put out five bestselling albums and 14 hit singles and achieved an ardent following in both the US and the UK, Morrissey has never come close to assuming the Bard-like magnitude of a Bob Dylan or David Bowie.

Yet whatever Morrissey does on stage seems to take on a symbolic life of its own: back in the days of The Smiths, fans waved gladioli or daffodils...