Recording for the album commenced in late August 2005 in Rome, Italy. Mixing began in late October 2005. Initially, Morrissey was to record the album with producer Jeff Saltzman; however, he could not undertake the project. Producer Tony Visconti, of T. Rex and David Bowie fame, took over the production role and Morrissey announced that Ringleader of the Tormentors is to be "the most beautiful—perhaps the most gentle—so far". Visconti wrote on his website: "We have been working on the music and each day it just sounds better and better. I find every musician in the band a joy to work with. Morrissey's vocals are passionate and confident. Right now I'm at the mixing stage and most of the musicians have gone home. I am two-thirds of the way through one of the best albums I've ever worked on, with not only Morrissey at his best, but the plot has twists and turns which somehow involve film composer Ennio Morricone and an Italian children's choir. That should whet your appetite, you Moz fans, you!"
The album opener "I Will See You in Far-Off Places" had grinding glam guitars and a couple of waspish one-liners. The second track "Dear God Please Help Me" proceeded with a stately, lovely piano figure, a funereal organ and the image of Morrissey strolling through his adopted hometown of Rome in the usual melancholy haze, "so very tired of doing the right thing". Thinking about the metaphor here of Mozza testicles, "Dear God," he adds, as indeed you might if you were trying to walk through the Eternal City while suffering from distended testicles, "please help me."
The brilliant "You Have Killed Me" where Mozza compared himself to film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who compellingly illustrated the downside of trawling the vias for a shag, when a bit of rough trade he picked up in Ostia ran him over with his own Alfa Romeo. Much of Ringleader of the Tormentors was given over to fretting about the effect that admitting sexual satisfaction - or, apparently more disastrous still, love - might have on Morrissey's image. "I am the same underneath," protested the album's remarkable centrepiece for many, "Life Is a Pigsty," as if trying to reassure both his fans and himself. The following song titled "I'll Never Be Anybody's Hero Now." It's all a bit ridiculous - in the admittedly unlikely event that Morrissey was filmed throttling a kitten, thousands of fans would storm the chatrooms claiming it was the kitten's fault - but nevertheless, this seems to have inspired some of his most impressive songs in years.
Then the "At Last I Am Born" was a fabulously overblown, deliriously joyful closer. Here, as a way to separate from "You Are The Quarry", the violins are not only real, but scored by Ennio Morricone. T Rex producer Tony Visconti lends everything a muscular authority. They have even splashed out on a children's choir, who turn The Youngest Was the Most Loved's refrain - "there is no such thing in life as normal" - into something impossibly moving.
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