He had successfully passed through rehab, and was now grappling with a vast number of songs planned for his sixth solo album. But when the magazine visited the singer-songwriter at his home studio in the city, they were confronted by an unusually bright Smith.

Under The Radar’s journalist repeated worse rumours, chiefly that Smith had been found out cold in an LA toilet, a needle hanging from his arm. “The whole spectacle’s so messy that you want to offer empathy,” the writer concluded, “but all you can do is watch. In early 2003, NME witnessed a show in LA that amounted to an excruciating “hour of false starts and rambling”.

Recently, though, he had struggled to even get through a gig without disintegrating. Smith’s long-term battles with heroin addiction and alcoholism, and the severe depressive episodes which had led to him being incarcerated in a mental hospital, were reasonably well-known. He hadn’t released a record for three years (since 2000’s ‘Figure 8’) and, in that time, dark tales about his condition had proliferated. In March 2003, Elliott Smith gave what would turn out to be his last interview, to a small American magazine called Under The Radar.

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