Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

Marr wrote the music in an hour in a New York hotel room on 2 January 1984, on a red Gibson ES-355 that Seymour Stein had bought for him that day. He wrote the music for the B-side, Girl Afraid, the same evening, and the two were a pair. The song was Stephen Street's first session with the band, when he was an engineer at Island's Fallout Shelter studios. The title was inspired by Sandie Shaw's 1969 single Heaven Knows I'm Missing Him Now, and the cover shows Viv Nicholson, who won a large sum on the football pools in 1961.

Released in May 1984, it reached ten in Britain, their first top ten single, and it is on both Hatful of Hollow and Louder Than Bombs. The B-side of the single was Suffer Little Children. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lists it among its 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. Douglas Wolk of Pitchfork called it perhaps the most lighthearted song ever written about suffocating despair. The Guardian's Simon Hattenstone linked the band's reputation as pop's supreme miserabilists partly to this song. On Channel 4's Earsay on 31 March 1984 Morrissey walked across wasteland with daffodils in his hands.

Live

It was a regular in the Smiths' sets. With 115 logged performances it is the third most often logged of their songs, after Hand in Glove and Still Ill. The first logged one was at the University of Sheffield on 31 January 1984.