Hatful of Hollow - Composition

Composition

The album consists mainly of songs recorded over several BBC Radio 1 sessions in 1983 (tracks shown in bold were included on the album). When first broadcast, these radio sessions mainly featured songs which were otherwise unavailable—all were subsequently re-recorded for singles or the following year's debut album, with the exception of "This Night Has Opened My Eyes" which was only ever recorded for the September Peel session.

1. For John Peel on 31 May 1983: "Handsome Devil", "Reel Around the Fountain", "Miserable Lie", "What Difference Does It Make?" (all four songs were later released as the Peel Sessions EP).
2. For David Jensen on 4 July 1983: "These Things Take Time", "You've Got Everything Now", "Wonderful Woman"
3. For Jensen on 5 September 1983: "Accept Yourself", "I Don't Owe You Anything", "Pretty Girls Make Graves", "Reel Around the Fountain"
4. For Peel on 21 September 1983: "This Charming Man", "Back to the Old House", "This Night Has Opened My Eyes", "Still Ill"

The album also features the band's debut single, "Hand in Glove", and their two most recent singles prior to the album's release, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", and "William, It Was Really Nothing", with their B-sides "Girl Afraid", "How Soon Is Now?", and "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want".

"How Soon Is Now?" would receive a separate single release in 1985 in the United Kingdom and the United States. It reached No. 24 in the British charts, but failed to chart in the U.S. Morrissey and Marr lamented the lack of chart success of what they considered their strongest song thus far; it looks like market saturation (the song had already appeared on the "William, It Was Really Nothing" single and Hatful of Hollow) played a part.