Happy 35th Anniversary to The Smiths’ compilation album Hatful Of Hollow, originally released November 12, 1984.
How do you write about the album that changed/saved your life? You can spell out in blue chalk the lyrics to “William, It Was Really Nothing,” you can describe in pillow-soft detail the mouth and eyes and wayward tongue of your very own Charming Man, you can cut out newspaper clippings of women who have drowned their children in bathtubs, of teachers who have fucked their students. No description of chord progressions or tremolo control or Red Gibson Guitars is going to ever come close to the intimacy that any listener might feel. They will be cold words at best, static on the page.
But you must possess a certain kind of heart in order to be a Smiths fan. You will exist within contradictions; romantically inward but only seeking what is outwardly unattainable, you will crave but never surrender. What thunders inside your chest is made of stone and blood. And no better is this series of complexities reflected than in 1984’s Hatful Of Hollow, a collection of BBC 1 studio recordings and B-sides. Americans wouldn’t get this album stateside until 1993; instead, much of what we have here was released on Louder Than Bombs in 1987.
Oh, that seismic shift in “William, It Was Really Nothing!” Morrissey has pulled back the bow, but it’s Johnny Marr who launches the arrow into your heart, not even a full first verse before you have been spun around and shoved to the ground, and we’re not even to the chorus yet. It’s over too soon, like the relationship I most associate with it. His name had the same two-syllable beat as William, interchangeable in the lyrics as perhaps I was interchangeable in the relationship. How can something be so gleeful and so mournful all at once? Like thorns upon a rose or sugar that masks the taste of poison, all that is beautiful must also contain a darkness that can draw blood.
(Though my own William inspired several terrible poems and a chapter in my novel The Big Rewind – a chapter named, of course, for this song – Morrissey’s muse, The Associates’ Billy MacKenzie, was quite the muse of the Madchester set, inspiring The Cure’s “Cut Here” and Siouxsie Sioux to write “Say” for The Creatures.)
Half of the album is made up of alternate takes of previously released singles. “This Charming Man” is a sweeter, softer version, less frantic than the version that appeared on the group’s eponymous 1984 debut album The Smiths. It is the romantic comedy version of Oscar-bait drama, a novelization, training wheels on a punctured bicycle. “Hand In Glove” is the original single version, with the guitar fade-in and Andy Rourke’s bass taking center stage, while “Still Ill” and “You’ve Got Everything Now” each get a slight makeover. Your preference will likely depend on which album you held in your hands first, like a first crush you never quite get over.
Of course, the Smiths’ best-known song also made its debut here. Even into 2006, “How Soon Is Now” was popular at a hipster nightclub I frequented after college—the Corrosion Dark ‘80s party at Luke + Leroy’s, DJ’d by Mr. X every Saturday night. I would dance with boys whose names I did not know, who left me phone numbers I did not call. The club shut down sometime after I left the city. I sometimes feel like this song was left behind on the floorboards among the glitter, the red drink stirrers, the phone numbers of Lincoln and Sean and William. In the end, it really was nothing.
The song, near the end of the A-side, forces the album to stand up and ask you: is it better to have loved and lost or to never have loved at all?
The album is full of such questions. There has never been a song that is More Morrissey than “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” It encapsulates all that is dark and witty about him, dry as unsalted crisps. It’s good to remind yourself, every so often, why give more of yourself to people who don’t care if you live or die? Ask yourself—is this the you that you are willing to accept?
Women are the perpetual antagonist of the album—the mother who drowns her infant daughter in “This Night Has Opened My Eyes,” the lustful schoolteacher of “Handsome Devil,” the girl who has come between the longing love affair of “William, It Was Really Nothing.” One could make the argument that everyone is an antagonist, in some way, to Morrissey, but while the men of “Hand In Glove” and “What Difference Does It Make” break his heart, the women cause damage far greater. They murder body and soul, seemingly without remorse, seemingly to forward their own needs before others. To be a woman and a Smiths fan is to do just that, take quiet pleasure in what you know is bad for the larger cosmic cause. They are the sticky sweets that pull out fillings, the last drink you don’t need, and you will savor each, damn the consequence.
The enduring power of The Smiths is such that nothing Morrissey can ever do can wreck their legacy, only his own. Their music is such an integral part of the Romantic’s DNA that to remove it would be akin to erasing a treasured memory. The singles gathered on Hatful Of Hollow illustrate this perhaps more than any other album, the faint-breath-balance of loneliness and love.
The Smiths will never reunite. They will never get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Morrissey will continue to play to increasingly empty theaters until he retires (the ultimate last-minute cancellation). That’s fine, because all of it is in line with the band’s entire aesthetic – that they are something sweet and short and ultimately doomed—dreams, after all, have a knack of just not coming true.
LISTEN: