The music was written by Johnny Marr in an hour in a New York hotel room on 2 January 1984, using a red Gibson ES-355 guitar that was bought for him that day by Seymour Stein.[4] After finishing the song, he wrote the music for B-side "Girl Afraid" the same evening. Marr considers the two songs "a pair".[5]
The song is notable for marking the beginning of producer Stephen Street's working relationship with the band.[1] As one of his first roles as "in-house engineer" at Island Records' Fallout Shelter studios, Street engineered the session. He was aware of the band and excited by the prospect, saying in a HitQuarters interview, "I'd seen them just shortly beforehand on Top of the Pops doing 'This Charming Man', and like most other people around that time who were into music I was really excited by them."[1] Although not contacted for the subsequent recording "William, It Was Really Nothing", Street was asked to engineer the Smiths' next album, Meat Is Murder, with Morrissey and Marr producing for the first time.[1]
The band's performance of the song on Channel 4's Earsay on 31 March 1984 features mixed footage of the band playing in a studio and footage of Morrissey walking around some wasteland located next door to the Hewart Studios (now Capital Studios) in Wandsworth London where Earsay was recorded, with daffodil flowers in his hands and unidentified foliage in the back pocket of his jeans.
Cultural references
Journalist Andrew Collins borrowed the song's title for the name of his autobiographical book Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now: My Difficult Student 80s, published in 2004.[6] The title of "Girl Afraid" is taken from the 1943 film Old Acquaintance, starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins's character Mildred Watson Drake is a successful author who writes a novel titled Girl Afraid.
