Since neither Tense Nervous Headache or Boyfriend are any longer available, High Hat remains the only place to find any of Boy George's songs from 1988 to 1989.

While High Hat has only ten tracks, the two other albums together included eighteen tracks: nine on the vinyl and twelve on the CD and cassette for Tense Nervous Headache; plus eight for Boyfriend, one of which (the hi-energy remix of "No Clause 28", also known as "Pascal Gabriel Mix") would later re-surface on Jesus Loves You's The Martyr Mantras album.

Tense Nervous Headache was shelved in the UK shortly after release of the first single due to lack of interest (or, as George put it in his autobiography,[1] after it "died a solitary death"), despite the singer getting to No.

William Ruhlmann from AllMusic gave the album three out of five stars and wrote that while Boy George was in the band Culture Club, together they "scored surprising across-the-board success with a wild new fashion sense and old-fashioned pop-soul music", but "as a solo artist [he] seems determined to address a much smaller, more targeted audience".

According to Ruhlmann, in the majority songs on the album, George "wants to engage in thinly veiled confessions set to new jack swing percussion tracks into which he nearly disappears".