Hey Boy Hey Girl

"Hey Boy Hey Girl"
Single by The Chemical Brothers
from the album Surrender
B-side	"Flashback" "Scale"
Released	31 May 1999 (1999-05-31)
Format	CD 12" cassette
Length	4:50
Label	Freestyle Dust Virgin Astralwerks
Songwriter(s)	Tom Rowlands Ed Simons Jerry Bloodrock Celite Evans Richard Lee Fowler Charles Pettiford Gregory Carlton Wigfall
Producer(s)	The Chemical Brothers
The Chemical Brothers singles chronology
"Only 4 the K People" (1999) "Hey Boy Hey Girl" (1999) "Let Forever Be" (1999)
"Only 4 the K People" (1999) "Hey Boy Hey Girl" (1999) "Let Forever Be" (1999)

"Hey Boy Hey Girl" is a song by British big beat duo The Chemical Brothers. It was released as a single from their 1999 album Surrender. It peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart in June 1999 and remained on the chart for ten weeks. It also reached the top 10 in Finland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, and Spain, as well on Canada's RPM Dance Chart. In the latter country, it did not make it onto the RPM Top Singles Chart, but it did debut and peak at number 3 on the Canadian Singles Chart.

The song dates back to 1997, when it was in the Radio 1 Anti-Nazi Mix. The song is a track in the 2011 video game Just Dance 3, and it is also featured in the 2012 video game Lumines Electronic Symphony by Ubisoft. It was also used during the introduction of Forza Horizon.

Samples

The vocal sample "Hey girls. B-boys. Superstar DJs, here we go!" was taken from "The Roof Is on Fire" by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three.

Reception

In October 2011, NME placed it at number 50 on its list "150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years", writing that the song "[starts] with a menacing, trance laden groove" and "[builds] to an absolute dance stomper".^[1]

Music video

The music video (directed by Dom & Nic) opens with a group of schoolchildren on board a coach. The camera focuses on a young girl who opens a medical book of pictures of the human skeleton. A blond boy spits on the page, then smiles at her as he walks away. The children go to the Natural History Museum, where the same boy tries to scare the girl with a skull in his hood. She chases the boy in the museum, but falls near the bottom of a flight of stairs and breaks her wrist. At the hospital, she gets an X-ray of her hand. It then shows her brushing her teeth whilst picturing herself as only bones. The background behind her morphs into a toilet area at the Ministry of Sound nightclub, South London. When she reverts into a person, she is older. She passes a couple having sexual intercourse in a stall, but she only sees them as skeletons (this shot is omitted from some pre-watershed television edits of the video). She exits the bathroom and heads to the nightclub's bar, where a man (uncredited appearance of Rick Warden) tries to chat her up. (You can barely hear his lines under the music). She then pictures him as a skeleton and feels his jawbone before leaving. She then goes to the dance floor, and sees more people as skeletons, almost as if she has X-ray vision. She exits the nightclub, and the Chemical Brothers themselves make a brief cameo appearance, stepping out of a taxi with DJ equipment. She then steps into that same taxi, where she sees the driver as a skeleton. He then asks her 'Where you going, baby?' in a camp, droll voice.

Track listing

CD single

Charts

Release history

References

External links

• Lyrics of this song at MetroLyrics