Hey Boy Hey Girl

"Hey Boy Hey Girl" is a song by English big beat duo The Chemical Brothers. It was released as a single from their 1999 album Surrender. 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. It peaked at number 3 in the UK Singles Chart and remained in the chart for ten weeks. The song dates back to 1997 when it was in the Radio 1 Anti-Nazi Mix.

Music video

The music video 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 blonde 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 hand. 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 back into a person, she is older. She passes a couple having sexual intercourse in a stall, but she only sees them as skeletons (only if you view the music video on television pre-watershed). She exits the bathroom and heads to the nightclub's bar, where a man flirts with her. 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 climbs into a taxi, where she sees the driver as a skeleton. The Chemical Brothers make a cameo in the video at the end, coming out of the taxi with DJ equipment.

Track listing

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]

Release history

References