"Hey Boy Hey Girl" is a song by the British big beat duo The Chemical Brothers. It was released as a single from their 1999 albumSurrender. It peaked at number three on the UK Singles Chart in June 1999 and remained on the chart for 10 weeks. It also reached the top 10 in Finland, Iceland, 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 three 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 gameJust 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.
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 " with a menacing, trance laden groove" and " to an absolute dance stomper".
Plagiarism allegations
In an interview with BELPOP, Lords of Acid founder Praga Khan confronted the Chemical Brothers backstage over the drum programming used in "Hey Boy Hey Girl" that is identical to "I Sit on Acid 2000" released by Lords of Acid. Their response to the allegations was "Everyone steals from everyone."
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 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 fractures 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 sex in a stall, but she only sees them as skeletons. She exits the bathroom and heads to the nightclub's bar, where a man tries to talk with her. 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.
