The One-Hit Wonders – The 2010s Part 2.

This is a song that I remember enjoying at the time that received a lot of hype, that rather surprisingly didn’t deliver on the singles chart. When a song is played on the radio, it usually has to be edited down to three or four minutes. But there are plenty of songs that are much longer, and can usually take seven or eight minutes to feature everything, and remixes could be even longer.

Dennis Ferrer is an American dance DJ and producer, and when I heard the full-length version of his song “Hey Hey” for the first time, I enjoyed the female vocal (uncredited, but it seems that it’s Shingai Shoniwa who had a big hit single around the same time as frontwoman of The Noisettes), and the rather drawn-out ending, where it sounds like someone is banging a big piece of iron for about three minutes, although most of this was lost from the radio edit.

If I was that way inclined, I would say that this was “a banger”, but I’m not really. There was also a video made. “Hey Hey” was released in June 2010, and I remember reading that this was played more than any other song on BBC Radio 1 Xtra around this time. Now this isn’t a radio station that I’ve ever listened too that much over the years, but I’m very pleased that they supported this and hopefully this would lead to some success.

So that’s a great song by a popular DJ that was barely off the radio. But, somehow, “Hey Hey” didn’t make the Top 40, and indeed didn’t get anywhere near, reaching only no. 55, and this is Ferrer’s only Top 75 hit in the UK. All that airplay didn’t really motivate that many people to buy this, which was a disappointment, as I would say that this is one of my favourite singles from this era.

I don’t know that much about what happened to Dennis Ferrer after this, but I presume that he went on to DJ at many more clubs around the world, and it’s a shame that the support for “Hey Hey” ended up being much out of proportion to how many people were actually interested. It would’ve been good if there were more songs on the singles chart like this, but it never really happened.