This week, I start the first of three /Tuesday Ten posts on a similar subject. Well, more about exclamations.

---

---

This week I start with “Hey!”, followed by the use of “Na Na” next week, and then “Woo!” and “La La” after that. Suggestions were asked for in successive weeks last year, and I got a stack of song suggestions – one of the reasons I held it over for a bit, as I wanted some good time to think about what to use. As is often the way with less specific subjects, lots of what might have been the obvious songs to use had been used before – but that’s fine, as it made me turn to some choices I might not otherwise have considered.

So, “Hey!”: it’s a greeting, an exclamation, and is used particularly in song in a great many ways. It heralds the introduction of famous songs, it is used as a melodic element, it is used in accusatory tones. Here are ten of them. Thanks, as ever, to everyone that suggested songs.

---

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

---

/Ramones
/Blitzkrieg Bop
/Ramones

---

“Hey! Ho! Let’s go!”

How else was I going to introduce this week’s /Tuesday Ten? The early proto-punks from New York used just a few chords, played fast and short songs, had a clear identity, and likely changed the lives of a great number of young people quickly. The leather jackets, long black hair, shades and tight jeans were in evidence in pretty much every photograph, and in the towering, skinny physique (he was just shy of two metres tall) of Joey Ramone, had a striking, disaffected frontman. Blitzkrieg Bop is the opening song on their 1976 debut, and seems to be played so fast that Joey has to work really hard to get his words in, as he tells the tale of excited British fans letting loose at one of their live shows. Their image has been reused and recycled constantly, and maybe “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” is a cliché these days, but those clichés have to start somewhere…

---

/Dream Academy
/Life In A Northern Town
/The Dream Academy

---

To put it mildly, a song of contrasts – the bleak reminiscing of working-class life in the North East amid gossamer-thin vocals and barely-there instrumentation, before the chorus explodes into a sunburst of African-inspired chanting that almost feels like the radio dial has slipped and turned us onto another station entirely. They are “heys”, there are “na nas” (more on those next week), there is an inspiration and joy in this that is hard to escape – as if this is what could await if only you could rise above that working class grey. Over a decade later, Dario G confirmed that the band were onto something, as they sampled that chorus element liberally to create the inescapable summer 1997 hit Sunchyme, and I’m sure the writers of the original were happy for the bounty of royalties that it doubtless unlocked.

---

/A.R.E. Weapons
/Hey World
/A.R.E. Weapons

---

A seething electroclash band from NYC that made confrontational, noisy electronic music, but perhaps their most powerful statement came when they dialled things back a bit musically. Hey World is a howl from teenage America, and seems now, with hindsight, to be a prophetic and intelligent statement of what was to come. It is a song warning about teenage boredom and underinvestment, and how that can manifest in dangerous viewpoints as they get distracted by violence and right-wing politics – the outcome of course being the never-ending epidemic of mass shootings, of which too many involve people under eighteen – both victims and perpetrators (the Gun Violence Archive reports 98 mass shootings already in 2025, as of writing this on 05-May 2025 – Wikipedia reports 117 as of the same date, the classifications vary). The chorus that shouts “Hey! World!” has a children’s chorus joining the band, as they shout for attention and support to ensure that they can survive to adulthood. The message remains unheeded, as the current Trump Administration continues to cut essential services to the bone, only likely to make too many children poorer…and angrier.

---

/Toni Basil
/Mickey

---

The things you learn when researching these posts – I was today years old when I first learned that Mickey is a cover. Originally by the band Racey as Kitty, Basil gender-switched it, and added the cheerleader chants that made it so iconic – and generally made it just that bit more immediate (try listening to it, then attempt to get it out of your head for days – good luck…). Amazingly, Basil’s music career had begun in the sixties, but that was a sideline to her position as one of the originators of street dance and bringing it into the mainstream, choreographing a who’s-who of iconic films and artists over the decades. Those “Hey!” moments here are integral to the cheerleader chants, and are of course key to the song.

This is a song I will always associate with my late friend Jez, as this was so much “her” song. We did a small tribute to her at the 80s night in Whitby at the one after her death, and it brought quite a few smiles (as well as tears, it has to be said), and she now has a bench in Whitby, up on the West Cliff, so she can watch over the Spa and the North Sea for eternity.

---

/Talking Heads
/And She Was
/Little Creatures

---

One of those artists Basil was involved in, incidentially, was Talking Heads – Basil did the choreography for the iconic video for Once In A Lifetime. But we’re pushing forward a few years until the later era of Talking Heads, and one of the few songs today that opens with “Hey!”. And She Was is an oft-overlooked Talking Heads single, but it’s still fabulous – stop-start rhythms, cowbell and a celebration of weirdness, as David Byrne remains in awe of a woman who can levitate over the houses and watch her world from above. Apparently said woman did hallucinogenic drugs (you think?), which probably explains a lot, but I’ve heard few songs about doing acid that sound so fucking joyous.

---

/Outkast
/Hey Ya!
/Speakerboxxx / The Love Below

---

A song that became part of popular culture thanks to the iconic video (where André 3000 plays no less than eight different characters – all eight members of the band), not to mention the phrase “shake it like a polaroid picture” (which, mind, you shouldn’t – tip five from Polaroid themselves), is actually a pretty bleak song. An ultra-catchy, retro pop song that was wildly popular from the start, but look deeper and it’s a bleak song about the irrevocable breakdown of a relationship. It could also be seen to be looking at the impending hiatus that Outkast were to begin – and have never come back from aside from a few performances together in 2014 – as the sprawling album Speakerboxxx / The Love Below was actually two solo albums, one from André 3000 and one from Big Boi (and singles were released from both), maybe, just maybe, Andre 3000 was expressing his disappointment at that too. Since then, both have gone in very different directions, with André 3000 recently releasing a surprisingly great jazz flute album New Blue Sun…

---

/The Fall
/Touch Sensitive
/The Marshall Suite

---

Perhaps best known as the soundtrack to the classic Vauxhall Corsa advert “Hide and Seek” – and which doubtless helped keep Mark E. Smith in beer and fags for a good few years afterwards – Touch Sensitive is possibly the most joyous song the Salford curmudgeon ever wrote. Sharp riffs bounce along an urgent drum rhythm, while Smith grumbles away amid the chaos at the idea of getting old and not giving a flying fuck about what his detractors think, while the “Hey! Hey! Hey!” of the chorus supercharges every damned bit of the song. I was never more than a casual fan of The Fall, unlike some of my friends, but The Marshall Suite saw the band at their peak, to these ears, and they were absolutely never better than this song.

---

/Massive Attack
/Unfinished Sympathy
/Blue Lines

---

This was a late entry into this list. I’d originally intended to use Firestarter by The Prodigy, whose use of a “Hey!” sample is one of over one hundred tracks to sample The Art of Noise’s Close (To The Edit), but having discovered late on – thanks to a typo in my now extensive /Tuesday Ten database – that I’d used it before, I’ve instead plumped for a similarly iconic electronic track that also uses another source for its iconic “Hey, hey hey hey” sample. This time, from jazz fusion group John McLaughlin & the Mahavishnu Orchestra‘s Planetary Citizen, from 1971.

Unfinished Sympathy is glorious modern soul, with Shara Nelson’s soaring, heartfelt vocal backed by a reworking of elements of Parade Strut by J.J. Johnson, synths and orchestral strings to create a magical song that doesn’t sound like it comes from any particular era – in fact, despite now being 34 years old, it doesn’t seem to have dated a day. The video is also iconic and much-imitated, as the one-take camera shot tracks Shara Nelson as she walks down Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, entirely oblivious to the world and people around her.

---

/Gravity Kills
/Guilty
/Gravity Kills

---

The first single from St. Louis-based industrial rock band Gravity Kills was one that I loved from the start (and their debut album remains an outstanding release from the time, with songs regularly in my DJ sets to this day, although usually the rampaging mayhem of Enough), and was probably helped by featuring on the soundtrack for SE7EN. The bruising omnious thump of the verses contrasts with the riff-led, stop-start fury of the chorus, and it was the point where it became clear that the band were definitely more industrial than rock, their monstrous rhythm patterns owing much to industrial club music of the era. As for the “Hey”? That’s a key part of the chorus and the first bit of the hook that most people remember/recognise. They remain on my bucketlist to see live, as they still occasionally reunite to play in their hometown St. Louis, but for now, that’s out of the question…

---

/The Sisters of Mercy
/This Corrosion
/Floodland

---

The mighty centrepiece of Floodland, lasting well beyond ten minutes in its full version, was unquestionable proof of Andrew Eldritch’s vision for his “band”. Jim Steinman – never a producer to understand the concept of “less is more” – turned the whole shebang up to eleven complete with a 40-piece choir, while Eldritch reputedly sends up his previous bandmate Wayne Hussey in the somewhat generic lyrics.

Thus, I’m buggered if I know what the lyrics are about, but they do lend themselves to flinging your hands in the air and singing along to the endless repeats of “Hey now, hey now…” that pepper the entire song, and thanks to the sheer length of it, it has remained a useful song for Goth DJs doing long sets to be able to take a quick break. And anyway, with a goth song of this majesty, why on earth would you cut it short?