Songs: Hey Hey 16K

notes / gigs / releases

We bought it to help with your homework
We bought it to help with your homework
And the household accounts
If your dad ever works it all out

Lunchtimes in the library writing down the pokes and peeks
Copying an access code, get a taste for home taping
Fetishists of map-making
Rubber keys and rotten leads, rand and run and load and screens
Then five minutes fingers crossed hoping not to witness the terror
Of R: Tape Loading Error

We bought it to help with your homework
We bought it to help with your homework
And the household accounts
If your dad ever works it all out

ZX spectrum 81, dragon vic and oric1
Commodore 64, amstrad and an acorn electorn
Cheaper BBC micro
Jet set willy, sabre wulf, lords of midnight, underwurlde
Dark star, transam, ant attak
And of course, manic miner
The hobbit and knight lore and elite

It made a generation who can code
A bubble before proper consoles, who all know
That the games you get today, may be very flash
But there'll never beat the thrill
Of getting through Jetpac

Hey Hey, 16K, What does that get you these days?
You need more than that for a letter
Old Skool Ram Paks are much better.

Personal Computer Games, Your Sinclair, 16K
Kempston Competition Pro, Crash and Cursor Keys and GO TO
Dixons and bother Saturday staff with loops that never end

We bought it to help with your homework
We bought it to help with your homework
And the household accounts
If your dad ever works it all out

Hey Hey, 16K, What does that get you these days?
You need more than that for a letter
Old Skool Ram Paks are much better.

For n=0 to 2
Those were the days
Next n

Published by Wipe Out Music Publishing

The hit!

It took me ages of thinking about it to finally get round to writing these words, with the middle bit probably being most important - it often seems to me that my adolescence in the 1980's is being wiped out of history so's we don't have to think about how close we came to the end of the world, and I wanted to write a song about what life then was REALLY like.

Obviously I'm not the only one who thinks like that - when it first came out as (the first ever! REALLY!) internet single we got loads of emails from people who felt the same, who seemed pleased beyond reason to have somebody else recognising the fact that all this happened.

It had a gentle life on the internet after that, with occasional emails, until Dave Green from Need To Know decided to do some t-shirts of the lyrics, which seemed to go down rather well, and which generated a bit more interest in the song, especially in Mr Rob Manuel of B3ta, who decided to finally get round to making a video for the song, having had it in mind for years.

When this was released things went COMPLETELY MENTAL. It caught on like WILDFIRE with people all over the world sending it on to each other, so that after the first week of it being released over TWO MILLION people had downloaded it, and it was the fifth most popular topic on blogs on THE WHOLE INTERNET! KRAZY!

The results of this were many - loads of gigs came about because of it, i got fanmail from all over the world, tons of people bought CDs, we had our own line of t-shirts, and a couple of years later we were approached by a marketing company to record "Hey Hey 64K" for an advertising campaign. That didn't come off, which is probably for the best - we got so much love and good feeling from people because of this song, it would have felt wrong to try and cash in on it.

We still play the song, and the best bit about doing this is when people in the audience who don't know us suddenly realise that it's THAT SONG. The looks of confusion then JOY on people's faces when that happens - it's lovely.