It has been amazing year for Hey! Hello!
Here is a recap of 12 moments that helped make our year so memorable.
12. Duff McKagan and Punk Wars
In January 2013, some 6 months before the official release of our debut album, Duff McKagan championed the track 'How I Survived The Punk Wars" on his Seattle Weekly blog. The Guns 'n' Roses legend wrote “Perhaps the best and most real punk rock song in a long, long time... "How I Survived The Punk Wars" off of the Hey! Hello! record actually stunned me.”
Our debut album got a full US release courtesy of The End records in July, which saw us becoming label mates with the likes of Crossfaith and The Prodigy.
In June we headed to sunny LA to film a music video for the track "Swimwear" with Director Derek Doublin. The video was filmed in one day and for the special FX, the individual frames were printed out onto over 3,000 sheets of recycled paper. Each piece of paper was then crushed, shredded, burned, chewed up, spit out, sunburned, sandblasted, scratched, stained, torn and taped. Each sheet was then painstakingly recaptured frame by frame and reinserted into the video, juxtaposed against footage from a Red Epic camera. A mammoth task as you can see from the production still below!
The video debuted in August
9. Japan welcomes Hey! Hello!
We had no expectation going over to Japan for the first time for a promo trip in June. The response was phenomenal. Live radio and TV performances were spliced with press interviews and two special instore appearances at Tower Records in Shibuya and Yokohama. A massive thank you to our Japanese label Vinyl Junkie for believing in Hey! Hello!
Tower Records Signing Shibuya
Tower Records Signing Yokohama
Acoustic performance Yokohama
Live TV performance and interview
You can watch a short video of our exploits here. Japan - we will be back!
8. Hey! Hello! to tour in 2014!
The most commonly asked question in 2013 was "When are you going to tour?!" so it was great to be able to announce back in November, that Hey! Hello! WOULD finally be hitting the road, with their very first UK tour in April 2014. We hope to see the US & Japan later in the year too.
With the release of Swimwear, Hey! Hello! took to the airwaves becoming the most played song on Team Rock Radio in the UK (Victoria and Ginger both hosted their own shows during that time too) as well as being regularly played on the likes of Kerrang! Radio, XFM, Planet Rock & Bloodstock Radio.
In the US we were playlisted on 30+ stations, but being huge fans of legendary LA DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, it was a particular honour to be played every week on his KROQ show.
Working with Dale was one of the highlights of our year. He is an amazing photographer (you can check out some of his work here) and his photos taken over the Summer gave us some memorable images - many of which were used in a Hey! Hello! feature for Classic Rock Magazine in September.
5.Hey! Hello! debut in London
Our first ever full band show took place on the 17th December 2013 at KOKO in London. The jam packed crowd sang every word and made sure our debut show would be forever memorable.
4. Hey! Hello! debut in LA
When we were asked by Billy Morrison in November if Hey! Hello! would like to be special guests at Camp Freddy's NYE show at The Roxy in LA, we jumped at the chance! Putting together a special LA band for the night (including Billy Morrison, Jimmy Ashurst & David Goodstein) we make our US debut tonight (as we write this). A perfect end to the year.
When we asked the legendary Frank Kozik to design the front cover of our album, we never expected him to reply let alone say yes! Given a brief of colourful, cute but ever so slightly sinister, Frank created this hand drawn masterpiece.
In August, Frank then collaborated with Dale May on one of our favourite photos of the year. The image required Frank to make a poster behind Victoria come alive. The attention to detail is amazing. Again Frank hand drew and inked the artwork, this time around Dales photo.
Frank makes rough sketches on a photocopy of the image
Inking the final drawing by hand
2. Album Reviews & Awards
We were (and still are) blown away by the amazing reviews we received for our album over the course of 2013. You can see a massive list of them here
Hey! Hello! were also nominated for Best New Band at The Classic Rock Awards in November, and hit several end of year "Best Album" lists too.
1. Hey! Hello! Goes to Number 1!
Perhaps the biggest surprise of 2013 was finding out that our album went straight to NUMBER 1 in the UK rock charts. UNBELIEVABLE!
Thank you to everyone who helped make 2013 so memorable for Hey! Hello! We really are truly appreciative to everyone who believed in this project.
We Wish you a very healthy and happy 2014.
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