Annotations: Hey Hey 64K

In early 2006 I got a call from a company who were bringing a replica of a Kempston Competition Pro style joystick that came ready loaded with hundreds of ZX Spectrum games which you could plug into your telly and play straight away. He'd just seen the Hey Hey 16K video, and was excited by the possibility of using it to promote his product. He said he could help us to make the video into a "viral". "I'm sure people would pass it on to each other - you could have thousands of people watching it!"

It was very nice of him to suggest it, and I felt a bit mean having to tell him that, actually, that had already happened and several million people had already watched it, but he still seemed keen so I agreed to meet with him to talk about it. I got Mr Rob Manuel to come along, as he has a lot more experience in this sort of thing than I do, and also because I thought this might be a way of getting some CA$H in, to finally be able to pay him for all the time he'd spend making the video in the first place.

We had a meeting which went rather well, but I still felt a bit bad about re-doing Hey Hey 16K in this way, as it felt that I was cashing in all the goodwill and fun we'd got from it's original release, just for the sake of a few quid. Thus I suggested that, rather than just re-release it, we use this as an opportunity to update the whole idea and do a sort of sequel instead. Everybody seemed quite keen so I went home and spent the weekend writing Hey Hey 64K instead. I was quite pleased with how it worked out, as I felt I'd got something NEW out if.

Before I took it back to the Joystick Guy I spoke to the mighty Mr John Esplen, our publisher, who said to be careful what we agreed to. "Often in these cases" he told me "they'll claim there's no money to pay for music, and they'll expect you to do it for free." Later that day Rob said almost exactly the same thing, so it wasn't really too much of a surprise when I was told that we'd be expected to record the song at our own expense, that Rob would be spending several days working for free, and that we would benefit from the "exposure" the song would received. As I say, we'd already HAD more exposure than we knew what to do with, so it was with some relief that we drew a veil over the whole affair, with our integrity largely intact.

Still, me and Rob had our dander up for another collaboration and thus The Gay Train video was born, which was a whole lot of other fun!