One of my most favourite bands of all time, I feel lucky to be have been offered the opportunity of making a record with them. The ex bass player of Hefner is still a good friend of mine, and it’s entirely because of my association with him, that I discovered them. One rainy, winters day in Wolverhampton me and mate Andy went to see them play for the first time. We were blown away …. I saw them many times after that, and watched them grow into something really special. I had not long started Fortune and Glory, and so, in many ways, the bands growth coincided with the growth of the label. No surprise then, that when the lead singer, Darren, was looking for someone to release ‘The Best Of Hefner’, we decided to work it together. Given the bands stature at the time they broke up, it’s no surprise that this album will probably be the label's most successful yet!
Hefner were formed around 1996 though Darren Hayman had been using the name for several years previously. The original line up was Darren Hayman guitars/vocals, John Morrison bass and Antony Harding drums. The band was convened for the recording of Darren’s debut single as Hefner ‘ A Better Friend’ and that recording marks only the second time the three of them played together. The single quickly gained the attention of Too Pure which remained the home of the band throughout their career.
The appeal of Hefner has always lay in the lyrics and songs of Darren Hayman, bittersweet vignettes on modern city life, he uses the extra-ordinary and the everyday to tell erotic melancholy tales that tug at your heart strings.
Their first album Breaking God’s Heart, earnt them a fan in the guise of John Peel, which resulted in the band recording 6 sessions for his Radio 1 show, including a live set at John’s house. In 1999 they achieved numbers 2 and 3 in his festive 50 with ‘The Hymn for the Alcohol’ and 'The Hymn for the Cigarettes'.
Their second album The Fidelity Wars, showed a darker and sharper side to their sound and lyrics and remains the favourite of fans and critics alike, however their biggest selling album was their third; We Love The City. This album found Hefner in a more upbeat mood augmenting their folk tinged sound with brass, synthesizers and new member Jack Hayter, contributing pedal steel, violin and guitar, and included their most popular songs with ‘Good Fruit’, ‘The Greedy Ugly People’ and ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’.
Hefner’s last album showed them moving a new electronic direction and is considered a curates egg by most, however Hefner’s popularity and self proclaimed status as Britain’s Largest Small Band was never in doubt as their last sell out show at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire showed.
Hefner split for no other reason then it seemed like it was a good time.
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MAGAZINE / INTERNET REVIEWS
NME
The Best of Hefner
Formed in 1996, Hefner were always a band out of time. The London trio had an old school indie sound that made Belle & Sebastian sound like Motorhead. And they sang about things – cinema, wine, politics, awkward sex, unknowable girls – that had gone out of fashion ten years ealier. Yet, still, Britain’s "largest small band" were loved by Steve Lamacq and managed to amass a substantial cult following. There rickety songs – part Jonathan Richman, part Arctic Monkeys – buzzed with choppy, poppy, energy, while Darren Hayman’s lyrics were often painful and frequently hilarious. It’s a timeless formulae and the like of 'The Day That Thatcher Dies' ("we will dance and sing all night"). 'I Took Her Love For Granted' and 'Hymn For The Cigarettes' still sound like miner classics.
Tony Naylor
Mojo Magazine
Hefner...The Best Of
Perennial Peel faves show off their best bits.
It must have been to the considerable annoyance of Henfer frontman Darren Hayman that at the peak of the bands popularity, he was compared with Jarvis Cocker. Hefner were alwasy too scruffy, too clumsy and, in a sense, too emotional to be allied to the Britpop pack. Puny they may have looked, but in terms of Hayman's lyrical honesty and the band's chewy guitar sound, they packed a punch (eg, early gems like The Hymn for The Cigarettes), not least via Hayman's ragged, norf London delivery here. Here, then, are singles and higlights from the bands four albums (1996-2002): paeans to public transport, happy fantasies about the death of Thatcher, and some great domestic erotica. Enjoy.
Sophie Harris
HEFNER
'THE BEST OF HEFNER'
ROCKSOUND MAGAZINE _ APRIL 2006
So, farewell then, Hefner. With your not terrifically in-tune singing, your general ramshackledom and your rubbishness with girls, you really were the absolute apotheosis of indie in that difficult age between the collapse of Brit-Pop and the eruption of The Strokes. Sad thing is, this lot became so associated with underachievement it's become easy to forget how stunning they could actually be, and that's a misconception this retrospective attempts to rectify. The glory years, when it looked, albeit briefly, as if they might actually enjoy something of a breakthrough, are particularly well represented here, but the real treats are in the whiplash wordplay in the likes of 'The Day That Thatcher Dies'. Smarts AND heart? Still an all-too-rare combination. They'll be missed, but this is a fine way to remember them.
Uncut Magazine
HEFNER
The Best Of Hefner 1996-2002
Fortune & Glory ***
DARREN HAYMAN
Table For One
Track and Field ***Greatest hits and debut solo outing from Essex indie auteur. Contemporary of the early Belle & Sebastian, London three-piece Hefner put a different spin on post-Britpop indie fundamentalism, drawing on Jonathan Richman,The Wedding Present and Billy Bragg for their chugging, whining, agreeably doleful songs of bedsit longing, cheap fags and Margaret Thatcher. Towards the end of their career,even the band themselves seemed to tire of their throwback sound, developing an eccentric, broken-down Bontempi electronica which lost them their audience. Hayman persists with it. A kind of sickly sibling to Saint Etienne’s recent concept operas, with songs about caravans, dog’s homes and Doug Yule, Table For One has a perverse, seedy, greasy-spoon charm.
Stephen Trousse
Drowned In Sound
Hefner (The Best Of)In an ideal musical world where the cream does actually rise to the top and Oasis only had two albums, I would not have to explain who Hefner were. You’d already know, because the indie-rock quartet would be on every Q list ever and on MTV2 at every opportunity; there would be no escape. But life isn’t fair kids, life’s a bitch and it hates you. Life will break your heart.
That was the point of Hefner, a band renowned for the songwriting of Darren Hayman, for whom lyrical heartbreak lied around every corner. Whilst the ‘cool’ bands wrote songs about the lack of intelligence in the NYPD, Hayman wrote about the Trojan War and the future death of Margaret Thatcher as well as the countless lost loves. The songs of Hefner, whether it was their ultra-lo-fi first recordings or the polished electronica which proved to be their curtain call, were so tactile that they almost reached out and touched you and so honest, so laced with frustration that on occasion it made Belle & Sebastian look bland. "Everytime you cry, it gives me little heart attacks", sobs Hayman on 'Good Fruit' with an observation so tiny that most writers would never consider it for a lyric. Coupled with a no-nonsense attitude towards intimacy ("you should be lying on your back with a glow in your heart" comes the sleazy observation in 'Pull Yourself Together'), this is what earmarked Hefner, for me at least, as something special.
The Best Of Hefner, then, is a cross-section of the six years that Hefner were properly active, featuring both ultra-rare songs, like 'A Better Friend and the original version of 'Christian Girls, and their ‘hits’ 'I Took Her Love For Granted', 'Good Fruit' et al. Unlike most Best Ofs, this is not just a tired singles compilation (although all singles are present and correct), the fan favourites are on here also from the masturbatory tale of b-side 'Hello Kitten' to the Conservative-baiting playground singalong that is 'The Day That Thatcher Dies'. True to the entire back catalogue, even two tracks from less popular final album Dead Media ('When Angels Play Their Drum Machines' and 'Home') are included, and when their electronica sounds are put back to back with the guitar-based portion of the back catalogue new life is breathed into them - they work much better intermingled here than they ever did mixing with their own kind.
If there is one criticism that could be made, it is that with a slew of excellent b-sides behind them only 'Hello Kitten' made the final cut, but it should go without saying that fans of Hefner will want to own this CD for the first few rare tracks, if not just to complete the collection. For anyone who missed out and is intrigued then I implore you: if you’ve ever been heartbroken, if you’ve ever looked at the coquette from down the road and thought "well, maybe..", if you like your music honest, slightly filthy and faintly twee then do yourself a favour, make this top of your list.
Ben Marwood
http://www.drownedinsound.com/release/view/7279
HEFNER - 'THE BEST OF HEFNER 1996-2002'
PLAYLOUDER
Meanwhile, in a very different corner of the underground, it's time to wave an admiring adieu to yet another cornerstone of the Peel constituency. Expensive month for Hefnerophiles, though, since not only do both Darren Hayman and Ant have new albums swarming the shops in the next few weeks but now there's this retrospective to contend with, and we'd have to say it does a blinder of a job, seeing as how it produces such throat-lumpening waves of nostalgia for a band whose releases were, let's be honest, beginning to become charged with ever less anticipation. Thankfully, this is awash with mighty, memorable tunes that celebrate unglamorous mundanity and strident underdoggery with wit and vigour, somewhere not unakin to the result of a write-off betwixt David Gedge and Jarvis Cocker, and it demonstrates the immediate fully-formedness of the trio, as they were when the superb early run of this was recorded. They probably never bettered the companion singles 'The Hymn For The Cigarettes' / 'The Hymn For The Alcohol', of course, but both are given pride of place here, and, in fact, most everything you could reasonably ask for makes the cut. They'll be missed, certainly, but at least with 'The Day that Thatcher Dies' they've even recorded the perfect song to reform to...
Iain MoffatThis review can be found online at http://playlouder.com/feature/+the-past-and-the/
The National Student
Hefner
The Best of HefnerSelf-proclaimed as ‘Britain’s Largest Small Band’, between 1996-2002 indie-pop trio Hefner enjoyed underground success and consistently threatened to break through into the mainstream with their vibrant, introspective, pop tunes.
Finding a fan in the late John Peel, doing 6 sessions on his show, the band developed a strong and fanatical fan-base, who whilst being baffled as to why the wider music-buying-public had missed Hefner’s brilliance, felt that they had heard something in the music that most people simply couldn’t get.
The Best of Hefner, compiling 20-tracks from their six year career, should rectify this situation as it highlights Hefner as a truly original and magnificent band, that put many of their peers and modem sound-a-likes to shame.
From the opener, first single ‘A Better Friend’ it is apparent that Hefner’s appeal always lays in the lyrics and songs of front-man Darren Hayman. Using the extra-ordinary and the everyday to provide bittersweet vignettes on modem city life, telling erotic melancholy tales that tug at the heart-strings of the common man.
Few writers can lay-bare the most mundane aspects of love and living in such a romantic and emotive manner.
The material from second album The Fidelity Wars, as a collection of songs, stands, up as the bands best highlighting the darker, sharper side to the band’s sound. Peel favourites ‘Hymn for the Cigarettes’ and ‘Hymn for the Alcohol’ tell the tales of love and heart-ache brilliantly through drug experiences.
‘I Love Only You’ begins with chugging guitars, introducing surging electronics and synthesised orchestrations before fracturing into a classic pop chorus.
The music exploration continues through the material from third album We Love The City which after the dark melancholy of the previous release saw the band in a more upbeat mood augmenting their folk-tinged sound with brass, synthesizers.
New member Jack Hayter added further depth with the use of pedal steel, violin and extra guitar parts taking the bands away from their original lo-fi sound.
‘Good Fruit’ with it’s ballad-esque style, and hard-rockin’ ‘Painting and Kissing’ show exactly why Hefner s music consistently deserved the attention of the many.
The brilliant ‘The Day That Thatcher Dies’ shows Hayman’s lyrical scope as he handles the subject of politics utilising his warped sense of humour to address a subject close to many people’s hearts.
As he blasts, "We will dance and sing all night, even though we know it’s not right," you totally empathise with his points.
You can't help laugh at lines like "It was love, the Tories don’t know what that means," and ‘Ding Dong the witch is dead, which old witch, the wicked witch.’
Finally taking in the electronic sounds of the bands final album, The Best of Hefner is a grand snapshot of a wonderously unique British indie-pop institution. This album is a must for fans of heart-felt, bittersweet, meaningful pop.
Chris Marks
I'LL LET YOU SEE THROUGH ME
HEFNER 'BEST OF 1996–2002'
UNPEELED
This is one of the best compilations in the whole history of ever, ever. This is a set of tunes that genuinely shows the evolution of an artist, his thinking and the band(s) that aided and abetted that evolution. This set takes you from the fragile and chilling guitar & vox tale of 'A Better Friend' to the fully fledged, electric stamp of 'The Day That Thatcher Dies'. You can engage with this material on any and many levels, personal, impersonal, observational, political or just plainly cruel, but engage with it? Yes, you should, chillingly superior and worryingly throwaway songwriting, felt like giving up all the time? Don't. Buy this, gird your loins, firm your jaw and set out to do better. This is catchy, cool and all that, but it's inspirational as well. So be inspired at www.hefnet.com and go on to surpass.
Shane Unpeeled
STYLUS MAGAZINE.COM
And so it was tired, ill, slightly depressed, and hung over that I finally listened to the best of Hefner, which is the sort of condition some would tell you is ideal. But, as the perceptive and enlightening essay from Jack Hayter of the band included here would gently correct you, to focus on the heartbreak recounted and enacted in (some of) these songs would be to miss the point—whatever Darren Hayman's personal life has been like, he's always been a writer of rare insight and humour (and empathy), and being in a band is, more than anything else "fun—why else would you do it?" (there's Jack again).The liner notes to the first potted history of Britain's Largest Small Band (a title dubbed and worn with humility and self-awareness as well as sardonicism and pride) provide the valuable kind of picture of a band you only get from the guy who doesn't join until after their second album, who throws in with an indie band despite being "forty years old with two kids and a mortgage." But that's not the best part of the package—that wouldn't even be the hard to obtain 'original version's' of the band's debut single ('A Better Friend' and 'Christian Girls', still as heartily sweet after a decade) or the 'didgeridoo version' of the immortal 'Pull Yourself Together'. Instead what really satisfies for fans is the chance to confirm once and for all that although Hefner's sound grew richer and deeper as they grew more experienced in and out of the studio, the writing never declined in quality and never lost its sense of identity.
What those early single tracks do accomplish is to put paid to the notion (popping up in reviews of their first couple of records) that Hefner were ever very 'folk' or 'country' after the name stopped referring to just Hayman and his guitar. They were very definitely a rock band, but one with "space in the sound, none of that indie mush." Hayman and later Hayter play without distortion for the kind of guitar sound favoured by early Talking Heads—just as muscular as fuller, rougher styles, but tensile instead of brawny. John Morrison is one of those bassists you really don't notice until you finally try to figure out what it is that is carrying the melody of a song like 'The Sad Witch' or 'I Took Her Love For Granted', and the galloping second half of 'The Sweetness Lies Within' should be all the argument needed on behalf of Antony Harding's prowess behind the kit. The band's sound was not a very flashy or unique one, but rather the kind of solidly dependable backing you sometimes wish someone like John Darnielle would luck into.
Not that Hayman is as phantasmagorical as Darnielle, or as historical or discursive, or any of a hundred other qualities; but although Hefner never gets the wild acclaim the Mountain Goats (deservedly do) Darnielle has never been as aphoristic or observational or as anthemic as Hayman was on a regular basis on these songs. Both writers possess voices "on the plaintive side of the whingeing scale", but Hayman is clearly more comfortable fiddling with structure and instrumentation, the actual music, whereas part of Darnielle's magic is that he often doesn't seem to be a songwriter at all, in the conventional sense. Hayman could instead pass at times for the bastard son of Elvis Costello, repeatedly working the fertile/furtive soil of infidelity and decaying relationships, albeit with a lot more sympathy than Costello in his fertile period.
The comparison to Darnielle deserves to be made, however, just as the Talking Heads and Costello ones do, because although Hefner have always been on the verge of being consigned to the dustbin as "just another" small indie outfit from England singing about girls, they deserve so much more. They weren't just Britain's Largest Small Band, during these years they were one of its Best. Breaking God's Heart is still as devastating a portrait of callow youth as anything you'd care to pit it against (and is in fact slightly under-represented here); The Fidelity Wars, their only album that you could fairly call "transitional", deepens the depictions of being smart but not good, of hurting and being hurt and still boasts one perfect song in 'The Hymn For The Cigarettes' (and another near-perfect one in the Gina Birch-assisted 'Don't Flake Out On Me'); We Love The City, arguably and popularly their peak, embraces happiness (and a horn section) in startlingly compelling fashion and boasts a surprisingly deep selection of love songs from a band who once seemed to write exclusively about breakups; and even the unfairly maligned "curate's egg" Dead Media assimilates Hayman and Hayter's longtime love of vintage synthesizer sounds easily thanks to another leap in songwriting, with only obvious crossover attempt 'Trouble Kid' (not included here) sticking out like a sore thumb.
The selections The Best Of Hefner 1996-2002 makes from these albums (as well as a few from the host of odds and ends collected on the fine Boxing Hefner compilation) are hard to argue with; even the couple of fairly left-field choices are likely to be met with warmth from fans, like The Fidelity Wars' closer 'I Love Only You' with its oddly fitting scratching or We Love The City's triumphant 'Painting And Kissing', five minutes without a chorus and never needing one. Or especially 'Home', a garrulously ramshackle road/label complaint that ended Hefner's last record. Because, as the invaluable Jack puts it, "Once a band starts recording songs about touring and record company staff, it's time for a rest." But here as on Dead Media, 'Home' works as a final throwing in of the towel, the natural companion to Six By Seven's cry at the beginning of their debut album that "all I want is a quiet life with my wife". There are a few songs each fan will probably wish were here (for my part, I can't believe 'Destroyed Cowboy Falls' and 'China Crisis' didn't make it), but no omissions or additions so glaring as to void the satisfaction of having most of the band's best material in one place, from 'Hello Kitten' to 'Alan Bean', from early fumblings of (self) love through to the ascent into space.
And for non-fans, it's hard to imagine there ever being a better mass-produced introduction to the band than this one (we can debate the merits of personally crafted mixes another time). Ranging wide without being schizophrenic, hitting the highlights without ignoring the interesting bits in the back of the catalog, digging deep without getting tiresome, this is the kind of collection that will make you ultimately go out and get all the albums, where as soon as first listen you could be falling in love to (or with) 'The Greater London Radio' or 'Lee Remick'. Hefner are no more for everyone than any other band, but they are for more than have actually heard them (except in Spain, but that's another story). Hopefully this compilation is the beginning of correcting that.
Ian Mathers
VANITY PROJECT
HEFNER _ THE BEST OF HEFNER
A lengthy overview of Hefner's output: nerdish, but cocky; downbeat, but cheeky. Hefner country is a place where politics is worn all down the sleeves (and your grave-dancing shoes on 'The Day That Thatcher Dies'. Braggisms pop out of some of their chords ('Christian Girls', while there are truly brilliant tunes such as 'Hello Kitten' and 'When Angels Play Their Drum Machines' the latter advancing them towards an electronic pulse, where they make it seem effortless. Theirs is a twee approach, but with a bite that'll take a chunk out of your torso, but Darren Hayman makes greater strides towards the heart when his voices strains with emotion. With the genius couplet of 'Hymn for the Cigarettes' and 'Hymn for the Alcohol' intact, this is an ideal celebration of Hefner's talents.
SkifThis review can also be found online at http://www.vanityproject.co.uk/
