Killing Heidi were an Australian rock band from Violet Town, Victoria. The band, which has been on hiatus since 2006, are best known for their multi-platinum album Reflector, released in 2000. The nucleus of Killing Heidi is singer/songwriter Ella Hooper and her older brother guitarist Jesse Hooper. They grew up in Violet Town, a small Victorian country town, with a population of approximately 600 where their parents worked as music and drama tea ... See more [+] chers. They started jamming together at home; Ella singing while Jesse played the guitar. They played an acoustic gig together at the Violet Town Arts Festival in 1996, when Ella was 13 years old. Bent Records label owner and local record studio owner, Jamie Durrant, offered them some time in a studio with a couple of schoolmates as the rhythm section. They submitted these recordings into the Triple J Unearthed competition in 1996 and the track "Kettle" won the competition for their area of rural Victoria. "Kettle" was written by Ella Hooper; Brian Walton and Jesse Hooper added some guitar parts later. The name "Killing Heidi" came from the band members generating two lists before their first gig; one filled with "soft" words, one with "harsh" words. Killing was chosen as the harsh, Heidi the soft. According to the band, the name basically means "the end of innocence". Producer Paul Kosky who had worked with Crowded House, Rage Against the Machine, Kate Ceberano, and The Clouds was looking for a band to manage and sign to his new recording label Wah Wah Music. He decided to check out live performance by Killing Heidi. He helped the develop the young band over the next two years working on songwriting, song structure and overall direction of the music. He was a mentor and offered the recording experience and production style that became the bands sound. He became the manager of the band and arranged a contract with Roadshow Music (who had a contract with Savage Garden) for his label, Killing Heidi had also acquired a new rhythm section (which Kosky sourced and introduced to Killing Heidi) with Adam Pedretti on drums and Warren Jenkin on bass. They recorded the rest of the first album in 1998.
