Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
With all respect intended, the 80s were arguably the moment when popular music hit its absolute zenith. The 60s were magical, the 70s illuminating, but the 80s seemed to bring music completely to a different audience that required a diversity of sound, the first sense of expanding genres, blurring them, marketing them with aggression, the battle to be the hero or heroine on the walls of the new teenagers, the Generation X wave and to make the most of the new modes of delivering sound to the senses…that was the moment when it truly reached its moments.
The 80s saw groups such as Huey Lewis & The News build on their humble beginnings, and become ones to whom could carry an audience in such a way that for a time they became synonymous with the glory of being associated with the cinematic hit, and whilst the album Sports arrived too early for the single The Power Of Love to aid its progress up the charts, it nonetheless acted as a springboard for the newly obsessed fan on this side of the Atlantic to truly feel the spirit and the joy in the band.
Celebrating its 40th anniversary re-release, Huey Lewis & The News revel in the mainstream success that Sports bought them, from out of the shadows and the perhaps acceptable shadows of the solo American market and found them to be one of the class acts of the decade.
The six major players, Huey Lewis, Mario Cipollina, Johnny Colla, Bill Gibson, Chris Hayes, and Sean Hopper, rose gloriously to the occasion and the assertion that they absolutely needed a hit to cement their relationship with the fans.
In I Want A New Drug that hit was secured and became a staple of the live sets, and became embroiled in a law suit against another track that was considered huge in the era, that of the Ray Parker Jnr. delivered theme track for the epic Ghostbuster’s film. I Want A New Drug may have been an open ended suggestion but its muscle made Sports a must have album, and forty years on it still sounds exciting, full of mischief, a tightly arranged force in which tracks such as Bad Is Bad, Finally Found A Home, You Crack Me Up, and the rather cool version of Hank Williams’ Honky Tonk Blues added insight to what was to come across the remainder of the decade…a band that truly paid their dues and which left their mighty stamp on the conscious of the generation coming though.
Many other groups of a like-minded musical persuasion at this time felt greatness, but Huey Lewis & The News were the unfashionable but deserved winners, and it all really kicked off on this side of the Atlantic as they embodied what it meant to be stars in the age of cinema scores and theme tunes.
Ian D. Hall