Huey Lewis & The News: Sports (40th anniversary) [UME]

Why you'll love it

This 40th anniversary edition comes with a lyric and credits inner sleeve, pressed in the EU. Sports hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200, stayed on the chart for 160 weeks, threw off four top-ten singles and went 7x platinum.

This edition

• 40th anniversary edition
• Lyric and credits inner sleeve
• Pressed in the EU
• Stereo mix

About the album

The title is a pun on the band's name, and the cover was shot at the 2 AM Club in Mill Valley, California, a bar they'd played in their early days; the reasoning was that most people watch sport in bars anyway. Their manager Bob Brown thought the band's own demos beat anything the hired producers offered, so the News produced Sports themselves, pairing old-school vocal sounds with a brand-new LinnDrum.

"The Heart of Rock & Roll" was born after a gig in Cleveland, where someone told them it was a great rock and roll town; engineer Jim Gaines and keyboardist Sean Hopper spent six hours building its heartbeat. "I Want a New Drug" rides a sequenced bass line, "Heart and Soul" is a Chinn and Chapman song they very nearly shelved, "Bad Is Bad" goes back to Lewis's old band Clover, and "Honky Tonk Blues" is Hank Williams played, by design, in the style of Status Quo.

Hank Williams Jr. later complimented the band on that last one. Forty years on, Sports still sounds like a very good night at a bar band's local, and we mean that as the highest compliment the trade has.

Also at Kops: more Huey Lewis & The News on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Chrysalis / Capitol, a reissue of the 1983 album.