Back in the headlines

"We have a great new song - it's called While We're Young," singer Huey Lewis, 63, chuckles over the phone from his hotel room in the US state of Virginia.

Young at heart, perhaps. Huey Lewis and the News, who are the headlining band at the Foreign Correspondents' Club's annual charity ball on October 5, are touring to celebrate a significant anniversary: it's 30 years since the release of Sports, their biggest album in the US, which produced four top 10 hits and went platinum seven times.

Sports has been re-released in an anniversary edition as a double CD, comprising the original album remastered and the same songs recorded live at various concerts between 1983 and 2012. The overdubbed studio tracks sound very much of their time, but the 1980s live performances sound as though they could have been recorded last year.

Despite their chart success, Huey Lewis and the News have always regarded themselves primarily as live performers. They swiftly tired of the method of multi-track recording that served them so well on Sports and reverted to a simpler "live in the studio" approach to making records.

"We've always played shows and it's really what we're best at. Making records is a fun thing when you are capturing performances, but creating them piece by piece is not that much fun for me. I'm impatient that way. I'm much more of a performance guy," he says.

Lewis' performer's instincts have also been channeled into a parallel career as an actor, which began with a 1985 cameo in Back to the Future. He has made regular stage, film and TV appearances since.

Also a fine harmonica player, Lewis also guests periodically as an instrumentalist on other artists' records, and has recorded with the likes of Dave Edmunds, Nick Lowe, Dick Dale and Brenda Lee.