Huey Lewis and the News' Fore! turns 40

Huey Lewis and the News' Fore! turns 40 this week, and a new essay in The Quietus looks back at a record that once sat at the center of mainstream American rock radio. It followed Sports, the band's breakthrough album, which sold nine million copies and made Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest albums of all time.

Fore! is anchored by "Hip to Be Square," the record's biggest and most enduring single, alongside cuts including opener "Jacob's Ladder," "Stuck With You," "I Know What I Like," "Forest for the Trees" and "Doing It All for My Baby." The international pressing added "The Power of Love."

Huey Lewis had a longer pedigree than the record's clean-cut, jock-rock image suggested. His first band, Clover, served as Elvis Costello's backing group roughly a decade before Fore!'s release, before Lewis moved into the more commercial territory that made Sports and then Fore! into hits.

The album has also picked up an unlikely afterlife in fiction. Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho devotes a seven-page passage to narrator Patrick Bateman's appraisal of the band, in which he calls The News "the best American Band of The Eighties," a passage that has shadowed the record's reputation for decades since.

Forty years on, Fore! remains a snapshot of mid-1980s rock at its most polished, an album that sold enormously well in its moment and that critics have argued over ever since -- exactly the kind of record an anniversary essay exists to reconsider.