Huey Lewis and the News - Do You Believe In Love (SUPERSCALED TO 4K) 🇺🇸
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 Published On Apr 4, 2024

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The actress in the video is Lisabeth Shatner, daughter of William Shatner.

In 1972, singer/harmonica player Huey Lewis and keyboardist Sean Hopper joined the Bay Area jazz-funk band Clover. Clover had recorded several albums in the 1970s, and in the middle of the decade transplanted themselves to Britain to become part of the UK pub rock scene.

Early in his career, Robert John "Mutt" Lange wrote and produced this song for a British band he was working with called Supercharge, which issued it on their 1979 album Body Rhythm under the title "We Both Believe In Love." Supercharge had some success in Europe, but weren't known at all in America, where the album wasn't even released.

In 1977, Lange produced two albums for Clover, and Elvis Costello thought highly enough of Clover to use them as his backing band on his album My Aim Is True, but the group couldn't break through in Britain as they hoped. Returning to America, Clover regrouped as Huey Lewis & the News, got a deal with Chrysalis Records, and released their first album in that configuration in 1980. It flopped. Chrysalis let them make a second album, but this time they had to have a hit.

The label strongly suggested they record "Do You Believe in Love?" The band wasn't thrilled with this idea: Clover's work with Lange didn't pan out, so why should they record another one of his songs? Lewis and his bandmates were determined to make music on their terms, but they were in their 30s and running out of time. At the urging of their manager, Bob Brown, they recorded this "overly commercial" song for their second album. It ended up being their first hit, and the song that paid the bills. It was a teachable moment for the band, who worked hard from that point forward to create at least two hits on every album, even if it meant compromising a bit.

This song got a lot of help from MTV, which was only about six months old when they put the song in hot rotation in early 1982. European artists had been making videos for years, so MTV's library was filled with A Flock Of Seagulls and The Human League; they were desperate for American acts. Most American artists didn't make videos pre-MTV because there was no place to show them, but in Huey Lewis & the News' stomping grounds of San Francisco, there was a cable TV show that shot a video for their song "Some Of My Lies Are True (Sooner Or Later)" in 1980 just so they could air it. That video got the band a deal with Chrysalis Records, a British label that was all-in on music video.

Chrysalis made sure every Huey Lewis & the News song got a well-produced video. The strategy paid off - the band became one of the popular artists on the network, boosting their sales considerably.

Even by early MTV standards, the video is a little strange. It shows the band doing everything together, including one scene where they were all in bed with a woman (it's not as kinky as it sounds). In an interview with Huey Lewis, he told the story:

"The label wanted to do this really serious video, so they hired an advertising guy who was a fashion guy, who dressed the set up in pastel colors and dressed us up in matching pastels with lots of make-up and shot the video all day long, hard.

Two weeks later, we went to see the rough cut, and everybody was there: the record company, us, and the video company. Probably about 30 people. The director stands up and says, 'It's not colorized yet. It's going to look much better when it's colorized. This is just the rough cut.' He turns off the lights and plays the video... and my heart sank. It was just horrible. There was no direction, there was no reason for this guy to be singing off into the distance. This is the video where we are all in bed singing to the girl for some reason.

I didn't know what was going on in that video. I just had this terrible sinking feeling. And when the video ended, everybody stood up and gave us a standing ovation! I thought to myself, Well, clearly there's no art to this. Nobody knows anything about this. We're already writing our own songs and producing our own records, we need to be making our own videos.

That's when I entered into that stage of having fun and trying to zig when the song zags. So, we did all of the rest of the videos, mostly."

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