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Huey Lewis, songwriter, vocals
Steven Spielberg and Bob Zemeckis asked to meet us, along with Bob Gale and Neil Canton. They said they’d just written this film whose lead character was a guy called Marty McFly, and whose favourite band would be Huey Lewis and the News. They asked: “How about writing a song for the film?” I said: “I’m flattered but I don’t know how to write for film necessarily. And frankly, I don’t fancy writing a song called Back to the Future.” They said: “No problem. We just want one of your songs.” I said: “Tell you what, we’ll send you the next one we work on.”
Chris Hayes, our guitarist and songwriter, had already written a chord progression, which he’d recorded on to a tape, and he gave it to me. I was going through a jogging phase and was out running one day when the song’s lyric just came to me. We sent them the demo but when Zemeckis heard it, he said it wasn’t upbeat enough. So I went back to the guys and we worked on it.
Johnny Colla, our saxophonist, got involved with the arrangement. On the original demo, the bridge chords happened twice and the song started on a verse in a minor key. Johnny had the idea of minimising it to just one bridge, and also came up with that big positive, three-chord major-key intro. I did my lead vocal in a couple of takes.
When we released The Power of Love, it was the most added track on radio in its first week and on heavy rotation. The interesting thing is that the film holds the record for the shortest amount of time between the end of principal photography and the release of the film: nine weeks. As The Power of Love raced up the charts, the studio kept yelling at Zemeckis: “Get the film out there; the song is killing it!” And so the release date was brought forward.
People forget that at the time we actually had a higher profile than Michael J Fox and Bob Zemeckis because we had hit records. The advantage to us was that this was our first really big international hit because the movie was so successful everywhere. It enabled us to tour Europe and other places.
Chris Hayes, songwriter, guitarist
Like all my writing, The Power of Love was done pretty casually. I had a real basic recording setup at my house, and I just sat down on the couch in my pyjamas one night, noodled around on the guitar, and came up with the chord progression. It was based around a really simple guitar riff and something that was as poppy and accessible as I could make it.
It was just all about using the right guitar parts and getting something kind of catchy. In the bridge section, it’s kind of gospel-inspired. I threw in a couple of chords that were a little bit different to the usual ones you’d put in a song like that. That was me going back to my music theory classes and jazz/gospel roots. When it came to the guitar solo, it was kind of inspired by Stevie Ray Vaughan.
When I wrote it, I had no idea what was going to happen or how popular it was going to be. It ended up being an integral part of the whole Back to the Future franchise, the biggest song in our career, and gave us our first No 1, which was exciting. What’s weird about it, though, is that the song really has nothing to do with the film whatsoever. We were given a synopsis of the screenplay of the movie, and I read through the whole thing and I remember thinking to myself: “This doesn’t sound plausible or like it’s going to be good.” And boy was I wrong!
