Power of Love star Huey Lewis has told of his devastation at going deaf and revealed how he “can’t sing anymore”. The 75-year-old musician posted the health update describing a recent meeting he had in the UK with Bon Jovi drummer Tico Torres. He said during the exchange Torres asked how he was doing and Lewis replied: “Tico, it’s bad. I lost my hearing. I can’t sing anymore.”

The pair became “really good friends” through their mutual love of golf and last month teamed up to play the Alfred Dunhill Cup in Scotland. Lewis added: “We met up at the golf tournament and Tico said, “Huey, how you doin’?” He’s from New Jersey. He sounds like one of The Sopranos. “How you doin?”

I said, “Tico, it’s bad. I lost my hearing. I can’t sing anymore.” I explained the whole deal to him.

He listened to me with furrowed brows, gently shaking his head, looking downward the whole time. When I finished, he shook his head and said, “What ya gonna do?”

“And so that’s been my new mantra: What are you gonna do? I mean, I have to do something. I want to stay creative. I want to stay busy and not focus on how bad my hearing is. So I concentrate on our theatrical endeavours, fishing, the TV show I’m working on… It’s something to hope for. It keeps me going.”

Lewis, who first rose to fame as a member of 70s US rockers Clover before achieving superstardom as the frontman of Huey Lewis and the News, has been absent from the stage since 2018, when he cancelled all tour dates due to his diagnosis with Meniere’s disease.

The disease, which affects the inner ear and prompts vertigo and other disorienting symptoms, saw Lewis experiencing increasing hearing loss during rehearsals and prompted his retirement from live performances until an improvement.

But last year Lewis said his life had improved since being fitted with a cochlear implant that enabled him to hear speech “much better.”

He added: “I lost bilaterally, my hearing … the intense vertigo, I’m mildly dizzy all the time, and my hearing just went to zero. And now I have a cochlear implant, so I’m much better that way, but I can’t hear music.

“The worst part is that means it’s bad enough not to be able to perform and sing and play, but it’s really bad not to even be able to enjoy music.”

Despite his inability to perform or record as part of Huey Lewis and the News, a jukebox musical based on the band’s music, The Heart of Rock and Roll, has been staged on Broadway in recent years.

His band is best known for its third, and best-selling, album Sports, and its contribution to the soundtrack of the 1985 feature film Back to the Future starring Michael J Fox.