He’s the ‘one-hit wonder’ who made so much money he could retire at 27. Now, thanks to a freak moment in internet history, Rick Astley has found a whole new generation of fans who are never gonna give him up. He tells Hadley Freeman about Smiths covers and surviving a violent childhood.
As Rick Astley and I are walking out of the pub, where we have spent an extremely amiable two hours, I get a glimpse into what it’s like to be a mega-hit wonder. We pass by a group of seven people, all probably in their fifties and sixties, and all gawp at Astley. Despite being 58, he still looks extraordinarily like the 21-year-old who shot to pop immortality with one song, even down to the hair quiff that he swears is natural. He clocks the recognition, says a friendly hello and, as he walks past, they sing — quietly at first, then more excitedly — Never Gonna Give You Up. He doesn’t even blink. Instead, he raises his hand good-naturedly and ducks out of the door.
“There have been times when I’ve completely forgotten about that part of my life. I’m on holiday with my family and buying ice creams with my daughter — ‘Two cones, please’ — and the guy starts singing Never Gonna Give You Up and I’m standing there in my trunks,” he had told me, chuckling, only moments before this.
Does it irk him to be constantly shadowed by a song he first sang in 1987?
“You can appreciate it, or you can let it be a stone in your shoe. But my alternative was so shit I’m just glad to be here.”
If ever there was a living lesson in how to handle the vicissitudes of fame with grace, then it’s Astley. Never Gonna Give You Up has been around for so long that “people are over whether it’s twee or whatever. Now it’s part of the wallpaper,” as he puts it.
But it’s worth remembering how big it was and is: released in 1987, it went to No 1 in 25 countries. It has sold over a million copies in the UK, and in the US in 2022 sales surpassed five million. It remains the biggest success for Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW), the three-headed record-producing monolith whose pop songs pretty much defined the charts in 1980s Britain. Yet only six years after being a global No 1, Astley decided he was, he says, “a washed-up pop star” and disappeared from the spotlight.
Then, some 20 years later, he had a career resurrection via an internet meme — the “Rickrolling” phenomenon. This is when an internet link unexpectedly takes you to the extremely low-fi video for Never Gonna Give You Up, featuring a childlike Astley jiving in front of a chain-link fence. In 2008 alone, 18 million Americans were allegedly Rickrolled (“No idea how they worked that out,” Astley says) and even the White House’s social media account, then under the Obama administration, got involved (“That was weird,” he adds). Encouraged by the sensation, in 2016 Astley released his first studio album since 1993 — 50, which I must admit passed me by, but it went to No 1, which is lovely.
And through it all Astley has remained so grounded he is practically subterranean. We arrange to meet in his local, near the home in Richmond, southwest London, that he shares with his Danish wife, Lene — who, like Never Gonna Give You Up, has been in his life since the 1980s. She worked for his record label in Denmark, they met when he was promoting the song and that was that. Wasn’t he tempted to, well, shag around? “When you meet someone you don’t say, ‘This girl’s amazing but I’m going to sleep around with other people first,’ " he says.
I’m pretty sure a lot of 21-year-old pop stars do say that, I reply. “Well, good luck to them! But that’s not how it was for me,” he says with a contented shrug. I ask what he likes to do with his days and he thinks for a minute before saying he enjoys going for walks and listening to “old man podcasts” — The Rest Is History, Paul McCartney’s A Life in Lyrics.
When not walking around Richmond and listening to podcasts, Astley performs. He has an extraordinary number of celebrity fans. When Kylie Minogue threw her 50th birthday in London in 2018, the singer who entertained the party was Astley. That same summer I saw him perform at the family festival Camp Bestival, where he got Mary Berry — yes, Bake Off’s Mary Berry — to rock out on the drums during his set. “Wasn’t that fantastic?” he grins. “I’m not oblivious to how amazing all this is.”
In 2021 Never Gonna Give You Up proved to be firmly part of the Gen Z universe when Greta Thunberg performed it at a concert to raise awareness about climate change.
Dave Grohl — yes, Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl — often texts when he’s in town and occasionally coaxes Astley to get up on stage with him. “The first time I was, like, ‘Dave, I can’t do that, I’ll be murdered!’ But in his charming, all-encompassing way, Dave said, ‘Come on!’ Just being in his orbit is a nice experience,” Astley says. (Shortly after our interview it emerged that Grohl had fathered a daughter outside his marriage. So perhaps, next time he’s in town, he could get some lessons on marital fidelity from Astley.)
Last year he played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. That same afternoon at the festival he had been booked to perform a secret gig playing covers of songs by the Smiths, backed by the band Blossoms, none of whom were even born when Never Gonna Give You Up came out. They had become friends over a shared love of the Smiths after meeting in Manchester in 2017 and he occasionally performed covers of the band with them. At Glastonbury word apparently got out because the crowd was so big that part of the field had to be shut off. I was there and I watched as Astley stared out at the crowd with disbelieving joy. “I always assume that people think I’m a bit of a twat or, at best, a loveably naff figure,” he writes in his memoir, Never. Although whenever I say, “As you wrote in your book,” he corrects me: he didn’t “actually write the bloody thing” — the music journalist Alexis Petridis did the hard graft and Astley doesn’t want to take credit where it isn’t due.
Well, whoever wrote it gives a lovely portrait of a man who improbably became one of Britain’s most beloved pop stars, despite a brutally difficult upbringing.
“It wasn’t difficult compared to some things I’ve read about. Whatever your norm is, you get used to it, don’t you?” he says.
Astley’s childhood definitely wasn’t normal. He grew up in the market town of Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside and his accent is still as deep as his singing voice. He’s the youngest of five children, although one of the children — his brother David — died from meningitis before Astley was born. This might, he thinks, account for his mother Cynthia’s emotional detachment from her children. When Astley was about four, his father, Ozzy, a handyman, suddenly divorced her by locking her out of the house. Cynthia meekly walked away, leaving her four surviving children with her violent ex-husband, who had at least once tried to strangle her. She went to live with her mother and Astley saw her at weekends, but eventually stopped because it felt, he says, like he was “pestering her to be a mum”.
“It was like she was a child herself, having had kids quite young. But look, I don’t think that’s an unknown story in working-class northern towns,” he says, anxious not to look self-pitying. Nonetheless, he says, thinking about his mum, who died in 2021, was the hardest part of the book process: “There was just no emotional connection there, really. What an absolute waste.”
His father, who died in 2019, had emotions to spare. “He wasn’t a bad man,” Astley stresses. But he was wildly unstable. “Whatever it is in someone’s character that tethers them to the normal, accepted way of behaving, my dad didn’t possess,” is how Astley puts it. When he was 12 his father sold their family home and moved his children into a two-room Portakabin in the middle of a field. One morning Ozzy thought Astley — then 17 — had done something wrong and pushed him down on the ground and started kicking him. He stopped when Astley’s brother, Mike, put a knife to Ozzy’s throat and said, “If you f***ing move, I will kill you here and now.” The two boys then moved in with their mum and grandmother; the older siblings had already left home. Years later, when Astley was No 1 in the charts, one of the tabloids found Ozzy and ran a photo of him with the headline “Chart-topping Rick’s dad lives in Portakabin”. It wasn’t very hard to find him because by then Ozzy wore a sweatshirt that had “I’m Rick Astley’s dad” written across it.
Once Astley became famous he tried to help his parents, buying his mum a house. But she never seemed very interested in him or, later, his daughter, Emilie, and his father sent him such a vicious letter when Emilie was born that Astley never spoke to him again. “I think my brother Mike put it best. After my dad had gone and my mum was dead, none of us — my sister and brothers — felt a sense of mourning because we’d done our mourning a long time ago. If we were mourning anything it’s what could have been. But it was what it was and it wasn’t great.” Astley is very close to his siblings, who are dotted all over the country. All are in long-term marriages with stable jobs, and Astley says that maybe the best thing any of them got from their parents was a lesson in how they didn’t want to be.
Astley left school without any O-levels and assumed he’d work with his father, fixing and selling things. After the knife incident that was very much off the cards. The only other thing he had going on was singing in a band with his mates that played at local pubs. But as Astley puts it: “It wasn’t as if London record labels were sending platoons of talent scouts out, with firm instructions not to come back until they’d found out what was big in Newton-le-Willows.” However, Newton-le-Willows did have a hairdresser named Gaynor and she had a new boyfriend who happened to be a chap called Pete Waterman.
If the chances of Astley getting talent-spotted in Newton-le-Willows were pretty low, then the prospect of him being spotted by a man who would go on to become one of Britain’s most successful producers was downright laughable. But that is what happened. Encouraged by Gaynor, Waterman checked out Astley, instantly recognised that this weedy lad with the soulful voice was a talent and signed him. So Astley went — minus his band — down to London to meet Waterman’s two partners, Mike Stock and Matt Aitken, aka the Hit Factory, who would shortly become the dominating force in 1980s British pop music. While Astley learnt song-writing skills and made tea at the Hit Factory, he watched SAW make stars out of Bananarama, Mel & Kim and — eventually — Minogue. Astley rolled his eyes when he heard Minogue was joining the SAW family and thought, “God, as if people don’t think they’re naff enough already, now they’re making a record with a soap star.”
Critics did think SAW were naff and many accused them of being formulaic — “which, by the end, they were because they didn’t have time to be anything else.
I don’t know many other record production companies where people say before the song is even written, ‘This will be on Top of the Pops in four weeks’ time,’ " Astley says.
After a year of tea-making for SAW, he was given a record contract and recorded Never Gonna Give You Up. In typical seat-of-your-pants, throw-something-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks SAW style, no one bothered to arrange a photoshoot, music video, stylist or even a choreographer to help with the launch — Astley was just shoved out on to the Top of the Pops stage, and told to sing his song. Still only 21 and terrified, he swayed anxiously from side to side (“It was fear, not dancing,” he says) and sang. It might not have been David Bowie doing Starman, but it worked: that week the song went to No 3 in the charts.
SAW realised they had a hit on their hands and set up a video shoot. Music videos in the 1980s were known for their high production values — such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer — but that was not the SAW way. Instead they filmed inside a youth club next to the A40 and told Astley to mime the song and “jig about a bit”. So that’s exactly what he did. “And those are all my own clothes in the video. You’d think an Eighties video would have a stylist, wouldn’t you? But no, those are my brogues and all,” he says. If he’d known that video would one day have more than 1.5 billion views, he might have bought better shoes.
The song shot up to No 1, where it stayed for five weeks. Suddenly Astley was a bona fide pop star, even in America, where Never Gonna Give You Up also went to No 1. More hit singles followed for Astley, including Together Forever and She Wants to Dance with Me. He nearly fainted when Morrissey, the lead singer of the Smiths, asked him for a photo when they were both on Top of the Pops, and then later used it for the cover of the rerelease of his single The Last of the International Playboys in 2013: “I just put that in my mental file I call ‘My Weird Life’, " Astley says. He hung out with Depeche Mode in Los Angeles; he performed with Brian May and Phil Collins at the Prince’s Trust Rock Gala in 1988; and Ozzy Osbourne offered to put him in touch with musicians for a tour (“Don’t be so stupid, Ozzy! He doesn’t want any of your long-haired, tattooed monsters playing for him! He’s a nice boy, leave him alone!” Osbourne’s wife, Sharon, shouted). But for Astley the real thrill came when he found out he was No 1 in the UK. His first thought was, “I’m saved. I will never have to live with my dad in the Portakabin again.”
Escape from Newton-le-Willows, and a stable life, was all he had wanted from the music business. And this is what saved him: it meant he was never tempted by drugs (“Wouldn’t know ‘em if I saw ‘em”) or any of the other usual pop star pitfalls. In 1990 he left SAW, wanting to do more soulful music. By now he was living with Lene, who gave birth to their daughter, Emilie, in 1992. But his next album, Free, didn’t do as well as he’d hoped. He didn’t have a nervous breakdown and he didn’t fall headfirst into a pile of cocaine. Instead he announced, at the age of 27, that he was retiring from the music business, and he did.
“I’ve no gripes about how things worked out. Maybe things could have been different if the record company had done this or that, but it just sounds like sour grapes when you say things like that. And the reason I went into the business was to have security. So I looked at my beautiful wife and daughter, our house in the Cotswolds, and thought, well, this will do,” he says.
The usual cliché is that a celebrity never matures beyond the age at which they become famous. But with Astley, the opposite was true: being famous made him able to prepare for his future. It helped that he had made so much money from his two albums with SAW that he hasn’t had to work since he was 27. He didn’t just sing on them, he also wrote many of the songs — albeit not Never Gonna Give You Up, much to his self-mocking regret. So although he doesn’t get much from Rickrolling, he still made a lot more money than most pop stars. “Not having to worry about money … I mean, that’s the winning ticket, isn’t it?”
What does he like to splurge on?
“One thing I’ve never thought twice about is buying dinner for everybody. That feels like a freedom, doesn’t it?”
Astley had an accidental starry moment in the 1990s when he went to Los Angeles to visit a friend, who happens to be Elton John’s guitarist. Because he was in the studio waiting for his friend, Astley got roped into singing the backing vocals on Can You Feel the Love Tonight? for The Lion King. But other than that, for the next two decades he lived a quiet life with his family in Oxfordshire, pottering about and being a father. And then Rickrolling happened.
Astley knows how sweet his life is, and if the price for that is members of the public singing a 37-year-old song at him every day, that’s not the worst tax. Still, having a nice life has never been a guarantee of sanity or even decency. If anything, when it comes to celebrities, it seems to be the opposite. But not with Astley.
He laughs: “Just don’t be an arse, right? That’s all. But I don’t want a medal for it!”
And that’s why he deserves one.
Extract: The making of that video — ‘I looked like a 12-year-old’
With the Never Gonna Give You Up single in the top three, the record company decided we needed a video, and quickly. Of course they did: it was the 1980s, the high point of the music video. Videos had such a huge impact in promoting a single that they had turned into a kind of race to see who could make the most striking, lavish production — like a mini-Hollywood film, often by directors who went on to make actual Hollywood films: Duran Duran on a yacht in Antigua, Robert Palmer with a band made up of female models; Morten Harket from A-ha suddenly turning from a cartoon of a teenage heartthrob into the real thing.
Our video wasn’t like that. I didn’t meet the director in advance or see a treatment, not that I’d have known what that was: in 1987, I thought a treatment was something you got from the doctor if you had piles. To be honest, I’m not certain that I knew what a director was either. If I went to see a film, I didn’t hang around the cinema until the end. My preparation for the video involved being told the date and time, and being instructed to bring a bag of my own clothes.
A car was sent to pick me up. It dropped me off in Shepherd’s Bush, near where the Westfield shopping centre is today. There was a big old building there that was used by a youth club. Inside, they had set up a stage, an old-fashioned microphone and a bar. I was introduced to a couple of dancers who were going to be in the video, both of whom, I noted, were a) really hot and, therefore, b) too hot realistically to be dancing with me.
There was another guy there, whose role was to play the bartender who’s so impressed by the sound of me singing that he stops polishing glasses in order to dance, does the splits in mid-air and eventually runs up a wall and does a somersault off it. That didn’t seem very realistic either, good as I thought Never Gonna Give You Up was.
In fact there was a fourth dancer, who was the boyfriend of one of the hot female dancers, but you don’t see him as much in the finished video. The guy was enormous and built like an athlete, and I don’t think they could put him in the same shot as me because, next to him, I looked like a 12-year-oldwith a quiff. There were no other instructions: I just had to mime the song and jig about a bit.
I mimed the song and jigged about a bit by a chain-link fence in the sunshine. I mimed the song and jigged about a bit on the stage with the two hot dancers. I mimed the song and jigged about a bit by the arches outside the youth club. In fact I probably couldn’t have taken any other instructions in.I was too busy looking at the cameras and the crew — there must have been 30 people there. It really did look how I imagined a proper film set would be.
Any sense of movie-star glamour was almost immediately undermined when we started filming by the chain-link fence. As the song kicked into life for me to mime to, someone in a flat nearby leant out of the window and bellowed, “Shut the f*** up! I’m on nights, I’m trying to get some sleep, you bastards!” Maybe the same thing happened to Duran Duran when they were singing Rio on their yacht in Antigua, but I somehow doubted it.
Extracted from Never: The Autobiography by Rick Astley (Pan Macmillan). One sale from October 22.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London