Rick Astley on rickrolling, refinding fame and his ‘weird’ childhood

“Rick Astley has your number and will call you at noon.” If 15-year-old me saw the text I’ve just been sent, in addition to wondering, “What’s a text?” she’d be hyperventilating and dreaming up ingenious ways to persuade 1980s pop legend Rick Astley to serenade her with his monster hit Never Gonna to Give You Up so she could boast about it at school the next day.
Decades before ‘rickrolling’ became a thing – we’ll get to that shortly – Astley with his trademark quiff was on bedroom walls all over the world, including mine. Also on my wall rocking an impressive quiff: Smiths frontman Morrissey. Early on in his new and hugely enjoyable memoir Never, Astley says that because he was seen as a manufactured pop star, just another product of the Stock Aitken Waterman hit factory, “people who liked the Smiths thought I was a total t**t”. Not me. I appreciated the musical stylings of both Astley and Mozza. I make a mental note to tell him that as the clock ticks maddeningly slowly toward midday.
Astley calls promptly at noon but the promised phone call has since been upgraded to a Zoom – joy! He’s wearing a black T-shirt and sitting on a stylish green sofa in his home in Surrey on the outskirts of London where he lives with his wife who is also his manager, the Oscar-nominated Danish film-maker Lene Bausager. Now aged 58, Astley’s quiff is, I’m happy to report, as bouncy as it was in 1987 when he was a suddenly famous 21-year-old, jiving his heart out on Top of the Pops. “That wasn’t dancing, that was fear,” he says.
Never Gonna Give You Up went to number three in the UK charts after that performance and shortly afterwards to number one, where it stayed for five weeks – preventing U2′s With or Without You from hitting the top spot and creating a massive pop star virtually overnight out of an auburn-haired kid with freckles from the market town of Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire.
“I looked around 11,” he says cheerfully. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Before long he was number one in 25 countries including the United States and Australia. There was a hit follow-up album and eight consecutive top 10 singles before he walked away from it all feeling like “a washed up pop star” aged just 27.
I waste no time telling him this Smiths fan did not think he was “a complete t**t” back in the day. A lifelong Smiths fan himself, he flashes a friendly grin and tells me about a new song by his much younger friends in the Indie band Blossoms. Last year he and the band did a not-so-secret gig of Smiths covers at Glastonbury when Astley, who has been having an eventful comeback for over a decade now, did his own set on the Pyramid stage where he was enthusiastically welcomed by a huge crowd. Nobody was more stunned by this development than Astley. Anyway, he says Blossoms have a new album out called Gary – “it’s their best one yet”. The song Mothers contains the lyric: “Our mothers said they were friends back in the Eighties … At the club, dance to the Smiths and Rick Astley.”
He seems pleasantly surprised by the lyric. “I think when I go back to those days I segregated everybody [in terms of what music they enjoyed] … you were told, ‘you’re in that camp, don’t come out of it’, but maybe it wasn’t as black and white as all that.”
People have been asking Rick Astley to write a book for years and when he finally decided the time was right he got Guardian music writer Alexis Petridis involved. He has no interest in hiding the fact that he didn’t write it himself. “I hate when I see ‘so and so wrote a song’ when I know for a fact someone else wrote it,” he says. “I was obviously massively a part of the book … any ghostwriter will tell you they want to make sure they get the person’s voice right so we spent a stupid amount of time together.”
The success of the book is partly due to Petridis’s superb storytelling, but the unexpected trajectory of Astley’s life and career has a lot to do with it too. Had he remained a mere footnote of 1980s pop culture, he would arguably not have merited a 300-page memoir. But he went from being Rick Astley, “a puppet of the evil empire of Stock Aitken Waterman”, to walking away from the pop star life to eventually becoming Rick Astley the baby face that launched a global Internet phenomenon a full 30 years after his 15 minutes should have been well and truly over.
Rickrolling, for those who managed to miss it, was an internet gag that went viral in 2007 and lasted for years. To rickroll someone was (and still is) to send an internet link purporting to be for one thing but which instead directs you to the video for Never Gonna Give You Up. Apparently, 18 million people in the United States were rickrolled in 2008 and even Barack Obama’s White House got in on the action at the time. Thanks to all that rickrolling, the YouTube figures for the Never Gonna Give You Up video have hit over a billion plays and the song has been streamed on Spotify 800 million times. In 2021, 14 years after it first started, Greta Thunberg interrupted her speech at a climate benefit concert to perform an impromptu version of the song.
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“The internet has been really cruel to a lot of people but it’s been pretty amazing for a few people, and I’m one of them … I think sometimes people think that’s what got me going again. It isn’t really,” Astley says. By the time rickrolling happened he’d been back on the circuit doing 1980s nostalgia gigs and dipping his toes back into recording. He does concede that while nobody was booking him for events just because he was a viral meme, it didn’t hurt to have his name out there again. “It was more like a reminder. Like, oh yeah, he’s not dead.”
Astley also had a very “weird” childhood which adds to the compelling nature of his story. He was one of five children, although his older brother David died aged five from meningitis before he was born. His father Horace, an impulsive, volatile, eccentric character known as Ozzy, always blamed Astley’s mother Cynthia for their son’s death and eventually locked her out of the family home. Ozzy then took their three sons and one daughter from the family home to live in a Portakabin in a field where he set up a garden centre.
It was a strange life. Ozzy kept horses and could sometimes be seen down the town on a pony and trap dressed “like Huckleberry Finn”, blaring brass band music from a boom box. The children witnessed his frequent rages; he’d often smash things up with a hammer for no apparent reason. Astley and his siblings were also expected to do manual labour around the yard from a young age. By the age of 15 Astley could lift 112lb (51kg) bags of gravel and cement over his head. He left school with no O-levels, having only managed to write his name on the exam paper.
“It was tough, if I’m honest, it definitely was, because as a teenager, you want to fit in … it was just the initial shock of, like, we’re going to live in a Portakabin in a field?”
In addition to his eccentricities, Ozzy had a relaxed parenting style which Astley’s friends envied. “As embarrassing as it was, it was also pretty amazing because, like, I’m literally gonna go and play ACDC as loud as I can and drum along to it, and no one’s gonna give a shit.”
His mother, whom he describes as “distant” and “emotionally detached”, went to live with her mother and never fought Astley’s father for custody of her sons and daughter. He says his father “wasn’t a violent man” but he did once see him try to strangle his mother, and Astley left home for good aged 17 after his dad physically attacked him for no reason. During this attack his brother Mike threatened to kill their father with a knife if he carried on, at which point the brothers went off to live with their mother in their grandmother’s home.
Regarding his mother’s parenting, he says “she didn’t really have it in her … she was my mum and she did the best she could but looking back I just think the relationship with my dad and losing David … it was like a ghost in the house and I don’t think she ever got over those things. I think we all want that lovely mum and dad and a nice little house, I certainly did, but it just wasn’t there. By the time I got into my late teens I knew it was never going to be there, so you knew you better get your act together if you want to find your own home and family and everything.”
He was in a band called FBI at the time, first playing drums and then vocals, but observers would not have put money on him ending up on Top of The Pops. At this point, a dogsbody job at his dad’s garden centre was his likely future. As he says in the book: “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 and signed it: Get me that band with the lad from the garden centre on lead vocals, or don’t bother coming to work on Monday.”
But what did happen was that a local hairdresser encouraged her boyfriend Pete Waterman to check out Astley’s band. Waterman, one third of 1980s hit makers Stock Aitken and Waterman, wasn’t interested in the group but wanted to sign the 19-year-old singer who had a distinctive voice that sounded like it came from someone much older. For a year or so Astley worked as a tea boy in their London studios, known as “the hit factory”, serving hot beverages to acts such as Bananarama, Mel & Kim and Dead or Alive. He was 21 when he was given Never Gonna Give You Up to sing and became suddenly famous, with construction workers shouting “w**ker” at him when he walked by – a sure sign of success in Britain.
He toured everywhere, including the United States, and has stories about staying in the Sunset Marquis in LA, where he’d see Bono and The Edge inspecting the breakfast menu and where he taught four-year-old Lily Collins, daughter of Phil from Genesis and now the star of Emily in Paris, to dive at the hotel pool. He was touring with an older record industry figure and close friend called Tops who never drank or smoke, and he says that was the main reason he never went off the rails.
Rick Astley, as we all know, is no stranger to love. He met Lene Bausager in Copenhagen where she worked for the Danish arm of his record company. Incredibly, he was never tempted to be a pop star lothario. “There are a couple of friends who said to me, what were you doing? But I met somebody who I actually fell really deeply in love with, and you’re not gonna go, ‘Look, I really want to be with you, but can I just go and shag around for a year because I’m a pop star?’”
He’s been with Bausager ever since, but the couple only got around to marrying in 2013. He was 25 when they had a baby, Emilie. She is now a landscape gardener in Denmark. Gardens again? “It seems to have skipped a generation,” he smiles. Emilie got married last year. He sang at the wedding. He sings at lots of weddings. “It used to be my friends’ weddings, now it’s their kids.”
We talk about why he abandoned his pop career in 1993. His third album Free had done all right but the next one, Body & Soul, failed to connect. And he had developed a fear of flying which was so acute he was unable to get on a Concorde flight to New York where he was due to play the David Letterman show. By this stage he had sold 40 million records and made enough money to never have to worry about financial security again.
Still, for the next while he struggled with depression. “I was a nightmare to live with,” he says in the book, acknowledging the shame he felt about the manufactured pop aspect of his career. He got out of this darkness through intense therapy after the family moved from a sprawling fixer-upper home in the countryside to London.
“I don’t think I’ve had a tough life at all. My upbringing was a bit of a challenge at times, but I don’t feel sorry for myself and I certainly don’t for being a pop star. All I would say is being famous does mess with your head and I know it’s great and glorious, and can be lovely, but it’s also really weird at times and strange, and it just screws with you.” He spent the time in therapy figuring out how to be a real person and not just “a commodity”.
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Astley now had what he craved since childhood: stability, a contented family, a lovely house in the leafy London suburb of Richmond – “not an ostentatious house but not a Portakabin”. Richmond was home to a lot of celebrities. “The Stones’ kids went to my daughter’s schools, you’d see Pete Townshend outside the vegetable shop.” He lived a relatively quiet life, with various forays back into music including a punk band full of middle-aged friends called The Luddites. Then rickrolling happened and he was introduced to a whole new generation of fans.
Ten years ago Bausager became his manager. He credits her with much of his recent success and with encouraging him to make the album 50, full of songs he wrote and played on himself. To his astonishment the album went to number one in the UK album charts in 2016. Eventually this comeback grew to include Glastonbury and those Smiths covers and sold-out gigs in the Royal Albert Hall where he did swing concerts, his father’s favourite music.
Astley was estranged from his father by the time he died, and his relationship with his mother never really deepened or improved, even after the birth of his daughter. “My brother Mike encapsulated it really well one day after both our parents had gone … he said, we’re not mourning now, because we mourned this a long time ago. We mourned that they were never what we wanted them to be.”
We’ve chatted for much longer than our allotted hour when I ask him, randomly, for his views on British politics. “I think politics in general, not just British politics, is broken … I know this is very contentious but I don’t really believe in politics … we all know those companies owned by the ten richest men in the world, and if on a whim they say, ‘I’m going to do this,’ then politicians have to get on board most of the time, because they can’t beat them … I don’t think it’s any different in your country or in any country. There’s somebody at the back of it who has got enough money and is calling the shots. Because I don’t see anything changing whether we have a Labour or Conservative government. United States had a black president for God’s sake – did anything change?”
I did not have chatting about late-stage capitalism with Rick Astley on my 2024 bingo card, but that’s what appears to be happening. “I have to say I’m liking this cynical Rick Astley,” I say, egging him on. “Cynical Rick Astley, right, that’s the name for the podcast, and you’re the first guest on,” he says. “Listen, I try not to think about it because it’s too much of a black hole to go down.”
Do I dare ask him if there’s any chance of a few bars of Never Gonna Give You Up? In the end, I don’t. Fifteen-year-old me is just happy to have spent some time with this charming man whose life mantra is “don’t be an arse”.
He’s toured a lot with his band this year and for the next while he’ll be on a talking tour with the book, including a stop in Dublin. He says he never gets annoyed by his most famous song being sung at him or being asked for selfies by people. “Who can be pissed off at that?” And it’s been a very long time since anybody called him a w**ker in the street.
He says as he nears 60, he’s been reflecting on how long he’ll keep going on with music and touring. “I don’t know whether I want to be 80, if I get to 80, singing Never Gonna Give You Up … but I like to possibly think I might still have a glass of wine in my hand singing an old Frank Sinatra song with my feet in the sand and someone playing the piano in a bar in Italy.”
Rick Astley will be in conversation about his book Never with Charles Hendy of The Mary Wallopers in a Festival of Writing & Ideas special event in Vicar Street on Saturday October 19th at 2.30pm: see https://festivalofwritingandideas.com/