Rick Astley on his unexpected comeback: 'I snuck out the back door and nobody seemed to care'

From topping the charts with Stock Aiken and Waterman, to Rickrolling and Glastonbury, the 1980s pop icon talks to Noel Baker about his very unexpected career comeback

Rick Astley in the studio re-recording Never Gonna Give You Up, as part of a campaign with Specsavers regarding hearing loss.

Rick Astley has many attributes, including a sense of humour. And why wouldn’t he, when his interviewer falls through a bed.

Following 30 minutes of engaging discussion on Zoom, the bed on which your correspondent has been perched suddenly, dramatically, gives way.

The laptop is sliding off to the right, legs are somewhere in the air, and a desperate attempt to rectify the situation results in even more bed boards giving way. It’s too late — this reporter has disappeared from view.

“It was like you were on a ship then,” Rick laughs as I finally right myself, dignity in tatters, just about afloat.

But the man who has been both a million seller and a meme strikes just the right amount of empathy, even as he’s left grinning and shaking his head. At least it’ll make a good anecdote for me in a few years.

Astley already has plenty of his own. He is fresh from acclaimed performances at Glastonbury and Electric Picnic, and while he has the wisdom of a man befitting his 57 years, his boyish looks and vibrant quiff knock a good two decades off. He is about to launch a new album, something he describes as “a bit full on”, though he is clearly grateful, adding: “It’s crazy to still be making records after all these years.”

He has also re-recorded his eternal classic and biggest hit, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, as part of a new campaign to raise awareness of hearing loss. The 1987 smash is among the top 10 songs for misheard lyrics, but the latest version incorporates some of those, such as “‘never gonna run around with dessert spoons”.

It’s an entertaining wheeze in collaboration with Specsavers, but there is a serious point: Astley himself has some hearing loss, which he attributes to his years in the music business.

“I have definitely noticed over the last how many years, where I’ve said to myself, I have to turn this down,” he says in his Lancashire accent. “I didn’t notice so much myself, I notice it when other people notice it.”

One example is his daughter, who lives in Denmark, visiting and telling him he has the TV on too loud.

Rick Astley, re-recording the vocals to 'Never Gonna Give You Up' to reflect some of the interpretations brought on by hearing difficulties.

The misheard lyrics gambit is similar to part of a show by comedian Peter Kay — for whom Astley has opened in recent years — where commonly misheard lyrics were repeated and lampooned on stage.

When he’s performing, Rick admits that the adrenaline at the start of the show equates to volume. “You want it loud,” he says, “that’s part of the emotion of it. But you’re going to pay a price for it.”

If this all sounds sensible, it’s because it is, and Astley’s career is a peculiar mix of showbiz madness and his ability to step away, for his own sake.

It is an uncommon trait in an industry that has been turned on its head by the internet and streaming platforms.

Rick Astley was barely in his 20s when his career exploded, initially through ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, followed by a wave of hit singles. He was all over the charts on both sides of the Atlantic — a sensation he can now look back on with a sense of wonder, and goodnatured bemusement.

“There is a definite change in my whole emotion about it all,” he says, “in the sense that I think I was super lucky on the one hand, because I had this song which just blew up, and it was the first song out of the gate, and how amazing is all that and everything.

“The only alternative view of that perhaps is that there was no preparation. It was not like saying, ‘OK, I’ve made an album, first song, nobody really picked up on, second song, wow, we got it in the top 30, third song, oh my God, we’re in the top 10. You get an idea of what is this: Oh, this is Top of the Pops, this is this, this is what a tour bus looks like. It was just like, boom, straight out of the blocks.

Rick Astley performing on German music show Formel Eins in 1988. Picture: Bernd Muller/Redferns

“Obviously, coming out of that Stock Aitken Waterman thing [the music stable which spawned numerous eighties hit acts], I had witnessed things go really quickly, and I had actually made tea on sessions for Dead or Alive, and Mel and Kim and Bananarama and all of that.

“I had done demos of my songs there, but that’s got nothing to do with being famous.

“Your persona is out there and you have turned into this thing and some of it is true and a lot of it isn’t, and it has sort of already gone before you.”

He is quick to qualify all of this, saying that while it sounds like he was put through the mill, he wasn’t really — in fact, he loved much of what came with this almost instant stardom.

But after five years of it, he just stopped, taking a declared step back from the music business to raise his daughter, who was born when he was 25. That gave him a sense of perspective, one at odds with the sheer strangeness of some of those heady days as a music celebrity.

“I went to Sweden and I had been number one for quite a few weeks,” he recalls by way of example. “I’ve never been to Sweden, I’ve never even spoken to a Swedish person in my life, and you arrive in Stockholm and you’re like, OK, everyone in the airport is kind of looking at me right now because I am on MTV on heavy rotation. Every radio station is playing, it blah blah blah, and I’m walking through the airport in Sweden going, ‘What is going on?’

“If that doesn’t make you feel odd, then you are a very, very special kind of person.

“One of the things that I think that happens is it does kind of destroy some people, it does burn them out to the point where it becomes dangerous, and some people have obviously paid the ultimate price because they have started to use all kinds of things to get them through it, drugs, drink and what have you, and I think for me, I was lucky enough that I realised, ‘I think I want out, really’, and I snuck out the back door and nobody seemed to care.”

That’s not quite true. Astley says he had made some money (“I knew I didn’t have to worry about the gas bill”), but that contrary to his lack of personal growth during the peak fame years, his 15-year hiatus gave him something different. It clearly allowed him a greater perspective on what had gone before, and so maybe it is no surprise that he can treat his return to the foreground in the past decade or more with what he calls a light embrace.

Rick Astley arriving for the annual Shooting Star Ball in aid of leading children's hospice charity Shooting Star Children's Hospices, at the Royal Lancaster, in London on Friday November 10. Picture: Ian West/PA Wire

It began with the ‘rickrolling’ internet phenomenon of 2008, which again pushed ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ back into the mainstream and opened it up to a new generation. Yet, Astley recalls how his daughter, who was then in her teens, gave him a blunt appraisal of what was really happening.

“She said, ‘You do realise it has nothing to do with you’. And I was a bit taken aback by that. I was like, What, run that by me again? What do you mean? It’s my video, it’s my song. And she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s not [about] you’.

“I think she was kind of right, really, it doesn’t belong to me, that part of it.

“To a degree, do songs belong to the artists who made them anyway once they are out?

“Because, at the end of the day, if it has become somebody’s wedding song, the song that they fell in love to, what have you, it might have been theirs [the artist’s] in the studio, but the moment it comes out it goes out into the universe and it sort of becomes something else.”

What can be said is that for all his light-touch approach to social media, Astley has rode the wave. He describes it as an insatiable machine, where if someone doesn’t post for a week people start wondering if they’ve died, yet he grasps the ridiculousness of it all. He appreciates that many of the people singing his lyrics back to him at Electric Picnic came to him and his music from somewhere else.

One of those places is Glastonbury, where, backed by the band Blossoms, he has nailed classics by the Smiths to crowds of more than 10,000 people. It brought him back to his youth, when he loved those songs, and he says it also highlights the ability of songs to transcend their beginnings. At Electric Picnic he was in the crowd to watch Smiths guitar legend Johnny Marr play his set, and he grimaces slightly when I say I had half a notion that he would materialise, stage left, mic in hand.

“It has kind of got out of hand a little bit,” he laughs.

“One of the things I’ve done in the last few years is say yes to things,” he says.

Rick Astley performs on the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset. Picture date: Saturday June 24, 2023.

This included two nights with a full orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall last year, doing the songs of Frank Sinatra — the songs his own father loved so much. He also plays drums in what he calls “a three-piece midlife crisis rock band”, stressing that it’s for charity “because we’re not that good”.

Alongside the new album, there will be shows in Dublin and Belfast next year, and more festivals. Every genre of music has beauty in it, he says, revealing that he has drummed along to Slipknot — though he can’t see himself playing a covers set. “That would be a bridge too far.”

“I like doing things,” he continues, whether it’s posing for a selfie for someone before their bus arrives, or playing the songs of his youth in a tent in Glastonbury. “The key, if I can dare call myself an artist for a moment, is to do things that turn you on.”

Astley seems to be the voice of reason in a wild industry and in a world gone mad. It’s all down to feeling lucky at everything that has gone before. As he says, “If they keep inviting me, I am going to keep coming.”

• Rick Astley has re-recorded ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ with the wrong lyrics, as part of a hearing awareness campaign for Specsavers. To find out more and book a free hearing test, visit: specsavers.ie/hearing