I remember when “Never Gonna Give You Up” came out. I was 21 at the time (I just discovered that Rick Astley is only 2+ months older than me - his birthday: Feb. 6, 1966; me, May 17, 1966). I heard the song and thought, “Damn, that guy has a great voice!” It was so … odd … to hear a white baritone pop singer at that time. Given that I’m also a baritone (and able to extend my range well into both bass and high tenor territory, but that’s taken years of practice), it was great to hear a pop singer in 1987 that I could actually sing along with without hurting myself
I just discovered this song he did in 1991, called, “Cry For Help”, which I think really demonstrates what a good singer he is:
Wait, no, don't watch that one, watch this live performance instead:
And holy crap, the guy's still got it! Here he is going all Tom Jones, performing "Never Gonna Give You Up" in Madrid in 2012:
And he seems like an awesome guy. I found an interview he did, and the interviewer asked him why he quit the business in 1991. He said he got married and had a kid, and decided to stay home and raise his kid(s) instead of being a rock star. He’s only back now because the Internet made him famous again.
Heh I think his career was likely over by 1991 so not a particularly tough choice. Decent performer and singer who should milk his renewed fame for all it’s worth.
Apparently, he’s still been doing live shows, but just playing in clubs to scratch the itch. Judging by that 2012 performance, I think he was looking at the whole thing as a joke. A lucrative joke, but a joke nonetheless. And I don’t blame him. If I’d done something to make myself famous when I was 21 years old, and now somebody wanted to pay me more money for it, I’d damn sure go for it.
I don’t know how the rickroll thing got started but I agree, that he has a great voice and “Never Gonna Give You Up” is a really good song. I didn’t know about his other songs so thanks for posting up “Cry for Help.”
Wow, first time I ever heard of this meme. If you had asked me about him in a trivia contest, I would have said he sang “Together Forever.” I remember it because he could carry a tune and I could understand every word of the lyrics, both rare events in my pop listening experience.
Nothing much to add here, Mister Rik, aside from learning that we have the same birthday (6 years later tho’). Astley is indeed a great singer. He did an album “Free” that really shows his pipes. He was unfortunately part of the overproduced, slick pop sound of Stock-Aiken-Waterman that was cheesy back then and has aged terribly. (See Sinitta, Mel & Kim, and early Kylie Minogue.) But even on SAW tracks like “It Would Take A Strong Man” his talent is undeniable.
He’s a great blue-eyed soul singer in the tradition of Daryl Hall.
(I tend to wax nostalgic and get a hankering for the 80s, but then I remember the charts were usually stocked with Stock-Aiken-Waterman tracks from forgettable artists. Yes, The Smiths and New Order existed, but they weren’t on Top of the Pops every week.)
Are you supposed to watch the whole video for it to be funny? Like, “why’d you make me watch that? That has nothing to do with [whatever you said would be in the video]!”
Or is just being sent to the video sufficiently humorous? Like a snipe hunt?
There is that Family Guy episode where Brian sings “Never gonna give you up” and a guy says “I didn’t like any of that” and everyone acts like they agree. That is a lie. Just moments before that they were all grooving to it.
I believe it’s sarcastic.
Like when someone is joking and leading you on, that is the gotcha moment. It’s like saying “would I lie to you?” in an exaggerated way to signify it was clearly a lie. The Rick Roll takes the place of that because in the song he says “Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.”
I’m starting to think SAW is like the shadow government that took over 80’s music. If only I knew that then.
That “It Would Take a Strong Strong Man” song really kicks ass. I like it better than “Never Gonna Give You Up” or the nearly identical “Together Forever.”
That was his “hook” back in the late 1980s. Alone of all the SAW acts he had a genuinely strong white soul voice, although sadly the team seemed to concentrate on the Australian soap stars instead.
The story of how he became famous is taught in schools over here as a parable, even in Muslim schools. He was supposedly a tea boy at the SAW studio, but they heard his demo tape and decided he had potential, so they gave him £150 to spend at young man fancy clothes shop Top Shop on a black suit, and viola! A deer, a female dew-drop shewel doo-wop.
And then he was on Top of the, er, Pops. A few years later the Wonder Stuff recorded a song called “Astley in the Noose”, which went “Oh Astley in the noose, he hasn’t got a use, but he’s trying - trying to be someone, trying to take it like a man, if you can, sing an old song”. He means something in the UK. He was mocked because he looked nerdy and was called Rick, but it was a shame because he had a good set of pipes. If he’d persuaded SAW to market him as Richard Astley he might have ended up with a longer career, perhaps in musicals.
Curiously both Allmusic and a contemporary article in Billboard say that he was on the soundtrack of the Madonna flop Body of Evidence, but Discogs says otherwise.
At the height of his popularity he put out a recording of old standards. His performance of these was awful - bad phrasing and emotionally flat. He may be fine with modern pop but had no idea what to do with those kinds of songs.
