Rick Astley:
The grateful pop idol tells Simon Button why he’s enjoying his Beautiful Life...
AS HE releases his greatest hits album The Best Of Me, I wonder what Rick Astley reckons his best quality is.
“It’s being a loyal friend,” he replies.and his worst?the Lancashire lad laughs. “I can be a bit negative and miserable sometimes,” he admits, adding “Which is otherwise known as being Northern.”
Not that the 1980s pop icon has any reason to be gloomy these days. Since topping the charts with his soulful comeback album 50 in 2016, Rick has been enjoying a career resurgence – nicknamed “the Ricknaissance” by fans – with newfound respect from the critics who may have written him off as a “pop puppet” back in the days of hit-making producers Stock Aitken Waterman.
Fame has never rested easily on Rick’s shoulders since his first single, 1987’s Never
Gonna Giveyou Up, catapulted the 21-year-old singer to number one in 25 countries, including here and the USA. But he’s learnt to live with the attention. Besides, his fans have got older and, he says with a smile, “It’s calmed down a lot since back in the day”.
Although, he adds, “If you just want to have a quiet dinner with your wife you can’t always do so but you also can’t really moan at people for wanting to have a photo with you either.
“I kind of think they’ve got a right to ask when you have a lovely life because they bought your records. If you’re in the middle of a proper pop career it’s just part of the deal.”
Rick, 53, is married to
Dane Lene Bausager, the Oscar-nominated film producer who is now his manager.
The couple met in 1987 at the height of Rick’s fame when “drop-dead gorgeous” blonde
Lene was working as a promoter for his Danish record label.they got together two years later and married in 2013.Their daughter Emilie, 27, has just finished her
Masters in Fine Arts.
He acknowledges that Lene had “more belief in 50 than I did”.the album’s success has turned his life around.the follow-up, last year’s Beautiful Life, peaked at number six.
He has supportedtake That on tour, sold out venues with his own shows and is clearly loving having a proper pop career again.
The new best-of includes all the hits, plus a catchy new song called Every One Of Us. He has also reimagined some of the old hits as bonus tracks, such as a jazzy new take on Together Forever and a stripped-down version of
Never Gonna Giveyou Up.
Yet despite his achievements and the acclaim, Rick is still a humble guy from Newton-lewillows. I ask if he sees the album as the culmination of a 32-year career.
“No,” he says. “And that’s because I haven’t had a
32-year career. I had four or five years back in the day, I quit or ran away or whatever you want to call it, I did a few little things here and there, then in 2016 I made a record in my garage just for me really. I never expected it to do as well as it did.”
Like 50, Beautiful Life was recorded and produced in what Rick calls his “man cave” in West London. It was his fifth Top 10 album.
But he insists: “I’m not daft enough to think it will last for ever. It will have its natural course then, at some point, I’ll either get bored with it or people will say, ‘We’re done now, Rick’.
“Either way it’ll be fine. I’m just enjoying the moment.”
Astley has been honing that amazingly rich voice of his from a young age. He started singing in the church choir when he was 10, then drummed in local bands and, after leaving school at 16, performed on the club circuit by night while working as a driver for his father’s market-gardening firm. Eventually he graduated from drummer to lead vocalist.
Pop producer Pete Waterman heard Rick sing and invited him to Stock Aitken Waterman’s London headquarters where he was initially employed as a tea boy. “Yes,” he says. “I made a lot of tea, made a lot of coffee, went and got a lot of sandwiches but it worked out for the best, really, because I got to hang around the studios watching them work and taking it all in.”
BY THE time Never Gonna Giveyou Up came out he’d become comfortable with the idea of being a solo singer. “But I looked at other people who were pop stars and thought, ‘I’m just not that’. I looked at Simon Le Bon and went, ‘I’m certainly not that guy’. I loved Duran Duran, don’t get me wrong, but I thought, ‘I’m not gonna be hanging off the front of any yachts in the Caribbean’.”
SAW provided him with seven Top 10 hits, including Together Forever and When I Fall In Love, but the budding songwriter was itching for more creative control and branched out on his own after just two years. His 1991 single Cry For Help reached thetop 10 in the UK, the US, Canada and Germany, and seemed to vindicate that decision. Subsequent singles didn’t fare so well, though.
So he quit. “I was just done with it all,” Rick says of his decision to stop making music and concentrate on being a father to Emilie, who was born in 1992.
He started to ease himself back into the business in 2001 but his Keep It Turned On album only got a German release and his 2005 Portrait collection of cover versions peaked at number 26 here. Rick realised there was a lot of nostalgia for those SAW hits when he appeared on retro roadshows. Even after the success of 50 and its successor