Rick Astley has zero regrets about retiring at the age of 27, after gaining global fame with his ’80s pop hit, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up.’
Speaking with Page Six this week, Astley said his heart wasn’t in it anymore: “I kind of feel that if I hadn’t of done it then I would have self-imploded.”
‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was the first single off Astley’s debut album, released in 1987, and reached No. 1 in 25 countries. It now has over a billion views on YouTube.
Other hits like ‘Together Forever’ and the album’s namesake track, ‘Whenever You Need Somebody,’ followed, but by 1994 Astley had had enough.
“The problem with pop music is when you’re in the real pop end of it like I was, it’s every single minute and hour of everyday or nothing,” he told Page Six. “And there is no in-between because everyone else does everything so you have to do everything.”
He returned to the music industry in 2000, and released the single ‘Sleeping’ and the album Keep It Turned On in 2001. He also formed an unexpected bond with Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters.
In the 2000s, Astley unwittingly became the subject of a viral internet meme known as Rickrolling, where users click on a seemingly unrelated link only to open ‘Never Gonna Give You Up,’ and in doing so have officially been “Rickrolled.”
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Astley has taken Rickrolling in his stride.
“Obviously some people are sick to death of the whole Rickrolling thing and anything else to do with it or me, but I think I just have to have a little distance from it,” he said. “Our daughter actually put me straight on that. Fifteen years she said ‘look just remember it’s kind of got nothing to do with you.’”
“I was a bit like, ‘What do you mean?,’ and I couldn’t get what she was talking about and all she was trying to relay to me was that it’s just a thing on the internet. Next week it will be something else, and okay, it has hung around and it’s found its little spot on the internet, but she was absolutely right, once it goes on the internet it doesn’t belong to you anymore.”
Astley is currently on tour, supporting New Kids on the Block, along with Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue.
