Glastonbury was dubbed ‘Rick Astonbury’ after the pop favourite’s two storming sets, but could Rick Astley’s new album be his last? “I don’t want to push it”, he tells Emma Higginbotham

Half an hour before his main set at Glastonbury this summer, Rick Astley had the heebie-jeebies. It was his debut on the legendary Pyramid Stage, and it looked like he might be playing to an empty field.

“I was obviously a bit nervous, so I’d been to the stage and there was no one in the crowd,” he recalls. “I kept going from the dressing room to the stage – I did it about three times – and there was still nobody there. I was like ‘Ah Jesus, this is going to be so embarrassing’.”

It was Rick’s 31-year-old daughter Emilie, busily steaming his salmon-pink suit trousers, who persuaded him to chill out. “She said ‘Look, just go and enjoy it. You’re here now, it’s not like you can say you’ve decided not to do it.’”

He needn’t have worried. By the opening notes of 80s banger Together Forever, some 80,000 fans had gathered to hear the 57-year-old not only belt out pop tracks from his youthful heyday, but more recent numbers, a Harry Styles hit, even ACDC’s Highway to Hell, featuring Rick on drums. “It was pretty amazing,” he says. “I’m actually most proud of myself for just being in the moment, because it’s very easy to be overcome by moments like that. They are so big.”

The vibe was joyous. Security guards danced in unison, Rick styled his trademark quiff with an on-stage hair dryer (“I just thought it would be funny”), and the crowd sang his 1987 mega-hit Never Gonna Give You Up with all the gusto you’d expect. Thanks to ‘Rickrolling’ – the April Fool-style meme where an online link unexpectedly takes you to a rain-coated Rick doing his elbow-waggling dance – the song has had a mind-boggling 1.4 billion YouTube views, and is surely known by everyone in the western world. “It’s mad, but I’m grateful,” he says with a grin. Does he ever get sick of singing it? “No! That’s almost like saying ‘do you get sick of putting your shoes on?’ You just don’t. It’s part of my life. It’s in my DNA.”

Next was his ‘secret’ second set with Stockport band Blossoms, singing 16 tracks by indie icons The Smiths, which scored him a five-star review in The Guardian. “I can understand that some people would hate it, because it’s sacrilegious in a way, but I am a big Smiths fan,” he insists. “There’s something magical about what they did, lyrically and musically, but we’re never going to get to see them again.”

This particular side-hustle began when Rick played at a benefit concert for the reopening of the Manchester Arena. “I met Blossoms in – rock’n’roll – Noel Gallagher’s dressing room; he was gracious enough to have everyone in for a pint after. I said ‘I’ve got this dream that one day I’ll do a gig where I just sing Smiths songs. I’ll probably get hung for it, but I just want to do it’.” They duly met up for a jamming session, “and every one of us went ‘ooh, something’s just happened there’. It was a really, really quiet moment. Then we put a couple of gigs on, and it was amazing.

“What tickles me is that Blossoms are all younger than my daughter, and their love for the Smiths is just as strong as mine. That’s pretty special, and testament to The Smiths. You’ve got young bands who want to emulate them, and play those songs with love and devotion, and that’s what we do. But our set at Glastonbury was absolutely off the hook. Just bonkers.”

Rick is talking to Weekend in an olde world hotel next to Hampton Court Palace, not far from his home. Still boyish, albeit a little baggier, he’s warm and self-deprecating in a most un-starry way, as though he can hardly believe his luck.

The youngest of five, he grew up in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, where his dad, Horace, had a market gardening company and mum Cynthia worked in an office. “I was around a lot of music,” he recalls. “My sister Jayne, who’s 10 years older, always had prog rock albums playing in the house, and we had a piano, because my mum was a pretty exceptional piano player – she had a second career in her 50s, playing in pubs and wine bars. And my dad had an incredible voice. He used to sing Frank Sinatra all the time.”

After Jayne, his parents had two sons, David and John. Tragically, David died of meningitis aged just three. “Mike and myself came after David died, and I don’t know if that was them trying to repair something that couldn’t be repaired...” he pauses. “I don’t know, because they never spoke about it. Ever. In fact my mum and dad never spoke to each other since I was like four, when they got divorced. It wasn’t great.”

Cynthia moved out after the split, leaving the children living with Horace. “In retrospect, she probably had a breakdown, but we didn’t use that terminology then,” he says. “I was happy, but there was definitely a black cloud in our house. My dad was angry a lot of the time, and probably depressed. Understandably so. He had a small business, a broken marriage, and had lost a son. Yet he could come home and be in the best mood ever.”

Despite being shy, young Rick joined the church choir and naturally gravitated to the spotlight. “I was always picked for school plays because I could sing a bit. When I was about nine, I played the Pharaoh in Joseph, and something definitely clicked. I thought ‘OK, I quite like this’.”

At 15, he swapped his leather biker jacket for a schoolfriend’s drum kit (“and beat the living crap out of it”), then formed a band with two friends called Give Way – after a road sign the bass player pinched – and sang covers ranging from The Police to Joy Division from behind the drums.

“We auditioned to play for the school Valentine’s disco, and we were not the cool kids,” he says. “The cool kids were in another band, and we wiped the floor with them. We were so much better than everybody else. Then Phil the guitarist, who I still see, went to college to do his A-levels and that was it, really.”

Bitten by the bug, he joined a band called FBI, who played a lot of Beatles covers. “Amazing as The Beatles are, that’s not what I wanted to do at that age. So I borrowed one of the guys’ guitars, he taught me three chords, I wrote a bunch of songs to sing over them, and we sort of morphed into something else. We got a new drummer in, and I became the singer.”

Rick’s life changed forever in a Warrington working men’s club, where FBI were playing in a showcase of local bands. Record producer Pete Waterman had turned up, and was struck by his rich, deep voice. “He thought he could do something with it,” recalls Rick, who duly moved down to London and signed to ‘hit factory’ Stock Aitken Waterman. For the first few months, though, he was more dogsbody than hot new talent. “I ended up making tea and getting the sandwiches in, just like all the other kids who worked there.”

One day, he was helping an engineer unbox and set up a new piece of recording equipment (and making his coffee) when songwriter Mike Stock came in. “He put the chords in, sang the melody, and said ‘we’re thinking something like this. I’ll leave it with you.’” The song was Never Gonna Give You Up, and Rick was smitten. “I thought it was great! Instantly you went ‘Hmm, that’s very memorable’.”

The first of his eight consecutive top 10 hits, Never Gonna Give You Up flew to number one in 25 countries. “It bought my house, it bought my mum’s house, it’s taken the worry out of everything you can ever worry about, financially, for the rest of my life. Which might sound crass,” he adds, “but I’m so grateful for it.”

How did he handle the fame as a 21-year-old? “Probably not very well, but you just do it. I was super-lucky that it was a hit everywhere, so we managed to have hits after it, but it was just fricking relentless.”

Rick was desperate to perform live gigs, but almost never did. Instead, the young star was put on a punishing schedule of promotional interviews and appearances. “Because we sold millions of albums, that’s all the record company wanted you to do. You went on German, Japanese or American TV to 10 million people, which is a lot better for them than going in front of a few thousand live.

“After doing it for a few years, you just don’t know who you are anymore. You don’t know what day it is, and you actually don’t care. That’s the scariest thing. I didn’t go off the rails, but I got very burnt out.”

By 1993 he’d had enough, and simply quit. “I just thought I’m 27, I’ve got some money, I’ve got a daughter now, I’ve got a life if I want one outside of this, I’m just going to clear off while no one cares. And that was it.”

For several years, Rick stayed out of the limelight, concentrating instead on being a good parent with his Danish partner, now wife, Lene. Ironically, it was his family who tempted him back on stage in the mid-2000s. “Lene and Emilie wanted to go to Japan, so when an offer came to sing my old songs there, they pinned me to the kitchen cabinets and said ‘We’re going!’

“I’d had offers before, and always said ‘Really appreciate it, thank you, but I don’t do that anymore’. But they really wanted to go, and me being a professional northerner, I thought if we go on holiday to Japan, it’s going to cost a fortune, whereas if I do gigs there, we’ll stay in some nice places and have a great time. So we did.”

Inevitably, the thrill of performing came flooding back. “What I realised was that I can sing some old songs, the audience have a good time, I have a good time, I walk off stage afterwards and go ‘Yeah, might do that again, but I’ll leave it a while’. You don’t have to do it all the time.”

Buoyed by a raft of new fans in the wake of Rickrolling and (selective) gigging, Rick decided to make albums again, starting with 50 in 2016. Recorded in the glamorous setting of his garage, he played every instrument himself. “I literally did it in isolation. I didn’t have a record label, I had no intention of ever getting it physically released, it was just a project to see what I could do as I approached my 50th birthday.” To his surprise and delight, the album went to number one. Now he’s following 2018’s Beautiful Life with Are We There Yet?, a soulful, feelgood collection influenced by a lengthy tour of America last year.

“With this one I was possibly going to get someone else to produce it, but I kind of like doing it myself. I don’t know if I’m going to make another one, though,” he confides. “It’s too hard. I mean it’s amazing, it’s just very time consuming when you do everything, and it drives me round the bend at times.

“The idea of it being called Are we there yet? is obviously kids in the back of the car, but it’s also ‘Am I there?’ Where is ‘there’, and do you ever get there?” he continues. “I’ve had so many amazing things happen over the last few years that it makes me wonder if there’s a point where the universe says ‘Look, you’re done. Quit while you’re ahead’. I’ve definitely felt a warmth, let’s say, and I don’t want to push it. I’ve been allowed back in the building for some reason, and it’s not a given that it’s there forever.”

And Rick is fine with that. “Our daughter’s pretty together, I’ve got friends from when I was a kid, and I’ve got an amazing wife,” he says. “Music has to come second, really. If the Devil said you can choose one or the other, I know which it would be.”

Are We There Yet? is out now

An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in October 2023 (c) Waitrose