Astley came to the States in early 1988 at a time when he was peppered all over the UK chart. Only three topped the US chart and two of them are by Astley: "Never Gonna Give You Up" and "Together Forever" (Bananarama's cover of " Venus" is the other).īritish artists often had huge hits in their homeland but found the American market tougher to crack. Thirteen of their productions made #1 in the UK, including " Respectable" by Mel & Kim and " I Should Be So Lucky" by Kylie Minogue. Stock, Aitken and Waterman are big names in Europe, but not in America, where Astley is their biggest success story. His next album didn't come until 2016 when he released 50, which garnered enough interest in the UK to debut at #1. He stayed out of the spotlight until the Rickrolling trend, when he participated in some well-paid stunts like appearing from a float at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade in 2008, but he didn't push any product or make any new versions of the song to capitalize on its newfound notoriety. That's not a normal story for people who got into pop music the way I did."Īstley kept making music, but with limited release. I ended up making what I considered to be real money, keeping hold of most of it, and having a very comfortable, relatively sane, great life since. "I didn't leave my career penniless and kind of crazy, on the verge of insanity, which is how an awful lot of people tend to end up in pop music," he told Songfacts. When the hits dried up after his 1991 album Free, his ego was in check and his finances in order. I don't care who wrote it, I don't care who produced it, it's my song."Īstley was a very pragmatic pop star who understood that his runaway success came with an expiration date. So, when I sing 'Never Gonna Give You Up' now, that's my song. "Even some of the greats, Whitney Houston, or even going back to Frank Sinatra, they didn't write and produce the music. "If you don't write the song and you haven't produced it, it's your song, but it takes a bit of time to bed in and for it to really become your song," he added. "I didn't have a personal connection to anything that was going on, because it felt like I was watching it from the other side of a screen," he said. In a 2018 Songfacts interview with Astley, he talked about connecting with "Never Gonna Give You Up," a song he didn't write. His first hit that he wrote was "She Wants to Dance with Me," which appeared on his second album a more personal song, " Cry For Help," was part of his third album - his first after parting from Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Astley has always written songs, and four of his tracks made his Whenever You Need Somebody album.
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