Inside Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up from breakdowns to rows

Rick Astley is set to take to the stage at Glastonbury festival for the first time ever as organisers unveil the final line-up.

The 80s hitmaker will be joined by the likes of Sir Elton John, who’ll be playing the last UK show of his farewell tour on the Pyramid Stage and tther names added to the bill include Tom Grennan and Sophie Ellis-Bextor while Arctic Monkeys and Guns N’ Roses join Sir Elton as headliners.

Astley, 57, has given us many hits from Together Forever to Whenever You Need Somebody, however, it is Never Gonna Give You Up which has stood the test of time but the song did not come without some controversy over the years.

His debut single which clinched the No.1 spot in 25 countries, including the US and the UK, saw a then 21-year-old Astley found stardom on a global stage with millions of records sold.

But how did the hit single really come about and what was the inspiration behind the record?

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Never Gonna Give You Up was written and produced by the hit factory of songwriting, Stock Aitken Waterman. The trio created a number of hits for Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, and Sinitta.

Pete Waterman, who spotted Astley singing in a soul band and brought him into the studio to make tea for the other artists, took a chance with her performer who helped to inspire his massive hit.

Waterman told The Guardian: “I’d been going out with a woman called Gaynor for ages. One morning, I came off the phone after a long call to her and Rick quipped: ‘You’re never going to give her up.'”

It was this quote from Astley which sparked the idea for the song title but the music was quickly forgotten about.

“On Boxing Day that year, I was bored at home so I went into the studio,” Waterman told the same publication. “We pulled out Rick’s track and did a new version but forgot about that as well. Then one day someone played it in a meeting and everyone went: ‘What is this?’ And the rest is history.”

He added: “It went to No 1 in every country, including America.”

Following his worldwide success, Astley would appear to be on top of the world, becoming a millionaire at the age of 27 with a string of number ones after his first hit Never Gonna Give You Up – which topped the charts in 25 countries in 1987.

But one day in 1993, on his way to Heathrow to fly to New York, he suffered a breakdown on the M4.

It was an emotional breakdown brought on by the terror of leaving his wife Lene and baby girl Emilie at home.

“Having Emilie in 1992 changed what I wanted in life,” he explained. “The music business is littered with people losing the plot.”

He added to MailOnline: “I was already taking trains and driving in Europe, I didn’t want to fly any more. I had control over nothing. I’d made enough money to say, ‘I don’t need to do this.'”

Fast forward to 2023 and Astley made headlines after he filed a lawsuit against the rapper Yung Gravy over the song Betty (Get Money), which was released in 2022.

Yung Gravy’s song Betty (Get Money) borrows heavily from the melody for Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. This bit, however, was reportedly authorised, according to Rolling Stone.

The song also features the singer Popnick, who appears to imitate Astley’s voice and Astley is now claiming the use of the impersonator is illegal.

Astley filed the lawsuit on Thursday 26 January at Los Angeles Superior Court.

“In an effort to capitalise off the immense popularity and goodwill of Mr Astley, defendants… conspired to include a deliberate and nearly indistinguishable imitation of Mr Astley’s voice,” the lawsuit says. “The public could not tell the difference.”

Astley’s lawsuit seeks “millions of dollars” in damages, as well as profits from the song.

Yung Gravy and Popnick are among the defendants, along with Yung Gravy’s record label, Universal Music Group’s Republic Records.

Elsewhere, Astley was at the centre of an internet phenomenon due to the “Rickroll” meme.

The meme, which dates back to around 2007, involves pretending to direct someone to an interesting website only to instead present the music video for Astley’s 1987 track Never Gonna Give You Up.

Astley told Claudia Winkleman on her BBC Radio 2 show that he finds the fame he has earned among younger audiences as the result of the meme to be a little strange.

He said: “It’s just this mad sort of thing the world that we live in today is so different to how it was back then, you can have this whole other existence on the internet.”

Due to the song’s internet popularity, the video has been viewed more than one billion times on YouTube.