![]() ![]() Despite originating in a spirit of mockery, it enabled the comeback Astley had been tentatively attempting in the preceding years. These not-unappealing incongruities inspired one of my fellow Millennials, a young enlisted man named Sean Cotter, to relaunch Astley’s hit into the zeitgeist in 2007. “I immediately knew I wanted to make this thing into a meme,” he says, and so he invented “rickrolling,” the prank of sending an unrelated-looking link that actually leads to the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video. “They hadn’t got a clue that he was a white guy,” says Waterman, nor, as Astley himself adds, that he “looked about eleven years old.” All was soon revealed by the music video - then still a novel form - hastily and somewhat amateurishly produced in the wake of the single’s chart-topping success. Shelved for a time, the song was finally included on a magazine mix tape, at which point it went the eighties equivalent of viral: airplay on the independent Capital London soon crossed over to a variety of mainstream radio formats. At that time he lived at Waterman’s home, and after overhearing the latter screaming at his girlfriend through his giant eighties phone, he made a fateful remark: “You’re never gonna give her up, are you?”įrom there, “Never Gonna Give You Up” seems practically to have written itself, though its producers admit to having ill sensed its potential during recording. The short Vice documentary above recounts how Astley became an overnight sensation, bringing in the singer himself as well as his original production team: Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, the trio who created the sound of British eighties pop. It was while playing with a band in his small northern hometown that Astley caught Stock Aitken Waterman’s ear, and soon thereafter he found himself working as a “tea boy” in their London studio. (Yet to be resurrected by the retro gods, the aesthetics of that decade were still at their nadir of fashionability.) But in its day, “Never Gonna Give You Up” was a pop phenomenon of rare distinction. If you’d heard of him, you might well have written him off as an eighties flash-in-the-pan. It was then quite easy to be unaware of the song, and indeed of Astley himself, given that he’d burnt out and retired from the music business in the mid-nineteen-nineties. Nor could you even find it on Youtube nor, come to that, could you find anything on Youtube, since it didn’t exist. You’ve got to remember that, two decades ago, Astley’s debut single “Never Gonna Give You Up” hadn’t yet racked up a billion views on Youtube. The song of which I speak is, of course, “Together Forever.” Even before I’d heard its whole three and a half minutes, I was hooked. Intrigued by the contrast of the unabashed nineteen-eighties production, equally energetic and synthetic, against Astley’s powerful, unusually textured voice, I went straight to AudioGalaxy for the MP3. I was in high school at the time, and it was on a weekend-morning cable-TV binge that I happened first to hear his music - albeit just a few seconds of it - on a commercial for one of those order-by-phone nostalgia compilations. The easy, fast & fun way to learn how to sing: 30DaySinger.It was an isolating existence, being a Rick Astley fan at the turn of the millennium. The song is considered Astley's signature song and it is often played at the end of his live concerts. In 2008, Astley won the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Act Ever with the song, as a result of collective voting from thousands of people on the Internet, due to the popular phenomenon of Rickrolling. ![]() The music video for the song has become the basis for the "Rickrolling" Internet meme, leading the song to also be referred to as "The Rickroll Song". In 2004, "Never Gonna Give You Up" was voted number 28 in 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs. ![]() In 1990, Nick Lowe quoted from the song and called it "ghastly" in the lyrics to "All Men Are Liars", a song on his album Party of One. The song won Best British Single at the 1988 Brit Awards. It eventually topped the charts in 25 countries, including the United States and West Germany. The song was a worldwide number-one hit, initially in the singer's native United Kingdom in 1987, where it stayed at the top of the chart for five weeks and was the best-selling single of that year. The song was released as the first single from Astley's debut album, Whenever You Need Somebody (1987). ![]() It was written and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman. "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a song recorded by British singer and songwriter Rick Astley, released as a single on 27 July 1987. ![]()
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