S2E13: Rick Astley
Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt
Rhino UK
4.8 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2022
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Rockonteurs, Gary and Guy are joined by Rick Astley. Rick is a renaissance man, having started his career in the 80’s when he was discovered by the pop powerhouse team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. That gave us the hugely successful, decade defining hit ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and many more. But Rick turned his back on music in the 90’s until fairly recently returning to live shows and getting back into the studio writing, recording and producing his own material which included the No.1 album ‘50’ which was a brilliant collection of songs.
Don’t be fooled by what you think you might know about Rick Astley, he’s a true music fan and a talented artist. In this episode he talks about his rise and fall and his rise again, rick-rolling, and even a bit of prog! He also talks about how his relationship with The Foo Fighters came about. This episode was recorded before the passing of Taylor Hawkins and the entire team at Rockonteurs would like to express their deepest condolences to the family, friends and band mates of Taylor.
Rockonteurs is produced by Ben Jones for Gimme Sugar Productions.
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Transcript
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| 0:30.1 | This episode of Rock Onters was recorded before the passing of Taylor Hawkins. |
| 0:39.0 | Hello Gary. |
| 0:40.0 | How you go? |
| 0:41.0 | So interesting one this week. Rick Astley, a man of supreme reinvention. |
| 0:47.0 | Yeah, like he's reinvented himself quite a few times. I mean going from being the sort of PwL puppy and making you know being |
| 0:57.2 | part of that sausage factory of music which actually is still probably making |
| 1:01.8 | PwL a fortune as we speak. |
| 1:04.0 | Well apparently there was a there was a rumor at the time that if you did sessions like backing |
| 1:09.1 | things and there were hardly any musicians but if you did sessions for PWRL |
| 1:12.3 | they didn't actually pay you because they didn't have to because anything they did was guaranteed so much radio play that you would get massive PPL payments and stuff. |
| 1:22.0 | I'm taking it you didn't play on any of those records. |
| 1:24.0 | It was all synth-based. |
| 1:26.0 | And then of course reinventing himself with that album free later on where he just sort of ended up writing the whole album and working with Elton John and and then with 50. |
| 1:35.8 | Yeah 50 which is yeah very impressive but then you know the greatest meme of all time. |
| 1:42.4 | For the Rick Rolling? |
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