Song Exploder - Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Rick Astley is a singer and songwriter from England, whose debut single, "Never Gonna Give You Up," became an international smash hit. The song came out in July 1987 and won the BRIT Award for “British Single of the Year.” It hit number one in 25 countries, and Rick Astley was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. And then, 20 years after the song came out, it became a new kind of phenomenon, when the meme Rickrolling was born. Last year, the music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" passed a billion streams on YouTube. The song was written and produced by the production team Stock Aitken Waterman, who became hitmakers for artists like Kylie Minogue, Dead or Alive, and others. For this episode, I spoke to Rick Astley, and songwriter and producer Mike Stock, and the two of them tell the story of how "Never Gonna Give You Up" was made. For more, visit songexploder.net/rick-astley.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Rick Astley is a singer and songwriter from England, whose debut single, Never Gonna Give You Up, became an international smash hit. The song came out in July 1987 and won the Brit Award for British Single of the Year. It hit number one in 25 countries, and Rick Astley was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. And then, 20 years after the song came out, it became a new kind of phenomenon when the meme Rick Rowling was born. Last year, the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up, passed a billion streams on YouTube.

The song was written and produced by the production team Stock Aitken Waterman, who were hitmakers for artists like Kylie Minogue, Dead or Alive, and others. For this episode, I spoke to Rick Astley here in Los Angeles, and songwriter and producer Mike Stock in a studio in London. And here, the two of them tell the story of how never going to give you up was made. My name is Rick Astley. I'm from a town called Newton-Lewillows,

which is a very working class, very salt-of-the-earth kind of area. People don't suffer fools gladly there. But it's a tiny little town. I got in a band with a couple of friends. I played drums. We were probably 16-17. And we weren't great,

but we had the right attitude. we practiced a lot. I used to sing a little bit from the drums. I'd always sung as a kid, church choir, school choir. And I turned up with a song one day because I'd borrowed a guitar and I got one of the guys to teach me the three chords, you know.

And that kind of grew into me being the singer. We had a good following in our little town and some local managers there, got three or four bands to do a showcase and Stockake King Waterman, which is a very small production company who hadn't had a proper, genuine, proper hit yet. Pete Waterman,

one of the three producers wanted to do something with my voice. He didn't want to work with a band, he wasn't really interested. Wasn't their thing, if you know what I mean. And so I signed a very small deal with them. And I wasn't, I didn't really want to do it because I'd never heard of the guy. It wasn't like he had this great track record. They just happened to turn into in the next six, eight, twelve months, the biggest producers in Britain.

My name is Mike Stock, part of the Stock Aiken Waterman production team. Mike and Matt, which is Stock and Aiken, they were strictly amazing musicians, great producers, that's what they did. Pete Waterman, who was the business end of it really and the mouthpiece of it all, he said, why don't you come and live in London? One of the concerns that Pete Waterman had was that Rick was quite shy and it was obviously going to be very new to him to go into a London studio and record.

So I basically ended up working at their studios. All he was doing really was helping out, making tea, getting me a sandwich. which it was almost like an apprenticeship. We used to call them tea boys or tape ops. A tape op was a guy that used to make sure the tape was wound on the spools, and when we run out of tape, he'd change it over, and in the meantime, he makes tea. So that's how I first met him.

And it was a bit unusual because they treated me like all the other kids who worked there, but they also knew that they were going to be making a record for me. A girlfriend of Pete Waterman, told me what a great voice he had, but I hadn't heard it yet. The first time I heard Rick sing was when Rick got behind the mic and sang, ain't too proud to beg. Which is a cover of a temptation song. His voice, you know, it had a very rich tone.

And with all due deference, so a lot of the acts we work with, they weren't necessarily Pavarotti. You know, these were pop singers. And Rick had that extra ingredient. He could sing soulfully, blue, loosely, powerfully. But I don't think they really knew what to do with me, because I looked about 11 years old

and sang like a middle-aged man had drank too much. Deciding what to do with Rick was the difficult bit for us, for various reasons, apart from which we were working on 10 different acts anyway. We were always working. And I made tea for dead or alive, banana, armour, Mel and Kim, loads of artists that were having massive top five and top 10 records. They were queuing up at the door. We were very successful at the time.

but his voice required, I think, a bit more personalised approach. So for me, Rick was a great possibility, a great opportunity. So it was excitement and I thought, let's just write the best song we can. And when he sings it, it'll have its flavour. Pete Waterman, he actually had a girlfriend in the little town that I'm from. And he says that I said to him about having a bad phone call, with his girlfriend and slamming the phone down in the car. I don't really remember it, but he says to this day that I said,

yeah, but you're never going to give her up anyway. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I like the story, do you know what I mean? Sounds like a good story to me. I don't know if that's true, but Pete did say to me, let's do a song, something like Never Gonna Give You Up. He very often used to come in with the title. He'd go in and sort of say, right, it's called bubba, blah, blah, and this is what it's about, and then Stock and Aiken would have to look at it.

him, watch him leave the room, I'd have to put the coffee on, while those two worked out what he just said, but it worked. To me, if you've got an idea for a lyric, and it only has to be the idea of the title, that's the bullseye. So you put that on the wall, never going to give you up, and you throw darts at it, and you're aiming to hit it every time. So everything about the song, from the opening line to the chorus, is leading up to never going to give you up so you have to know where you're going and that's a great roadmap but if

Pete came up with a random title i was always trying to make sense of how it fits in with the artist and rick had already told me he was still dating uh his girlfriend whom he went to junior school with the age of five or six they knew each other and so i thought well this is a lifelong fidelity so never going to give you up, that fits in, and you can lead a song to that hook line. At some point, the three guys got so busy that they thought, we need somebody to help out with keyboards, programming, all of that. And I'd never even heard the term programming. So they got this guy in called Ian Kernel, amazing player, but really technically gifted and brilliant as well. And they bought a fair-like computer. You needed to remortgage your house to buy it. It was like £100,000 or more even then, back in the

end of the 80s. So I helped Ian Kernel take the Fairlight out of the boxes and set it up in his programming room. I went and put the coffee on for him, got the biscuits. Mike Stock came into his little programming room and he said, this is Rick. He's going to be making coffee feel the next good days, but this is also his first single. And he played the chords into the computer, sang him a bit of the melody. Da da da da da da da da da da da. That was a repeat. That was a repeat. heated motif. From the moment I very first heard the very beginnings of it, I thought, there's definitely something in this.

And then Ian Kernel gets programming. He came up with the string thing, which to me is like a massive part of it. I think he came up with the brass part as well. And he was so excited because he'd never had a fair light before, and he's got one now to play with whenever he wants to. And all these sounds are in there, the strings, the brass and everything. See, that's not a real good sound.

And that was cool at the time. It was almost cooler to have that playing a guitar sound than a guitar player. That's straight out of a Lin-9,000, which was their go-to drum machine. And if you listen to some of the stock equipment records, they're very, very two keyboards on a drum machine. I think in their eyes a lot of the time,

they were trying to emulate a lot of the great production teams, Motown and various others, you know, that basically had a sound. sound and the artist came in and sang over it. So we've been through that phase of it being the very rough beginnings of it in a programming room in the basement, basically, and then it got brought up to the main studio where Stockwick and Waterman lived, as it were. Mike was pretty amazing at getting vocals out of people.

He knows exactly what he wants. And he was pretty tough to work with, if I'm honest, because all the keys of everything they wrote for me was really high. I know he did say to me at one point that the song is too low. high for him in places. So it was hard to sing it anyway. We're no strangers to love. You know the rules and so do I.

Rick has a baritone voice and I think he always loved Luther Van Dross. He's possibly the best singer I've ever seen in my life. But with Luther Van Dross, that's all so relaxed and open and lovely. and I had to keep reminding myself as much as Rick and anyone else so we're making a pop song here. You've got three minutes to make a point. It's not quite the same thing. So he would just push me until he got what he felt was the best I could do,

which is obvious. But I hadn't been to that experience before, so it was quite hard, I think. He'd go in and he'd sort of say, right, I know how it should tell him, trust me. So even though your lungs might be bleeding and you're just singing for me again. I've full commitments while I'm thinking,

And also we didn't get this from any other guy. And also we didn't have autotune. There was no escaping that. You had to wit the notes or else the notes weren't there. I just want to tell you how I'm feeling. You know, it was for him a bit of a push, but we broke it down. So I just got him to sing Never Goneer. Duda, da, da.

He has to sing that three or four times and we can pick the best one, and then we can drop it into place. then all he's got to do is give you up. Now he can sing that without blinking his eyes. That's simple now, but when you're making it up on the spot and trying to create it, you have to break it down. Never going to give you up. Never going to let you down.

Never going to run around and desert you. I can almost hear myself desperately trying to reach those notes. But that's where it sounds good. Never going to make you cry. Never going to say goodbye. Most people under-recognise the backing vocals, which was Dee Lewis and Coral Gordon, and the very accurate backing vocals,

which give support to what Rick's doing. If you up, let you down, never going to run around and desert you. Sounds beautiful to me that, to be honest. I know you shouldn't say that about a record that happens to be yours, but I'm taking no credit. I'm just saying that sounds beautiful to me. It went through a lot of different mixes, a lot.

Probably something in the order of five or six months before we delivered a mix. They had three or four different guys who did mixes. They'd just say, let Dave have a go. And he would have just put a synth part, like a four-bar loop, eight-bar loop, and then unmuted it and see if it had worked somewhere. We went through so many phases

and throw many changes and so many different ideas because we weren't sure what we had. So it was a bit of a weird time at the time because I really believed he'd never going to give you up. And so you're thinking, well, just get on with it, guys. This song's great. What are you doing? Far be it from me to say that as a 20-year-old at the time I was,

for six months of your life at that point, is a long time. They thought it was great. They just didn't think the marriage of it and me was right, I think, because I looked 11. And I had, like, pretty reddish hair at that point, freckles, It's like, just look at the way this guy looks, but just listen to the way he sounds. And is anybody going to, for one, believe it? Is anybody going to warm to that?

Yeah, I don't know, really. To come up with the best suit of clothes for that song and that singer was always our task. You know, it's like a tailor-made suit. So I tried it, you know, that song a bit faster at about 120 beats a minute. in a more sort of housey style. We slowed it down to 114 beats a minute to get the groove right. And I thought, well, if we're going to be this slow,

we ought to syncopate the bass a bit to energise it. And for him and the tune to bounce off. We've known each other for so long. Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it. Inside, we both know what's been going on. Once they found their bass sound, they stuck with it. Matt actually ended up playing it. That's difficult to do.

You want to get this rhythm and move around those chord structures. When we put that down, it really did come together very quickly at that point. Never gonna give, never gonna give. If you were. Never gonna give, never gonna give. If you were. They're never gonna give, never gonna give. It's just somebody literally pressing the keyboard down.

It's a French. A sampler is what it is with that vocal in it. Never gonna give Never gonna give. I never heard that until I kind of heard the final mix of the record and I didn't love it if I'm honest

because it felt alien and it sounded a bit inhuman to me but in a bizarre way that's what's kind of funky about it. The drums at the very beginning of it that was kind of like chopped and reversed and all kinds of things which created this weird sort of intro.

And funnily enough, it became this thing that, you know, because when you heard it on the radio, you'd go, oh, that's that record, because they instantly know it. Somebody played it in the office one morning when I was coming in. Pete was coming down the stairs, and I was going up the stairs, and we both heard it coming out of the office,

and we stopped in our tracks. And we said, bloody hell, this sounds fantastic. I mean, we could often tell when we were wrong, but you didn't know when you were right, a lot of the time. But yeah, we heard it there at that moment and realized it was all hands to the pump. Let's get it out there. Let's not hold back. And I remember the record label came over with Pete Robinson, who was head of RCA in the UK. And he wasn't sure. He was Rick singing. Other people were joking about it. So we had Rick sing it live in the foyer of our studio. And then he did a TV show.

a little regional news program, and then the phones didn't stop, and the lights went on, and it was just an instant, instant hit. It was number one for five weeks in Britain. We didn't make the video until it went to number one, which is unheard of. This is the end of the 80s.

This is MTV. This is like, who puts a single out on RCA records without a video? And I think they were just all terrified of people seeing me. So, yeah, so it's pretty crazy, really. Rick was thrust into the line. because not only did it hit number one here, but in 25 other countries, you know.

And suddenly there's a lot of pressure on Rick, a lot of pressure. After that, I never saw Rick because he was off on tour. He was off round the world. And it was the number one in the US as well, which when that happens, it's like, it just changes, really. You just become something else, you know. So a thing called Rick Rowling, which if people don't know what that is, I'll do a very brief explanation.

Somebody sends an email to somebody, and in it there's a link to a video. You click on that, and a few seconds in, or at the crucial moment where it gets really exciting, the video to never going to give you up, gets to play.

Our 15-year-old daughter at the time, she's 30 now, but she was 15, 16. She kind of put me straight and said, look, just realize this isn't about you. It's just what's happening on the internet this week. And I just thought, wow. That's hard to swallow But she's absolutely right

And she was proved to be right Because 10 year old kids Want to have selfies with me sometimes And I'm like, what? And it's like, because they play Fortnite It just became this thing that people did And it grew and grew on the internet And we've had over a billion streams of the song

And that is You couldn't have even dreamt it How could anybody dream the internet 33, four years ago? This Rick Rowling phenomenon. It may have spurred more interest, but it certainly was always one of those songs that isn't going to go away, you know. It's part of the pop canon. And listen, I wish I had five of them. I really do, but I don't. I've got one. So it's a bit weird, but I think the

underlying feeling of it all is gratitude rather than anything else, really, that I was in the position to be in that building when they were doing those things. And that, you know, The coffee I made was good enough for me to be able to stick in the room. And now, here's Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley, in its entirety. Visit songexploader.net. You'll find links to stream or download this song. And you can watch the music video, which, if you haven't seen it in a while, still rules. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists.

And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine,

rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder and the show's theme music are made by me. I produced this episode with Craig Ely and Casey Deal, with artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by Kathleen Smith and production assistance from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net, slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.