Rick Astley
Pete Waterman got the idea for "Never Gonna Give You Up" during a heated phone call with his girlfriend while driving Rick Astley to the studio. When Astley said "you're never gonna give her up," Waterman immediately heard a song. Stock Aitken Waterman recorded the track in December 1986 and then shelved it for months, uncertain whether Astley's appearance matched his voice. The demo eventually reached Mix Mag, which played it, and it went "from nowhere to number one in about a week." Astley recorded the full vocal in approximately one hour. By 1993, at age 27, he had walked away from it all deliberately and stopped being famous.
In our deep dive into Never Gonna Give You Up, we trace the song from a car argument to a shelved tape to the number 1 that launched and eventually confined its singer, and the second life it found three decades later as the internet's favourite prank.
