Stop, Look, Listen #9: 90 minutes with Rick Astley, or the rest of my interview with pop's loveliest man
Tales of McCartney, Grohl, Elton, Jason, Bananarama, George Michael, his mysterious Christmas plans, his favourite Smiths song, and much more...
Yes, this is a Substack newsletter that features posts on Lankum, Kirsty MacColl, Sylvester and Rick Astley. I don’t care. Rick Astley is great. And whatever you think of him as a musician (and I say to the naysayers: watch his Glastonbury set – his singing, his drumming, his stage chat is undeniably top drawer), he’s a lovely bloke. Thoughtful and interesting on the ‘80s, stardom, parenthood and more, he also has a love of lots of different kinds of music from AC/DC to ABBA and is a genuine enthusiast. We need more of that in this grim world.
After Glastonbury, I emailed Sarah, my editor at the Observer New Review, to say I’d love to interview him. We got him for the supplement’s big Q&A slot: here he is in last Sunday’s paper talking about Glastonbury, the secrets of long relationships, his tough childhood memories of his father, his thoughts on Morrissey and Johnny Marr, AI, RickRolling and more ahead of the release of his new album, Are We There Yet? Do read it, and share it.
But we also spoke for ninety minutes on Zoom, which isn’t usual for these kinds of pieces. It turns out Rick enjoys a good chat. He said lots of other interesting, funny and touching things, and I thought, it’s a shame to leave my transcription lingering in my JOURNALISM sub-folder of my WORK folder on my desktop seen by no one. And other people have said, oh, I fancy reading more, so here you go.
I also thought: I’ve been feeling weird about posting paid posts up here unless they absolutely offer something meaty for a reader, properly good stuff which has required effort and work. I know how grim it is getting constant demands for payments for newsletters from some Substackers (including those who had established audiences already…), but I also know that if I spend time putting lovely things together, I must remind myself that I am a freelancer that isn’t earning money when I’m doing this…so if you become a paid subscriber, I will give you access to nice things at least twice a month that are as satisfying and soul-lifting as a good coffee and a really good slice of cake, but at a cheaper price.
And as this has taken me a good few hours yesterday and a few hours this morning to sort out – trimming the errs and umms and repetitions in the chat, and cutting out a few things that weren’t as exciting, including my extraneous waffle – it’s paid, but I promise it’s you it’s worth it. (And now I have to finish prep for a big interview at 5pm, and do some other work before I head to my son’s school to co-run the after-school newspaper club for an hour. So many of you know how the juggle is, though, so I’ll shut up now.)
So I’m going to post longer, behind-the-scenes interview material, as well as more stuff on my playlists, as and when I can, for my paid posts. You also get access to all my archive stuff too, including my live reviews of Blur and Pulp this summer, pieces about Sinead O’Connor, playlists and more. But back to Rick. We talked for 90 lovely minutes about the things I’ve listed above, but also about him loving The Winner Takes It All, about the weirdness and wondrousness of the early Stock Aitken and Waterman days (I loved what he says about their first few big hits), people shouting “wanker!” at him out of cars, the Vic and Bob parodies, his thoughts on natural wine (naturally) people tattooing his face onto themselves (in various places), collaborating with Blossoms, Bastille, Sharleen Spiteri, where he gets those suits… but we begin with a question from my friend Alex’s son, Ed, who needed to know something very Smash Hits-y, about cheese.
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