Rick Astley urges support for young artists to cope with pressure of sudden fame

Eighties pop star Rick Astley has called for young artists to be given help to deal with the stresses of sudden fame.

The singer became a global superstar at the age of 21 in 1987 with the worldwide hit Never Gonna Give You Up which catapulted him into TV studios and onto the front pages of newspapers.

His early success brought him fame and so much money he quit his pop career at 27.

Astley, 58, has now written about his childhood growing up in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, his pop career and musical comeback in his new autobiography, Never.

He told the Cheltenham Literature Festival he started playing in local bands as a teenager and soon switched from the drums to vocals.

Record producer Pete Waterman, who co-founded Stock, Aitken and Waterman, spotted him playing in Newton-le-Willows and gave him a record deal, which propelled him to stardom.

“I have often said actually that I think it should be a legal thing that when someone signs a record deal, and I know this sounds a bit over the top, but that they get a therapist,” Astley said.

“They get a few hours where someone says look, just so you know, you’re going to have to think about things slightly differently if this really takes off for you.

“Because it’s amazing, and I wouldn’t swap it and I wouldn’t want to retract any of it or anything, but it’s absolutely, it’s inhumane what happens to people, it really is.

“I’m not here to get a violin out and get people to feel sorry for myself. I said at the very beginning of this, I’m very lucky, I’m very happy.

“I think what you go through when it goes like that is kind of almost… it’s too much.

“We see it every year, every six months, you see someone’s had a breakdown, somebody’s like… to the nth degree, someone literally drugs themselves to death sometimes because of that pressure.”

Stock, Aitken and Waterman were unknown at the time and were still to have their first top 10 hit – later going on to have 300 Top 75 hits and 30 platinum albums and producing the likes of Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Bananarama.

Astley explained he had never heard of them, and it took a while for his career to take off as he was always at the back of the queue.

“I just did it thinking well, I’ll get to go to London a couple of times. I’ll get to make a record in a kind of pro studio, and we’ll see how it goes,” he said.

It took a while for his career to take off because Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s commercial success had exploded, and they had record companies throwing artists at them.

“I know people sometimes are quite negative about them, but as guys they were super-generous. They gave their studios in the evenings and at weekends,” he said.

“I’m not just grateful that I met them, but I also met them before they made it, and before they cracked it, because I saw them before all the nonsense that came after.

“I don’t have completely fond memories of being there and working with them, because it really pissed me off at times that they would do things that I just thought were ludicrous.”

Never Gonna Give You Up was recorded in October 1986, but it was not released until the following summer after several delays.

“I had a cassette with that song and another song on it and I just kept playing it and I played it to my family, and I played it to a few friends, and we were all saying it’s a hit,” Astley said.

“They just stuck it in a drawer and Pete was delaying given it to RCA who I had signed a worldwide deal with by this point.

“At one point we got back to London, Pete’s kind of oblivious to most of this at this point, and I just said to the guy I was with, ‘I’m going home, I’m done’.

“I just thought they can call me, they can whatever, but I’m just not doing this anymore, this is not what I signed to do.

“People said I was really brave, it wasn’t. It just seemed ludicrous and eventually RCA kind of made him play the song, and as they say, the rest is history.”