"I think it had something to do with Glastonbury. I was watching this year’s festival on TV the other night. Coldplay were headlining, they were amazing, and I thought: God, it gets no better than that. Then I thought: You played there, last year. You played Glastonbury. You. Rick Astley.
You went to Glastonbury, you played a set on the Pyramid Stage, it went down really well, people said lovely things about you. Then you played again, the same day, doing Smiths songs with Blossoms. And instead of getting slated and destroyed and people tearing the tent down in disgust at some eighties pop star desecrating the catalogue of Morrissey and Marr, it went down a storm.
That’s insane.
If you want evidence that people think of you differently from the way they once did, there it is: thousands of people were singing along to you covering ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ so loudly that you could barely hear your own voice. If someone had told you that would happen even three or...