"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 four years ago, you would have laughed at them and told them to stop talking rubbish."
"I think this was probably all Morrissey’s fault. I’d loved The Smiths from the moment I heard my brother Mike playing them. The first time I listened to ‘This Charming Man’, I was completely hooked – the sound, the lyrics, the fact that they came from a place down the road to me, everything about them. I’d never come across anything like it before. I heard that line about ‘a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place’ and thought: What? The weird thing was, I recognized it straight away. My mum had taken me to see a stage production of Sleuth in Morecombe when I was ten or eleven years old, with Michael Williams playing the role that Michael Caine played in the film, and that was a line from it – ‘You’re a jumped-up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place.’ It had always stayed with me, probably because I was far too young to be watching Sleuth in the first place. And there it was, in a song. What the f***? It was the kind of songwriting that was too original to copy, but I gave it a go anyway. After spotting the reference to Sleuth, I realized that Morrissey’s lyrics were often inspired by plays and books. And I must have decided to try that myself, without understanding that you were supposed to actually read some books first before incorporating their influence into your songs."
"One night, after dinner, we went to a club and I asked the DJ to play two songs. The first was ‘Never Too Much’ by Luther Vandross, and as it was playing I sang it to Lene on the dancefloor, which I thought was romantic. The second was ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths, which wasn’t particularly romantic, but I sang that to her too, this time with actions: I grabbed a bunch of flowers out of a vase on a table next to the dancefloor and started swinging them around like Morrissey. I was sort of relishing the feeling of not giving a shit. I was never that big in France, so I felt a bit anonymous there."
"There was a knock on the door of my dressing room at Top of the Pops. It was February 1989, and I was on the show singing the title track of my second album, Hold Me in Your Arms. It was the last single I released with PWL. I’d already made the decision to leave, but I was still – just about – a Stock Aitken Waterman artist.
That made the request from my visitor when I opened the door all the more surprising. It was someone I didn’t recognize, who said they were working with Morrissey. Morrissey was, apparently, wondering if he could come to my dressing room so he could have a photograph taken with me. What? I knew Morrissey was on the show as well – I’d watched him doing a run-through of his new single, ‘The Last of the Famous International Playboys’, but I’d done it from a very discreet distance. Generally speaking, indie musicians like Morrissey were not big Rick Astley fans. They thought I was a total twat, a mindless puppet sent out to do the evil bidding of Pete Waterman, who was intent on destroying everything they liked about music: a band called The Wonderstuff even had a song called ‘Astley in the Noose’. So I really didn’t think Morrissey would want to know I was a huge fan of his. He was a fairly mysterious character – he still is – but the one thing everyone knew for sure about him was that he had a very sharp tongue; he was always wishing death on people he didn’t like in interviews, things like that. I didn’t fancy being on the receiving end of that.
And now there was someone at the door telling me he wanted a photograph with me. Was this a joke? Why would Morrissey want that? Was he taking the piss? Did he want to come to my dressing room so he could tell me how awful he thought I was? I supposed there was only one way to find out, so I said of course he could.
It wasn’t exactly a great meeting of minds. Morrissey seemed quite shy and I was absolutely baffled as to what was going on, but he seemed perfectly nice: quiet, but friendly enough. I told him I was a fan, but I left out some of the gory details – I decided not to mention having stalked his former bass player around Manchester. He didn’t explain why he wanted a photo, but we had our picture taken together – a Polaroid, sitting on a sofa, both grinning at the camera. And that was that: he was in and out of there in five minutes."
"You just file these things away somewhere in a mental box labelled ‘My Weird Life’: Ozzy Osbourne offered to help me put a band together and then his wife thumped him and told him to shut up; Morrissey wanted a Polaroid with me at Top of the Pops. But the Morrissey photo turned up again, years later: he used it as the cover of a re-release of ‘The Last of the Famous International Playboys’, when David Bowie’s estate wouldn’t let him use a photo of them together. It was funny, I’d forgotten that Morrissey and I had near-identical haircuts at the time – we were at completely different ends of the musical spectrum and yet we almost looked as if we could be in a band together. When the NME asked me about it, I told them how much I loved The Smiths and said that I’d like to do a gig in Manchester where I only played songs by them. Then I realized how ridiculous that sounded and added that if I did, people would probably throw up or smash the venue in up in disgust."
"There was a bit of a party in Noel’s dressing room after the show and I got chatting to Blossoms. They told me they’d started their own podcast, just them sitting in Stockport, talking about whatever was on their minds, sometimes with a special guest, and they asked me if I wanted to come on: you had to pick your five favourite songs from Manchester. I chose New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’, ‘Supersonic’ by Oasis, ‘Ever Fallen in Love’ by Buzzcocks, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division and ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ by The Smiths. The guys in Blossoms loved The Smiths too, and we ended up talking about how unlikely it was that The Smiths would ever re-form, or that Morrissey or Johnny Marr would ever do a gig where they only performed Smiths songs. I told them about seeing a Smiths tribute band called The Smyths at the Half Moon pub in Putney, and how I thought it was a shame that they were only playing to 200 people – they were really good – and how amazing it would be to hear a set of Smiths songs at a bigger show. And that somehow ended up with an invitation to come to their rehearsal room in Stockport and . . . work up a set of Smiths songs for a gig, with Blossoms playing and me singing.
After that meeting, I got back in touch with Blossoms and said that if they were having second thoughts, it was fine with me. I knew it would be a controversial thing to do, as Smiths fans are very precious about the band and their music. Any backlash from it didn’t matter to me at all – you know, I’m in my fifties, I’ve got a really established career; people can say whatever they want about me and it’s not a problem, I’m past worrying – but I felt quite protective of Blossoms: they were having hit albums and selling out tours, but they were still a young band, and a young alternative band at that. I didn’t want to get them involved in anything that was injurious to their reputation. But no, they definitely wanted to do it.
Here’s the first thing I learned at the rehearsals: Smiths songs are bloody difficult to perform. Everyone knows that Johnny Marr is an astonishing guitarist, and that Smiths songs have these amazingly intricate and inventive guitar parts – he’s just one guy, and yet he sounds like five guitarists playing at once. But it’s more than that. The Smiths’ rhythm section – Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce – were incredible. Their songs have really unusual structures; they’re not merely verse-chorus-verse, they’re all over the place. And I know every word to every Smiths song, and, like every Smiths fan, think I can do a pretty good Morrissey impersonation after a couple of drinks, but his lyrics are really, really hard to sing properly. They’re complex and they’re clever and every word matters: something like Cemetery Gates is ridiculous. The line about the sun doing salutations to the dawn – you try singing that and not sounding like you’re busking it. We occasionally took to having a quick drink in the rehearsal studio before trying something particularly tricky, and that definitely seemed to help.
To announce the gigs, I sang a couple of Smiths songs with Blossoms as an encore at their show at the Forum in London. We were going to do two nights, one in London and one in Manchester. The reaction was as mad as I expected it to be. Lene and I sat in bed the morning tickets went on sale, killing ourselves laughing at the responses on social media, both good and bad. If you were old enough to remember the late eighties, the idea of Rick Astley singing Smiths songs was quite a difficult thing to conjure with. A few people were really upset, they thought it was sacrilege, and I totally got that. And at least they expressed it in a funny way: ‘Has someone been stealing ideas from Alan Partridge?’; ‘What next? Shakin’ Stevens and The Charlatans perform the songs of The Fall?’
Most people, though, seemed to be really happy for precisely the reasons I was: they wanted to see the songs live and got that it was a homage, not a joke. The gigs were fantastic, really joyous, a celebration, the whole audience singing along. We unexpectedly got the seal of approval from Morrissey. His nephew came to the gig in Manchester, met us backstage for a drink afterwards and told us he thought it was a nice thing to do, and the next day, Morrissey posted a photo his nephew had taken at the gig and put a message on his website thanking us, with the headline, ‘If there’s something you’d like to try – Astley, Astley, Astley’, which I thought was fantastic."
"The next morning, I was on the BBC again. The interviewer asked me if being a hit at Glastonbury meant I was, officially, cool. It was a good question, if you thought about it. The fact that I’d gone down so well definitely seemed to be an indication that old, long-standing notions of what was and wasn’t deemed cool and acceptable didn’t really hold true in the twenty-first century, and so, I suppose, did the fact that not everyone turning up to my gigs was old enough to remember my eighties hits first-hand, or the fact that a band like Blossoms were happy to work with me, or that Morrissey had given the Smiths shows the thumbs up. I definitely felt I was a bit more accepted than I had been, and playing at Glastonbury seemed to underline that, on a scale that not even I could argue with: Yeah, Rick Astley’s allowed here – that’s fine."
Regards,
FWD.
