Never Gonna Give You Up — how Rick Astley’s 1987 hit became a global meme

‘The song has been good to me,’ says the singer of the track that gave rise to ‘Rickrolling’

Helen Brown MAY 23 2022

“A bit spooky, innit,” is how Rick Astley describes the “Rickrolling” phenomenon that has transformed his 1987 debut single into the most unstoppable meme of the 21st century. In 2021 “Never Gonna Give You Up” became one of only four songs from the 1980s to pass 1bn views on YouTube. (The other three are Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, A-ha’s “Take On Me” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”.)

Rickrolling grew out of a prank on the obscure anime fan-pages posted on the website 4chan. As a joke, in 2006 the site’s moderator ran a word filter replacing every use of the word “egg” with “duck”. Consequently, a thread about “eggroll” became “duckroll”. One contributor took the joke further by posting an image of a duck on wheels. The “duckroll” caught on and users began planting “bait and switch” hyperlinks that promised interesting content but actually took viewers directly to the image of the duck. 

In March 2007 one user began using Astley’s video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead of the duck and the trick took off across the internet. On April 1 2008, YouTube got involved, redirecting an estimated 6mn web surfers who clicked on its “featured videos” towards a video of the 21-year-old Astley, hand-jiving in double denim. The song’s buoyant simplicity gave the prank a good-natured feel — although its earworm melody burrowed deep into victims’ brains. 

“Never Gonna Give You Up” was written and produced in the hit factory of British production/songwriting trio Stock Aitken Waterman, creators of hits for artists such as Bananarama, Kylie Minogue and Sinitta. Pete Waterman had spotted Astley, a shy Lancashire lad, singing in a soul band and brought him into the studio to make tea for the other artists while they worked out how to use him. 

Inspired by the syncopated bassline from Colonel Abrams’ 1985 hit “Trapped”, Waterman claims they wrote “Never Gonna Give You Up” in three minutes, but in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, his co-writer Mike Stock said: “He’s lying… It all took a couple of months to get there.” The lyrics fell into place when Astley overheard a besotted Waterman on the phone to a girlfriend, and told him: “You’re never gonna give her up.” They flipped the line into a pastiche of Motown wooing which Time Out magazine compared to a “used car salesman pitch”.

Astley recorded his smooth baritone vocalsin October 1986, but the single wasn’t released until SAW felt the time was right to launch a new artist the following July. Astley told Rolling Stone that Stock “knew exactly every syllable he wanted and the way he wanted it, so, basically, you’d just do take after take after take. [Then] he’d chop it all together. It’s hard to get emotion into that.” 

They made the video on the fly, Astley wearing his own, budget clothes, his much mimicked dance moves driven by “pure fear”. “Never Gonna Give You Up” topped the UK chart in August 1987 and the US chart in March 1988.

The song attracted much sneering, but years later it dialled directly into the Noughties’ appetite for guilty pleasures. Then came the memes, which reached as far as the US presidency: in 2011 the White House responded to a complaint that its Twitter feed was boring by Rickrolling readers. Popular viral videos of the song include one from the cast of Mad Men, and another of Barack Obama, spliced to recite the lyrics.

In 2015, Foo Fighters hired a flatbed truck to make a carnival of Rickrolling members of the Westboro Baptist Church, known for their condemnation of homosexuality. The band later worked a prank into a concert in Japan, playing the intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” before inviting a grinning Astley on stage to sing a rock version of his hit. And in 2019 Astley re-recorded the song as a piano ballad, perfect for all the weddings at which he had heard it was being played.

Scriptwriters have enjoyed finagling the song into films and TV shows, from Family Guy (2007) to The Lego Batman Movie (2017). But the most moving example came in a 2021 episode of Apple TV Plus’s sports comedy-drama Ted Lasso, when one of the characters finds herself lost for words at her father’s funeral and recites the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up”, with mourners joining in the chorus.

Through it all, Astley has remained a good sport. “I’ll be frank [about the meme],” he told Consequence Podcasts last month. “It has definitely boosted my career and my bank account. I’ve realised I’m not embarrassed by the song. I can see why some artists would be horrified if this happened to a song they'd put blood into. But this is just a pop song that’s been good to me. When I sing it live now, it feels good.”