Rick Astley

• Year: 2002
• Rating: 7/10
• Cat. No: 74321 955122

Track listing:

1. Never Gonna Give You Up
2. Whenever You Need Somebody
3. Together Forever
4. When I Fall In Love
5. My Arms Keep Missing You
6. It Would Take A Strong, Strong Man
7. She Wants To Dance With Me
8. Take Me To Your Heart
9. Hold Me In Your Arms
10. Cry For Help
11. Move Right Out
12. Never Knew Love
13. The Ones You Love
14. Hopelessly
15. Body And Soul
16. Sleeping

Rick Astley came from nowhere to dominate the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1980s, but at a price. An earnest, inoffensive and thoroughly likeable chap, he nonetheless found himself a figure of ridicule and, in some quarters, hate.

In 1988, rising indie-band The Wonder Stuff memorably recorded a B-side called “Astley In The Noose”. Rick, with typical equinamity, took it in his stride. Soon after, he would leave the presumed safety of the SAW nest to forge an initially promising chart career without them. Pop music had moved on, though, and by 1993 his records weren’t even making the UK top 75. With a young family to raise, Rick Astley decided it was time to quit the circus and live life his own way.

A total of 8 Top 10 singles in Britain (including a #1, 1987’s best-selling hit, Never Gonna Give You Up), half-a-dozen Top 10 singles in the US (he had more chart-toppers there than here, remarkably)…. it’s not a bad track-record. Certainly, for a lad who upon his emergence was cruelly doubted as being the real voice on his records and who admittedly lacked true pin-up qualities, Rick Astley did very well for himself.

Obviously, his label RCA must still regard him as a prestige act, since this collection has been given a proper full-price release complete with one new recording, rather than the usual half-arsed budget title with cheap packaging and questionable tracklisting. Not for Rick the treatment dished out to his peers such as Living In A Box, Nik Kershaw, Curiosity Killed The Cat or several others.

Greatest Hits is, in fact, a complete singles collection, with not only every UK A-side and AA-side, but also the US-only Top 10 hit from 1988 It Would Take A Strong Strong Man. Then there’s Sleeping, the latest comeback success which has been big across Europe, a pleasant if routine contemporary trance-pop number which brings Rick Astley into the 21st Century by making him sound like everyone else in the charts.

Of these 16 tracks, some have dated badly (Together Forever, Take Me To Your Heart), others sound quintessentially 80s but still appealingly so (Never Gonna Give You Up, Whenever You Need Somebody, She Wants To Dance With Me), while the 90s material is more considered and durable despite never quite achieving more than a Living In A Box/Level 42 class of white soul/funk.

There is that essence of Michael McDonald in his vocals and, latterly, in the music itself (Cry For Help, Body And Soul), but perhaps due to his SAW background Rick never became an artist of similarly-regarded stature. 1991’s Never Knew Love also reveals part of the reason…at times the music was inescapably naff.

Yet, overall this is a catalogue to be proud of, a batch of songs which largely define an era too often reviled by the revisionist who shape current attitudes to pop.