Rick Astley opened up to Vice about the whirlwind of recording his iconic hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the song’s meteoric rise to number one, and the personal toll of sudden fame. “A lot of the things that I really loved about music and wanting to make music had no relevance anymore. I just felt like a traveling salesman who could be selling nuts, to be honest,” he reflected. The pressure pushed him to step away: “I want to be at home with my daughter, you know. I was literally on the motorway. I said, ‘We’re going to have to turn around. I need to go home.’ And that’s what I did.”
But in 2007, everything changed with the birth of the now-legendary Rickroll meme. Master Sergeant Shawn Cotter explained its origins: “There was a common meme on the Internet called the Duck Roll. You get a link sent to you and you get this picture of just a duck with wheels. Duck Roll became Rick Roll.” Suddenly, Astley’s hit was everywhere again, immortalized in meme culture and bringing his music to a whole new generation.
