You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. And then 20 years after the song came out, it became a new kind of phenomenon when the meme Rick Rolling was born. Last year, the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up passed a billion streams on YouTube.
The song was written and produced by the production team Stock Aiken Waterman, who were hitmakers for artists like Kylie Minogue, Dead or Alive and others. For this episode, I spoke to Rick Astley here in Los Angeles and songwriter and producer Mike Stock in a studio in London. And here, the two of them tell the story of how never gonna give you up was made. My name is Rick Astley.
I'm from a town called Newton, La Willows, which is a very working class, very salt of the earth kind of area. People don't suffer fools gladly there. But it's a tiny little town. I got in a band with a couple of friends. I played drums. We were probably 16, 17. And we weren't great, but we had the right attitude. We practiced a lot. I used to sing a little bit from the drums. I'd always sung as a kid, church choir, school choir.
And I turned up with a song one day because I'd borrowed a guitar and I got one of the guys to teach me the three chords, you know. And that kind of grew into me being the singer. We had a good following in our little town and some local managers there got three or four bands to do a show case and Stockake Kim Warton, which is a very small production company who hadn't had a proper genuine proper hit yet.
Pete Warton and one of the three producers wanted to do something with my voice. He didn't want to work with a band. He wasn't really interested. I wasn't there thing, if you know what I mean. And so I signed a very small deal with them. And I wasn't, I didn't really want to do it because I'd never heard of the guy. It wasn't like you had this great track record. They just happened to turn into in the next six, eight, 12 months, the biggest producers in Britain.
My name is Mike Stock, part of the Stockake and Morton and production team. Mike and Matt, which is Stockake and they were strictly amazing musicians, great producers. That's what they did. Pete Warton, who was the business end of it really and the mouthpiece of it all. He said, why don't you come and live in London? One of the concerns that Pete Warton and how was it? Rick was quite shy and it was obviously going to be very new to him's going to a London studio and record.
So I basically ended up working at their studios. All he was doing really was helping out, making tea, getting me a sandwich. It was almost like an apprenticeship. We used to call them tea boys or tape ops. A tape op was the guy that used to make sure the tape was wound on the spools and when we run out of tape he'd change it over. And in the meantime he makes tea. So that's how I first met him.
And it was a bit unusual because they treated me like all the other kids who worked there but they also knew that they were going to be making a record for me. A girlfriend of Pete Warton told me what a great voice he had but I hadn't heard it yet. The first time I heard Rick sing was when Rick got behind the mic and sang Ain't Too Browse a Begg.
Which is a cover of a temptation song. His voice, you know, it had a very rich tone and with all due deference so a lot of the acts we worked with they weren't necessarily Pavarotti. You know, these were pop singers and Rick had their extra ingredient. He could sing soulfully, bluesily, powerfully. Well, I don't think they really knew what to do with me because I looked about 11 years old and sang like a middle aged man of drank too much.
Deciding what to do with Rick was the difficult bit for us for various reasons apart from which we were working on 10 different acts anyway we were always working. And I made tea for Dead or Alive, Banana Rama, Mel and Kim, loads of artists that were having massive top five and top 10 records. They were queuing up at the door. We were very successful at the time. But his voice required I think a bit more personalized approach.
So for me, Rick was a great possibility, a great opportunity. So it was excitement and I thought, let's just write the best song we can and when he sings it, it'll have its flavour. Pete Waterman, he actually had a girlfriend in the little town that I'm from. And he says that I said to him about having a bad phone call with his girlfriend and slamming the phone down in the car.
I don't really remember it, but he says to this day that I said, you're never going to give her up anyway. Now whether that's true or not, I don't know but I like the story. Do you know what I mean? Sounds like a good story to me. I don't know if that's true. But Pete did say to me, let's do a song, something like never going to give you up. He very often used to come in with a title. He'd go in and he'd say, right, it's called, and this is what it's about.
And then Stock and Aiken would have to look at him, watching leave the room, I'd have to put the coffee on while those two worked out what he just said, but it worked. To me, if you've got an idea for a lyric and it only has to be the idea of the title, that's the bullseye. So you put that on the wall, never going to give you up. And you throw dark said it.
And you're aiming to hit it every time. So everything about the song from the opening line to the chorus is leading up to never going to give you up. So you have to know where you're going. That's a great road map. But if Pete came up with a random title, I was always trying to make sense of how it fits in with the artist. And Rick had already told me he was still dating his girlfriend, whom he went to junior school with the age of five or six, they knew each other.
And so I thought, well, this is a lifelong fidelity. So never going to give you up. That fits in. And you can lead a song to that hook line. At some point, the three guys got so busy that they thought we need somebody to help out keyboards, programming all of that. And I'd never even heard the term programming. So they got this guy and call Ian Kernel, amazing player, but really technically gifted and brilliant as well. And they bought a fair like computer.
He needed to remorage your house to buy it was like 100,000 pounds or more, even then back in the end of the 80s. So I helped Ian Kernel take the fair light out of the boxes and set it up in his programming room. I went and put the coffee on for him, got the biscuits. Mike Stock came into his little program in room. And he said, this is Rick, he's going to make him coffee, feel that school days. But this is also his first single. And he played the chords into the computer.
Sang him a bit of a melody. Da da da da, dam. Da da da, dam. That was a repeated motif. From the moment I very first heard the very beginnings of it, I thought there's definitely something in this. And then Ian Kernel gets programming. He came up with the string thing, which to me is like a massive part of it. I think he came up with the brass part as well. And he was so excited because he'd never had a fair light before.
And he's got one now to play with whenever he wants to. And all these sounds are in there. The strings, the brass and everything. See, that's not a real guitar. And that was cool at the time. It was almost cooler to have that play in the guitar sound than a guitar player. That's straight out of a Lin-9000, which was their go-to drum machine. And if you listen to some of the stock it can want in records, they're very, very two keyboards on a drum machine.
I think in their eyes a lot of the time they were trying to emulate a lot of the great production teams, Motown and Varys, so that basically had a sound and the artist came in and sang over it. So we've been through that phase of it being the very rough beginnings of it in a programming room in the basement basically. And then it got brought up to the main studio where Stockick and Morton and Liv does it work.
Mike was pretty amazing at getting vocals out of people. He knows exactly what he wants. And he was pretty tough to work with if I'm honest, because all the keys of everything they wrote for me was really high. I know he did say to me at one point that the song is too high for him in places. So it was hard to sing it anyway. We're no strangers to love. You know the rules and so do I. Rick has a baritone voice, and I think he always loved Luther Vandross.
He's possibly the best singer I've ever seen in my life. But with Luther Vandross, that's also relaxed and open and lovely. And I had to keep reminding myself as much as Rick and anyone else that we're making a pop song here. He got three minutes to make a point. It's not quite the same thing. So he would just push me until he got what he felt was the best I could do, which is obvious. But I hadn't been through that experience before. So it was quite, quite hard, I think.
He'd go in and he'd sort of say, right, I know I should sound trust me. So even though your lungs might be bleeding and you're just singing for me again. A full commitment swallowing, thinking of you wouldn't get this from any other guy. And also we didn't have auto tune. There was no escaping that. You had to hit the notes or else the notes weren't there. I just want to tell you how I'm feeling. You know, it's for him a bit of a push, but we broke it down.
So I just got him to sing never gone. He has to sing that three or four times and we can pick the best one. And then we can drop it into place. Then all he's got to do is give you up. Now he can sing that without blinking his eyes in that simple now. But when you're making it up on the spot and trying to create it, you have to break it down. Never going to give you up. Never going to let you down. Never going to run around and deserve to.
I can almost hear myself desperately trying to reach those notes, but that's where it sounds good. Never going to make you cry. Never going to say goodbye. Never going to tell you why and hurt you. Most people under-recognise the backing vocals, which was Delois and Coral Gordon, and the very accurate backing vocals which give support to what Rick's doing. If you are, let you down. Never going to run around and deserve to.
Sounds beautiful to me, that to be honest. I know you shouldn't say that about a record that happens to be yours, but I'm taking no credit. I'm just saying that sounds beautiful to me. Ooh. It went through a lot of different mixes, a lot. Probably something in the order of five or six months before we delivered a mix. There are three or four different guys who did mixes. They just say, let Dave have a go. And he will just put a synth part, like a four-bar loop, eight-bar loop.
And then unmuted it and see if it had worked somewhere. We went through so many phases and so many changes and so many different ideas, because we weren't sure what we had. So it was a bit of a weird time at the time, because I really believed it'd never give you up. And so you think, well, just get on with it, guys. The song's great. What are you doing? Fabi, from me to say that as a 20-year-old at the time I was, but six months of your life at that point is a long time.
They thought it was great. They just didn't think the marriage of it and me was right, I think, because I looked 11. And I had like pretty reddish hair at that point. Freckles. It's like, just look at the way this guy looks, but just listen to the way he sounds. And is anybody going to, for one, believe it? Is anybody going to warm to that? Yeah, I don't know really. To come up with the best suit of clothes for that song and that singer was always our task.
You know, it's like a tailor-made suit. So I tried it, you know, that song, a bit faster at about 120 beats a minute in a more sort of housey style. We slowed it down to 114 beats a minute to get the groove right. And I thought, well, if we're going to be this slow, we ought to sync up the bass a bit to energize it. And for him and the tune to bounce off. Once they found their bass sound, they stuck with it.
Matt actually ended up playing it. That's difficult to do. You want to get this rhythm and move around those chord structures. When we put that down, it really did come together. It very quickly at that point. Never going to give. Never going to give. Never going to give. Never going to give. It's just somebody literally pressing the keyboard down. It's a French sampler. It's what it is with that vocal in it. Never going to give. Never going to give. Never going to give.
I never heard that until I kind of heard the final mix of the record. And I didn't love it, for my honest, because it felt alien. And it sounded a bit inhuman to me. But in a bizarre way, that's what's kind of funky about it. The drums at the very beginning of it. That was kind of like Chopped and reversed and all kinds of things, which created this weird sort of intro.
And fun enough, it became this thing that, you know, because when you heard it on the radio, you'd go, oh, that's that record, because they instantly know it. Somebody played it in the office one morning when I was coming in. Pete was coming down the stairs and I was going up the stairs. And we both heard it coming out of the office. We stopped in our tracks. And we said, bloody hell, this sounds fantastic.
I mean, we could often tell when we were wrong, but you didn't know when you were right. A lot of the time. But yeah, we heard it there at that moment and realized it was all hands to the pump that's getting out there. It's not whole back. And I remember the record label came over with Pete Robinson, who was head of RCA in the UK. And he, he wasn't sure. It was Rick singing. Other people were joking about it.
And so we had Rick sing it live in the foyer of our studio. And then he did a TV show, a little regional news program. And then the phones didn't stop. And the lights went on. And it was, it was just an instant, instant hit. It was number one for five weeks in Britain. We didn't make the video until it went to number one, which is unheard of. This is the end of the 80s. This is MTV. This is who puts a single out on RCA records without a video.
And they were just all terrified of people seeming. So, yeah. So it's pretty crazy, really. Rick was thrust into the limelight because not only did it hit number one here, but in 25 other countries, you know. And suddenly there's a lot of pressure on Rick, a lot of pressure. After that, I never saw Rick, because he was off on tour. He was off around the world. And it was the number one in the US as well, which when that happens, it's like, it just changes really.
You just become something else, you know. So, a thing called Rick rolling, which if people don't know what that is, I'll do a very brief exploration. Somebody sends an email to somebody and then it has a link to a video. You click on that. And a few seconds in or at the crucial moment where it gets really exciting, the video to never going to give you up gets to play.
Our 15 year old daughter at the time, she's 13 now, but she was 15, 16. She kind of put me straight and said, look, just realize this isn't about you. It's just what's happening on the internet this week. And I just thought, wow. That's hard to swallow, but she's absolutely right. She was proved to be right because 10 year old kids want to have selfies with me sometimes. And I'm like, what?
And it's like because they play Fortnite. It just became this thing that people did and it grew and grew on the internet. And we've had over a billion streams of the song. And that is you couldn't have even dreamt it. How could anybody dream the internet 33, 4 years ago? This rick rolling phenomenon, it may have spurred more interest, but it certainly was always one of those songs that isn't going to go away. It's part of the pop canon.
And listen, I wish I had five of them. I really do, but I don't. I've got one. So it's a bit weird, but I think the underlying feeling of it all is gratitude rather than anything else really. And I was in the position to be in that building when they were doing those things. And the coffee I made was good enough for me to be able to stick in the room. And now, here's never going to give you up by Rick Astley and its entirety. There are no strangers to love. You know the rules and something hard.
If they'll commitments fall out, they can't up. You wouldn't get this wrong any other guy. I just want to tell you how I feel. Gotta make you understand. Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around it. He's hurt you. Never gonna make you cry. Never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell the lie. And we've known each other for so long. Your heart's been aching, but your touch has to say it. You know we've all known what's been going on.
We know the game I'm going to play it. And if you ask me how I feel, don't tell me you're too glad to see. Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around it. He's hurt you. Never gonna make you cry. Never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell the lie. And we've known each other for so long. Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around it. He's hurt you. Never gonna make you cry. Never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell the lie.
Never gonna give you up. Never gonna give you up. Never gonna give you up. Never gonna give you up. Never gonna give you up. We've known each other for so long. Your heart's been aching, but your touch has to say it.
This is how we both know what's been going on We know the game and we're gonna play it I just wanna tell you how I feel I gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around it These are two Never gonna make you cry Never gonna save your life
Never gonna tell you how I feel I gotta make you understand Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around it These are two Never gonna make you cry Never gonna save your life Never gonna tell you how I feel Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around it
Never gonna let you down Never gonna save your life To learn more, visit songexploder.net You'll find links to stream or download this song And you can watch the music video Which, if you haven't seen in a while, still rules Song Exploder and the shows The Music are made by me
I produced this episode with Craig Ealy and Casey Deel With artwork by Carlos Lerma Music clearance by Kathleen Smith And production assistance from Chloe Parker Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Topia From PRX, a network of independent listener supported Artistone to podcasts
You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm You can follow me on Twitter And Instagram at RishiHairway And you can follow the show At Song Exploder You can also get a song exploder t-shirt At songexploder.net slash shirt I'm RishiCashHairway Thanks for listening Radio Topia From PRX