Rick Astley’s contentment is joyous

The veteran popstar’s story strikes more than a musical chord.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

On a music festival stage, a popstar in a pink stages holds raised hands with his band.

Astley at Glastonbury. 2023.

aph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Last month was the wonderful Cheltenham Literature Festival and I flexed my low-brow muscles by going to see Matt Haig, Miranda Hart and Rick Astley. All three truly brilliant events.

But the last of these was the final event of the whole festival and the most surprising. I had no idea what to expect as I’ve never heard veteran popstar Rick talk or be interviewed. If I’m honest, I was probably being ever so slightly ironic in choosing to buy the ticket. I didn’t even know he’d written a book – his autobiography, Never.

He was absolutely sensational. The first question was “I’m sure you’ve been asked before to write your autobiography, so why now?” Answer, “Because I wanted to be completely honest and for that, I had to wait for my parents to die.” Oh, hang on. This is going to be a very different evening from the light entertainment rickrolling we were all anticipating.

He went on to describe a “very scary” childhood. He spoke with grace and kindness where he could, but he was also completely open about how “scary” his dad was. About living in a Portakabin at the age of 14. That music was his ticket out of that “scary” place. He used the word scary a lot. Which I found really moving. As a word, it vividly conjures up the fear felt by a child, which can get lost in the slightly abstract safeguarding language that we often hear people use when talking about abuse.

He told lots of fabulous stories about the early days with music producer Pete Waterman) and again, he spoke with respect (“they were just amazing musicians”) but also with candour. He dropped names with affection and disinterest in equal measure. We all know he was stratospherically famous – for a while – and then he wasn’t. And now he is again, at least a bit. He talked openly about all of that. He was articulate and funny; the kind of guy you’d have a great evening with, in the pub.

But most impressive was at the end, with tears rolling down his cheeks, he said, in his rich Lancashire accent “music was my way out of that scary place. Not my ticket to sex, drugs and a Ferrari. I wasn’t interested in all that. What I wanted to find was safety, to build my own family and have a stable, safe home life.” Wow. And he’s achieved it. He met his wife in 1987.

Funnily enough, the day before I went to see Rick I found a meme on my Insta feed – it was putting the words of “Never gonna give you up” into the mouth of Jesus. I don’t think Rick Astley is a Christian and he certainly isn’t the Messiah – but there is real joy to be found in an artist whose music celebrates what is good and beautiful in human relationships. And not just in a soft lens, infatuation dream-state ballad. He’s in it for the long haul.

In the words of the blurb on the back of the book, “Never” is a “portrait of truth, artistic evolution and the astounding power of contentment.” Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.

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America

Comment

28 November 2024

3 min read

America: two nations under God?

Red, blue, and rarely purple.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

a tattered American flag flies against a blue sky.

Mario Sessions on Unsplash.

I've just come back from the USA. A few days on the east coast was a chance to take the temperature of America after its recent election, a brief impressionistic sense from conversations, reading the runes – and the blogs. In short, I had heard much about the divided state of America. I didn’t realise quite how divided it was.

America has always made a great deal of unity. The vision for the USA imagined immigrants from different nations across the world invited to forge a new life in a new continent, leaving behind the divisions of the old world. It was the coming together of varied States across the vast continent into one Union. The language is everywhere. Most cities have a ‘Union Square’, Street or Turnpike. The chosen name itself was the United States of America. The slogan E pluribus unum – “out of many, one” was first featured on the original 1776 design of the Great Seal of the United States and formally adopted by the U.S. Congress as the nation's official motto in 1782. The American civil war of the nineteenth century was such a trauma for the nation precisely because it threatened that union. “One nation under God” says the pledge of allegiance, recited by every American child. Yet today it feels that a more realistic description would be two nations under God. The Disunited States of America.

The split is pretty even. 73.7m people voted Democrat. 76.4m voted Republican. That itself is no great cause for alarm. What does cause alarm is the utter divide between the two groups. New York, for example. is pretty solidly Democrat. Someone who voted Trump told me they would never admit to it publicly because of the public shame it would bring. The same is true in the red states. To admit you voted Democrat in some Southern Baptist churches in Texas would be to invite social ostracism. Many Evangelical pastors who have their doubts about Trump have to keep quiet otherwise they would lose the support of their congregations and quite possibly their jobs. As a result, the only Evangelicals that tend to criticise Trump will be academics or journalists who have little to lose.

As a taxi driver joked, if a young Democrat goes out on a date with someone they've met on Tinder, and discover their partner voted Republican, there is unlikely to be a second date. A Christian visitor centre in Washington DC tells me that they are looking forward to Trump being President again, because the flow of evangelical Republicans visiting the capital dried up during the past four years as they felt it was Biden’s town. It’s well known that nearly 80 per cent of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Such families were more likely to come to DC to see the seat of government if they knew ‘their guy’ was in the White House.

It seems that in the current version of the USA, who you voted for is the number one identity marker. And the two groups rarely talk. In New York I preached in an Episcopal church. The Bible readings for the day spoke of ‘wars and rumours of wars’ – ‘everything will be thrown down’ – apocalyptic texts that invited me to talk about the election in the light of Jesus. Beforehand I asked the Rector what the voting pattern of the church was. “It’s genuinely purple” he said – “a mix of red and blue, Republican and Democrat, Trump and Harris. At least here they do talk to each other.” That seemed a rare thing in this deeply divided country.

Jesus once said: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.” Trump may well fix the economy and illegal immigration. Yet such deep division, especially in a nation whose identity rests of unity is perhaps a more existential threat.