Before Rick Astley made an accidental comeback as a meme (“rickrolling”), he was the sort of 1980s pop star you might Google if “Never Gonna Give You Up” or “Together Forever”—his two biggest hits—came on the radio (“What happened to Rick Astley?”). In which case, you might learn that he quit music at 27 to focus on being a dad when his daughter, Emilie, was 2, or that a fear of flying made it impossible for him to continue on as international pop star.
But what you might not come across is the story of how Madonna‘s 1993 stinker Body of Evidence essentially precipitated the British singer’s exit from music—sort of.
In his new autobiography, Never, out Tuesday, Astley recalls how his fourth studio album, Body & Soul—the last one he put out before disappearing into life as a normie—actually started as a single for Body of Evidence, a movie he roundly burns in his recollection of events.
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The story goes like this: Astley’s record label asked him to write something for the erotic thriller’s soundtrack, and without him knowing anything about the movie (not even that it was an erotic thriller), he agreed.
“I didn’t really understand why Madonna wasn’t getting involved with the soundtrack for her own film, but maybe she didn’t want the public to confuse Madonna the singer with Madonna the serious actor,” he writes in the book. “Or maybe Madonna had already realized that Body of Evidence was going to be one of the all-time great cinematic turkeys, a huge critical and commercial flop, and didn’t want her music associated with it.”
Astley wound up co-writing two songs—”Hopelessly” and “Body and Soul”—for the soundtrack, only for his record label to then ask him to churn out a whole album while he was at it, which he did. “Their logic was that ‘Hopelessly’ was almost a guaranteed hit, because it was going to be in the new Madonna film and no matter how that turned out, it was going to get a lot of publicity just because it had Madonna in it,” he writes. “[T]hey wanted an album to capitalize on its sure-fire success.”
But then the “film people” called to say there’d been a “rethink” of the soundtrack, and they were going to go with an orchestral score instead.
“That phone call changed everything,” Astley writes. “Suddenly, the record label were stuck with an album that no one really wanted.”
The subsequent rollout, which saw him doing forced, cringe-y press, nearly broke him. “I knew the whole enterprise was complete bullocks,” he writes. “We’d rushed into the studio to make an album because someone on a whim had said we were going to get a song in a film, then someone on a whim decided we weren’t, and we were left with a total mess … It was depressing to the point that it really started affecting me.”
Perhaps as a result of the stress, his fear of flying, which he’d experienced since childhood, became almost unbearable—until, finally, he told his manager that he was “done permanently.”
“And that was that,” he writes. “My pop career was over. I was 27 years old.”
Was Body of Evidence—which also starred Willem Dafoe, mind you—to blame for Astley’s retirement? Not exactly. But while Madonna’s career may have recovered from the flop, Astley’s never did. Nor did he really want it to.
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