It is crush hour on Friday evening at London’s Liverpool Street station and we
are waiting for the moment of revelation. Hidden among the teeming hordes
hurrying for trains is a “Rickmob” primed for action.
Word had gone out earlier in the day on Facebook, the social networking
website. “The world’s first Rickmob,” it announced. “Find a spot on the main
concourse area . . . right in the centre of the station.
“There will be no horn! Please use the digital clock on the
arrivals/departures board and at exactly 6pm begin . . .”
Two minutes to go. Is the man in the grey suit part of the plot? What about
the women with the buggy? The teenagers hanging about near the newspaper
vendor? It is impossible to tell.
One minute. The police are looking edgy. The seconds tick down and on the dot
of 6pm the moving crowds right in the centre suddenly seem to coalesce and
voices sing out: “We’re no strangers to love, you know the rules and so do
I. A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of, you wouldn’t get this from any
other guy.” People are dancing and travellers have stopped to stare. At
first it is hard to hear the words, but as more and more people join in, the
sound swells. By the chorus it is unmistakable: “Never gonna give you up,
never gonna let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you.”
Yep, it’s a Rickmob, the latest twist in a phenomenon that has turned a
forgotten 1980s pop star into an internet craze of monster proportions which
is spilling over into the offline world.
In 1987 Rick Astley, a 21-year-old from Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire, hit
the big time with his song Never Gonna Give You Up, only to fade into
obscurity four years later. Yet nearly two decades on, a video of him
singing has been the most watched item on YouTube in the past month, with
more than 7m hits.
He has created the word “rickrolling”, the name given to the practice of
duping people on the internet into watching things that they do not expect.
He has caused uproar at the New York Mets baseball team. And he is being
used by activists to do battle against the Church of Scientology.
Some of it is daft and much of it is pointless as participants in the Rickmob
happily admitted.
“I just happened to be here and thought it might be fun,” said Ramon
Chirathuup from Southall, who was belting out the chorus. Leila Blacking,
who also sang and danced, said: “It’s not in the line of my normal
activities. He’s a bit cheesy to be honest. It’s the sort of song people got
off to at 1980s school discos.”
But it is fun - and it reveals the extraordinary alchemy of the internet.
Astley played no part in setting the rickroll craze rolling. He has not
promoted himself or his videos. In some ways he wishes it had not happened
at all. How did a forgotten popster with a naff song turn into a web
phenomenon?
IT began with a duck. A while ago contributors to an anarchic internet message
board called 4chan started fooling others by luring them to click on
interesting-sounding links. The clickers thought they were going to get the
latest video game news or pictures of hot babes or celebrity gossip; what
they actually got was a picture of a duck on wheels. They had been
“duck-rolled”.
The picture is of a fine-looking duck and sometimes it comes with soundtracks
of pop songs, including Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees. But somehow the
wheely-duck failed to gain mass lift-off.
Then an idle inspired prankster changed tack and replaced the duck with a
video of Astley singing his 1987 classic. The image of the baby-faced
crooner, with his black rollneck sweater and Tintin hair, dancing as if his
bladder was fit to burst, fitted the absurdism perfectly. Rickrolling was
born.
Typical of the joke was the gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who put a link on his
site purporting to be to a video of a celebrity smoking crack cocaine.
Anyone who clicked on it ended up with the Astley video.
How did I get here, victims asked. Who is this guy? What a crazy dude. Check
out this cheesy grin, they said, as they sent the link on to others. Like a
virus it spread exponentially, finding a home in the most unlikely places.
One wag spliced the song into a clip from Die Hard, the Bruce Willis action
film. “Don’t do this!” wails his character John McClane as he realises he is
being rickrolled. As the phenomenon gathered pace, protesters targeting the
Church of Scientology inexplicably began using the song, broadcasting it
outside Scientology branches. When Scientologists created a website to
counter allegations about their organisation, rickrollers set up a site with
a similar name; it took people to the Never Gonna Give You Up video.
A weapon of protest? Astley’s caramel voice and the catchy song had never been
so envisaged when they first emerged. He had been spotted while playing in a
soul band in 1985 and taken under the wing of the songwriters Stock, Aitken
and Waterman. He was “tea boy” at their hit factory before he got his big
break.
Notching up 13 hit singles, he sold more than 30m records worldwide before
dropping from view in the early 1990s. Quite happily, as it turns out. These
days he values anonymity and is bemused by his return to fame, mindful that
it is based on a mixture of admiration and mockery.
“Well, it’s a prank,” he said with disdain. “And, as such, I don’t think it’s
really related to me.”
Interviewed in London, where he lives what can only be described as a life of
semi-retirement with his film producer girlfriend and their daughter, he
clearly did not find rickrolling that amusing. “If I had something musically
that I wanted to promote, or if I wanted to use the profile for something -
well, great. But I don’t, really,” he said. In some ways it is a suitably
farcical result: rickrolling has boomeranged into the spotlight one of the
few celebs who does not want to make a comeback. Despite all the millions
who have viewed videos of him recently, he is not eager to reignite the Rick
Astley brand.
“Rick Astley brand? I’m not really aware that there is one. I know I’m on
YouTube a lot, but that wave will die down and then there will be a headless
chicken or something else. It’s just the way life is.”
He shrugs. “I have an idyllic life now. If I want to go to Sainsbury’s, no one
bats an eyelid. Not even when I give them my credit card. I could probably
whistle Never Gonna Give You Up at the same time as giving them my credit
card and they still wouldn’t bat an eyelid.”
Why the retreat? You could say that Astley’s career rickrolled him right from
the start. Far from leading him to fulfilment, he came close to having a
breakdown. “I was a very young guy from a very small town, with a sheltered
upbringing,” he explained. “And I went from making Pete’s [Waterman’s] tea
to being No 1 right around Europe. And being sent to America, where the same
thing happened. And then all around the world. I never really dealt with any
of that.”
He found himself miming in one studio after another. Life was not exactly
glamorous: “I would travel to some studio just outside a city like Slough.
There I would mime my song. Probably wearing a black suit. I would have done
the same thing in Germany the day before, and in Italy the day before that,
and in Portugal the day before that. I never had a chance to switch off.
“I signed Bibles for nuns. In ski resorts! Eventually it starts to drive you
mad. Or it did me and I only had it for four years.”
If Astley thought his fame was out of control before, it certainly is now.
Internet gurus say his song has become the most popular “viral video” they
have known.
“It’s a perfect example of a viral video because the definition of one is
something that gets out and is uncontrollable,” David Griner, who blogs for
Adfreak.com, a pop culture blog, told ABC News. “Even if you’re the one that
created it, you can’t control it.
“And by that definition rickrolling may go down as the most successful viral
to date. It’s self-perpetuated. Once you’ve been rickrolled, you want to do
it to other people.”
On April Fool’s Day, YouTube linked all its front-page offerings so they were
rickrolls - taking users not to the videos they expected but to the song.
Last week Astley’s voice was blaring out at the stadium of the New York Mets,
one of the most famous baseball teams in the United States. The club had
asked fans to vote on a new theme song for the upcoming season, judging such
classics as Jon Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer, the Monkees I’m a Believer or
Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond to be suitable fare.
Instead, 5m voted on the club’s website for Never Gonna Give You Up - the Mets
had been rickrolled. They were forced into a climbdown where they decided to
play the contenders over their stadium’s intercom and select a tune based on
the crowd’s reaction. Astley’s song was roundly booed.
In London yesterday protesters from a group called Anonymous used his song in
more demonstrations against Scientology. “We might use it in other things as
well,” said one of the group who declined to be named. What sort of things?
“We haven’t thought of them yet.” This craze could yet go further.
While Astley has agreed to appear among fellow ageing chart-toppers in a short
“Eighties tour” across Japan and in Britain next month, there is hope for
him that his internet fame will wane.
Last week a new video appeared on YouTube that claimed to reveal the successor
to duck-rolling and rickrolling. Be prepared to be suckered into
dice-rolling - which is exactly what it says it is, but set to a jaunty
piece of classical music. You will know when your number’s up.
The original Rick Astley
rick-rolled video - 10 million hits and counting
College
basketball game gets rick-rolled
Scientology
protest gets rick-rolled
New York Mets get
rick-rolled
TV news anchor gets
rick-rolled
Westboro
Baptist Church gets rick-rolled
Rickrolling was a 4chan/Anonymous invention, it came about long before Anonymous got ticked at Scientology this January.
While Rickrolling is interesting, the real story is the one you're missing -- that Anonymous has begun real-life mask-and-placard protesting at Scientology storefronts worldwide. And how insanely well-suited Anonymous is to go up against the oppressive, threatening tactics of Scientology. It's a perfect storm of causes and a model for protesting a cult, and should be getting loads more attention. Get on it, Times!
AnonyGrace, New York,
Honestly, I just love the song...
James, London, England
I feel sad that Rick thinks the Rickroll is mocking him. IT'S NOT TRUE, RICK!
There is a huge amount of real affection out there for Rick Astley. For some of us, the clip and song bring back very fond memories of the '80s, and Rick was a real part of that time. For others, the lyrics of the song are particularly apt - we sing them to Scientologists, both current and former, as an expression of our support for them (as opposed to the cult leaders). The message, the joy and the innocence of the song suit Anonymous well.
Max Champion, Perth,
It's not strange that Anonymous used rickrolls as part of its Scientology protests...Anonymous uses 4chan as one of their main bases. They invented rickrolling; when they get together it's something they all love.
John, Perth, England