Before Rick Astley plays in Brisbane for the first time since 1989, he talks with Heidi Maier about being a 1980s pop phenomenon, abandoning music for fatherhood and what he remembers of the Sunshine State.

For many internationally successful pop stars, the perks of success are those that spring from the financial wealth that often accompanies that success – palatial houses, fast cars, exotic holiday homes or flashy jewellery.

But for Rick Astley, circa 1989, the biggest perk of being a pop pin-up was disarmingly humble and down-to-earth. Never one for the material trappings of success, he took pleasure in knowing that, wherever he went in the world, one small thing was assured: he’d be able to play tennis.

Whether in Europe or North America, Australia or Asia, there was always a tennis court, booked in his name, ready and waiting “for us to muck around on, convincing ourselves we could actually play a pretty decent game.”

Indeed, ask the now 46-year-old what he last remembers of our fair city and his answer is swift and accompanied by a wry laugh: “Honestly? Tennis! I mean, I remember other things, but the big one is tennis!”

Asked to elaborate, he laughingly obliges.

“Don’t, you know, hate me for this, but I don’t know whether I remember the actual gig in your city more or whether I remember playing tennis there more, actually, to be honest! Whenever we toured, someone would always try and find a court for us to play, so we turned up to this court in Brisbane,” Astley recalls.

“And we were all ready to play, in shorts and t-shirts, and the guy who was going to play with us, who was a local, turned up in, like, full-on winter clothing. We were all laughing and asking him: ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But, for you, it was obviously quite cool, temperature wise, and that’s my biggest memory of Brisbane – I loved it, but thought it was funny that all the locals were saying it was cold and, for us, it was warmer than our summer.”

As international pop stardom goes, Astley was the male star de jour for much of the late 1980s and early 90s.

He was barely 21-years-old when, a shy former record label tea boy, a buoyant song called ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ catapulted him to the top of the singles charts worldwide.

Styled in the image of his makers, crack British writing and producing team Stock, Aitken and Waterman, the trio also responsible for much of Kylie Minogue’s early music successes, Astley’s career continued to climb over the next five years.

He produced a further string of Top 10 singles – among them ‘Whenever You Need Somebody,’ ‘Together Forever,’ ‘When I Fall In Love,’ ‘She Wants To Dance’ and ‘Cry For Help’ – and four studio albums.

For a self-professed socially awkward, shy kid who’d grown up dreaming of singing for a living, but never quite sure how to make such a fantastical dream come to fruition, Astley was, to all intents and purposes, living the dream by the time his relentless touring schedule brought him to a sold-out crowd at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre in 1989.

All told, he’d sold more than 40 million records worldwide, cracked the difficult US market without much effort and slowly but surely amassed a mantle full of international music awards. It was a charmed life, to be sure, but not necessarily always a fulfilling or creatively nourishing one.

“I was 21 when I had my first record out, you know, and that makes me ancient by the standards of some of these kids today, but I just remember I felt so young back then. I was quite naïve, too, I think. I look at someone like Justin Bieber, or even Britney Spears, back when she started out, and it’s such a different world,” Astley muses, reflecting on his heyday.

“I’ve had my 15 minutes of pop fame, as it were, and I did have a level of fame that made living a normal life difficult. I couldn’t go out and do stuff. I was chased down streets by groups of girls, wearing badges with my face on them and screaming my name. It was what it was, but I couldn’t go to the movies or down the pub with my brother and my mates. It was very different to what I think I had thought it might be.”

Still, by the time Astley released his excellent, gospel-tinged Body & Soul album in 1993, he’d come to a sobering decision, one that shocked those who, from the outside, had equated his popularity with personal happiness.

At that time, still one of the biggest, most recognisable pop stars in the world, Astley decided to essentially walk away from his career at what was, more-or-less the height of his fame.

He had, by then, turned his back on the manufactured, Stock, Aitken and Waterman hits with which he’d made his name and was instead following his own musical instincts, writing and recording the self-penned material he’d always hoped he’d someday make his name with, but there were nagging doubts that were both niggling and persistent.

Only 27-years-old, Astley was both recently married and the first-time father to a newborn baby daughter. He knew, he says, that he had to – and, moreover, that he wanted to – “live a different life, a life where I was a provider, where I was responsible, a good husband and a good father.”

When unanticipated and largely catastrophic behind-the-scenes changes at his then-record label resulted in nothing but a spate of botched record releases and lack of promotions and publicity, he knew it was time to act: he followed that gut instinct and quit the music industry.

“My priorities had shifted. Music was still hugely important to me, very much so, but everything that happened, with the label and then behind-the-scenes stuff, had left a bad taste in my mouth. To be honest, I’d experienced everything I could, I think. I knew what it was to be super successful, I knew what it was to be super popular, and I knew that it wasn’t always necessarily everything it was cracked up to be,” Astley concedes.

“You realise that, to be honest, other than the hour-and-a-half that you’re onstage, a lot of it isn’t fun. It isn’t that fun to not be able to go out without being followed or attracting ridiculous amounts of attention. In the beginning, as a kid, you don’t mind it. It’s novel. But, when I got to a certain age, the travelling got boring and tiring and I just had a massive reassessment, really, of what life was and what I wanted it to be.”

In 1991, two years before the remarkably assured and mature Body & Soul LP, Astley released the equally admirable Free, an album that could scarcely have been more different from the jubilant 80s chart-topping pure pop of his first album.

The album’s title was, of course, symbolic – after years of being a manufactured pop star, albeit one gifted with a wonderful, sonorous voice who could, lo and behold, actually sing, he’d broken free of the pop production line and was finally both writing and recording music on his own terms.

Midway through our discussion about the album, Astley laughingly interjects, mock-sarcastically: “Yeah – there were real instruments on them, you know! Actual guitars! Actual drums!”

“Up until ‘Cry For Help,’ the single that was released off Free, all I’d ever had was To 10 records. After all the label changes, the next single didn’t even got Top 60. People couldn’t find it in record shops and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t upsetting. I mean, I was realistic and I knew Free was never going to sell the millions my first couple of albums did. I think we did actually sell over a million, in the end, but that was small potatoes compared to what was expected of me based on what had come before,” he admits.

“I think that was the point where I started to think: ‘Okay, so this record that I really like, that I’ve worked really hard on, that I’ve really struggled to write and to record, the label’s not really invested in it. They’ve done the bare minimum, had one hit single off it and now it’s not going to get any further promotion.’ More than anything, that made me realise that, if you haven’t got the machinery of a big label behind you, to make it work, then no matter how good something is, or how hard you work on it, you’re screwed.”

Nowadays, Astley remains in demand as a live performer, but says that his career is “worlds away” from what it was all those years ago. He has recorded another album, in his home studio, and says he has plans to try and release it.

Pressed as to whether or not Australian audiences can expect any new tunes when he plays live, he’s humorously cagey: “Maybe. Or maybe not! Oh, I don’t know – you’ll have to come along and see!”

For a man who has experienced every facet of fame, from the highs to the bitter disappointments of the lows, he remains upbeat and optimistic, something he attributes to his inherent nature.

But he’s also quick to point out that, second time around, he’s very much a musician on his own terms and “not a puppet, controlled by somebody else, pulling the strings, putting the words in my mouth.”

“I do love singing. I am fortunate to still be able to do it, to genuinely enjoy it and to be paid well to do it. Something that I think is really wonderful for me is that now, these days, I can actually go out and do stuff in the cities I visit. And, not to sound idiotic, but that really wasn’t something I could do back in the day. If I wanted to go out for dinner to a nice restaurant, or to a gallery, or the movies, if I am absolutely, one hundred percent honest with you, it was an absolute pain in the arse because I was very recognisable and it’d turn into a nightmare,” Astley says.

“It wasn’t comfortable at all, you know? Whereas now, I might spend a Saturday night and sing to 30,000 people just outside of London at [80s music festival] Rewind, but, today, I can wander around and not one person knows me! I do sometimes get recognised, yeah, but people are cool about it. It’s usually just a smile or a look that sort of says: ‘Oh, yeah, you’re him, aren’t you?’ It’s very different to being chased by screaming schoolgirls!”

Rick Astley plays Twin Towns, Tweed Heads on November 16, Ipswich’s Civic Hall on November 17 and The Tivoli on November 18.

Heidi Maier.