Rick Astley to to appear on GMTV on his Birthday, February 6th 2009.  He will be talking about re-joining the Here & Now Tour for their 2009 Arena Tour amongst other things.

It is a great opportunity to pull of yet another type of Rick-roll.  Known fans and anonymous fans are encouraged to send a Birthday Card to Rick at the following address:

Viewers’  Correspondence Co-ordinator
Rick Astley 6th February 2009
GMTV
The London Television Centre
Upper Ground
London
SE1 9TT

It’s true.  I never thought it would happen but alas age is catching up with me and the transition from happy youth to moany old man seems to be fully underway.  The latest thing to annoy me is something which happened to me on the train on my way home last night.  It’s freezing cold outside.  It’s the time of year where ice appears on the roads and you can see your breath yet some guy thought it would be a great idea to open the fracking window! What added to my rage is that this fella was wearing about 20 layers and a thick overcoat.  Why not at least take the coat off before opening the window?

I have been very quiet since MTV announced that Rick Astley was a nominee for their Best Act Ever category at the European Music Awards but the time has come for me to break my silence. Ever since we found out that MTV have not invited Rick to perform at the ceremony, the whole thing has been going round in my head.

I find the decision not to invite Rick to perform a peculiar one indeed. As we know, MTV and parent company Viacom are major players in the capitalist world, always looking to find another way to boost revenues. You would have thought that they would have paid close attention to Rick and the Rick rolling phenomenon the minute they realised his nomination. It wouldn’t have taken much research to understand that if Rick were to perform at the EMAs, they would net literally millions of extra viewers from all over the world. Good for MTV and more importantly, good for their sponsors. Dell, Sony Ericsson and Espirit are the 3 main sponsors of this event, surely their main objective is advertising their brand? Then wouldn’t they prefer for Rick to be at the Awards? Hold on, wouldn’t it actually be worth paying for Rick to perform at the Awards?

So are MTV out of touch with their audience? Whilst the world is celebrating one of its greatest ever singers, MTV are doing little to recognise Rick at all. Celebrating music, isn’t that what MTV are supposed to do? Isn’t that what the awards are supposed to be about? Isn’t celebrating music whilst generating money the whole point of their existance? Well you would think so.

So quite why MTV aren’t making the most of this situation I don’t know. From a musical and a financial perspective, they should be bending over backwards to get Rick Astley on their stage. Perhaps the EMAs are really just a party for the board of Directors, celebrating the music that they like? Sod the audience, sod the sponsors? Whatever the reason, there seems to be a major force against Rick from MTV. It’s a real shame they seem to have lost their direction and purpose.

The best way to prepare for a new course whether it be school, college or University, should be an early night with plenty of sleep.  I prepared the worst possible way but I din’t really have much of an option.  The company I work for were managing an event for a client Oracle, huge database company, in London and I had to be there to help manage the event.  7am start which mean me getting out of bed at 5am.  The event went well but was extremely exhausting.  By the time it finished, I was ready for my bed but somehow I had to get myself across the other side of London to attend a 3hr lesson.

The Uni is probably one of the biggest buildings I’ve been in.  It almost had an American feel to it.  It was bustling with people and had a very positive vibe.  I felt proud to be here and strangely whereas in the past study has be a weight of parental expectation, I found the walk up to my block, quite liberating.  For the first time in my life I am following a path that I actually want to get to the end of!  It took me a long time to get here.  I didn’t think I ever would.  The wilderness of “I don’t know what to do with my life” is dark and unforgiving place.

Thankfully today was my first day which meant the first 2 hours was running through the course, expectations and University policy.  This was kind of boring but eventually we got around to talking about what constitutes as a good website.  We now have a 10 criteria that a website must adhere to, in order to be a good website.  These criteria are going to be at the heart of everything I produce from now on.

We were told that we are not allowed to use Internet Explorer.  Apparently it is semi-intelligent… correcting inaccurate code, or at least trying to display it in the way ith thinks the programmer wanted.  I have been told… use firefox only.  This way my code will have to be 100% correct at all times.  A good discipline.  So anyway, we also got shown a “validator”.  Basically its a website which can analyse your code and tell you to what degree it is accurate.  Out of curiousity I stuck in www.rickastley.co.uk to find I have 21 errors.

Actually, in terms of being a website, I can tell from this one lesson that www.rickastley.co.uk is not a good website.  At least from a design point of view.  For starters it is using the html table method which is obsolete but also because it doesn’t conform to web standards for 100s of reasons.

I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to producing my first site using pure code and CSS.  When I get there Rick should have one of the best sites on the net.  I started reading ahead of my course already… I hope I stick to this practise!

Despite Rick being a very ordinary, shy, teenager back in 1987, there was never anything ordinary about his career.  Perhaps one of the most extraordinary things about him was that there was this giant contrast between his young boyish appearance and the huge voice that he would project.  Those of us above the age of 30 will recall the stories of how record company bosses demanded that he sing in front of them before they would believe his voice was the one the demo tape.  Even in the outside world, some people would refuse to believe it was really Rick behind the voice.  So what else?  Well, Rick had phenomenal success in a short speight of time.  With a Number 1 single in 17 different countries, there wasn’t anywhere in the world that people hadn’t heard of him.  A lot more success followed yet Rick would not allow himself to get sucked into the celebrity lifestyle.  Whilst other stars were living the rock and roll dream of drugs and sex scandals, Rick kept his nose clean and did his best to stay out of the media’s eye. He refused the glamour girls that record company bosses wanted him seen with to boost his PR insisting that he would choose his own girlfriends! 

Like I say, there was never anything ordinary abour Rick’s career.  Love him or hate him for the type of record he made, most people agreed on the fact that he had an amazing voice and combined with his ‘boy nextdoor’ image, Rick won himself male and female fans from every generation.  Parents were more than happy with the role model Rick was to their teenage offspring and the elder generation were totally won over by his cover of Nat King Cole’s “When I Fall In Love”.  Rick has one of the most diverse fanbases in the history of pop music.    

Rick broke America.  Very few British artists have manage to establish themselves into the American market but Rick did.  Infact he had more Number 1s there than he did in the UK.   So what else was strange about him?  Well, he was never really happy making the kind of record that he made with Stock/Aitken/Waterman.  Stock/Aitken/Waterman were having monster success of their own with many established artists wanting to work with them.  Cliff Richard and Donna Summer for example, but Rick was already moving in the opposite direction.  What people didn’t appreciate was that Rick was a musician.  S/A/W had an agena of their own and for these reasons, Rick’s musical talents were played down.   Originally a drummer, Rick’s musical desires and influences were somewhat different to the records he was recording but at the same time, he was learning the art of producing from the industry’s best.  By the time he left S/A/W, he was growing as a songwriter and had learned enough to produce his own mataerial.

There’s no doubt about it, Rick was different but perhaps the most bizarre things of all about Rick Astley is they way he chose to bring his career to an end.  He was on his way to the airport, bound for a tour of the USA when he asked his driver to pull over.  He got out of the car and told his manager that and he didn’t want to be a popstar any more.  He ended his career right at its height.  Just walked away!  It was nearly 15 years before he would even step on the stage again. 

I’m sure you will agree that this is an extraordinary story for an ordinary lad.  I’m pretty sure Rick would palm his life off as uninteresting but I would argue its one of the most interesting showbiz stories you’ll find.

I’m finding this blogging business a bit strange to be honest!  I should have planned this a bit better and come up with a logical place to start.  Instead, the fact that Rick Astley has been nominated at the MTV Europe Music Awards for Best Act Ever, I guess I am going to have to start with this.  The thing is, there is such a huge amount of factors at play surrounding this nomination, I could write a book.  Rick has a new fanbase now, many legitimate fans, some have other agendas, which I will touch on later, but anyway, these people are in their 20s or younger and therefore there is a lot about Rick that they will not know.  So if I have any hope of explaining how it is Rick has landed this nomination, I have no choice but to rewind the tape to 1987!

For many many reasons, Rick Astley is a truly unique popstar.  He probably feels his story is boring and nobody would be interested in it but the truth is his story goes beyond the curiously interesting.  It is one of great achievement, talent, ironies, the bizarre and much more.  In my next blog I’m going to be talking about ironry.  The ordinary lad from Newton-Le-Willows being anything but ordinary… 

Oh.. one last thing… here’s a pic you might not of seen before…