Years before he directed Con Air, Simon West made a music video for Rick Astley, only to see Never Gonna Give You Up become an infamous internet meme. Awkward dancing. Tall hair. Big jackets. The unique sights and sounds of Rick Astley’s music video for his 1987 hit, Never Gonna Give You Up, have made ... How the director of Con Air accidentally invented Rickrolling
Years before he directed Con Air, Simon West made a music video for Rick Astley, only to see Never Gonna Give You Up become an infamous internet meme.
Awkward dancing. Tall hair. Big jackets. The unique sights and sounds of Rick Astley’s music video for his 1987 hit, Never Gonna Give You Up, have made it one of the most-watched pieces of media in human history; at the time of writing, it has over 1.7 billion views.
One of the major reasons why this famously kitsch pop promo has been seen so many times is, of course, because it was the subject of an internet prank in the 2000s: Rickrolling.
A viral gag that began life on the grim pages of 4chan, Rickrolling involved providing a link to something readers might find enticing, only to direct them to Rick Astley’s video on YouTube instead.
According to Know Your Meme, the prank is a riff on the earlier duckrolling, where clicking on a link would lead the user to an image of a duck with wheels instead of the destination they were expecting. In May 2007, a 4chan denizen then took the idea into the 80s pop sphere by posting a link purporting to be a preview of the eagerly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV. Clicking the link led to – you guessed it – the Never Gonna Give You Up video instead.
Rickrolling appeared to reach its peak in the early 2010s, by which point even the Obama Administration was getting in on the act – in 2011, the White House’s official Twitter account replied to a user with a shortlink to Astley’s 80s earworm.
Viewing all this from afar was British director Simon West – perhaps most famous for his 1997 Nic Cage action epic, Con Air. Back in 1987, he was still in his 20s and making music videos for a living – including the promo for Never Gonna Give You Up.
Seeing the video suddenly become a meme roughly 20 years after it was made was “bizarre” West told me in 2013 – not least because the video was shot in a hurry, became an unexpected hit, and then vanished again months after the accompanying single was released.
“Who knew that, 20 years later, it would come back and re-haunt me,” West laughed.
Never Gonna Give You Up emerged from the pop hit factory that was Stock Aitken and Waterman – a record production company that West had worked with more than once before 1987. For the firm’s music duo Mel & Kim, he directed the promos for the 1986 single Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend) and Respectable, released the following year.
Both were typical up-tempo, danceable tunes in the Stock Aitken and Waterman mode, and West’s promos were similarly full of 80s bounce – Showing Out featured its singers bopping and singing away during a photoshoot, while Respectable’s more ambitious video took place in a set dressed to look like an alleyway in an American city, complete with dancing beat cop.
“I was just starting off making music videos, and I was doing a lot of cool indie bands, and there were all sorts of early techniques I was experimenting with,” West said. “By sheer chance, I fell into that dance thing with Stock Aitken and Waterman. I did a couple of videos for them – I did Mel & Kim.”
While West was in the Stock offices one day in 1987 when, he recalled, “there was this guy walking around, getting sandwiches and tea” – it was Rick Astley, who at the time was a 21 year-old hopeful who’d been hired by impresario Pete Waterman. Waterman had spotted Astley performing at a club, and had offered to give the Lancashire singer a job – albeit as an apprentice doing odd jobs around the studio.
Astley got his shot at fame, however, when Waterman, along with songwriting partners Mike Stock and Aitken, wrote Never Gonna Give You Up as his first solo single. The synth-heavy pop ballad was recorded early in 1987, but wasn’t released until that July; and, by the sounds of things, the music video was something of an afterthought.
A week after he’d seen Astley handing out cups of tea at the Stock offices, West was asked “with one day’s notice,” he recalled, to direct a promo for the singer’s debut.
“He’s got a great voice,” West remembered being told, “and we’re going to give him a chance with this song. But we don’t want to spend any money on it, and you need to do it tomorrow.”
The reason the video for Never Gonna Give You Up looks simplistic and rushed, then, is because it was put together in a matter of hours. Shot beneath the arches of the Hammersmith and City viaduct and in a former church building up the road, the brisk shoot was “one of those things where I threw it together,” according to West.
“Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong on the shoot – half of the people didn’t turn up. The choreographer was double booked. The production designer hadn’t finished the set, so it wasn’t even shot where it was supposed to be shot.”
West had assumed that this hurriedly-shot video, in which Astley sways and boogies uncomfortably against an assortment of walls, would disappear without trace. Instead, the song became one of the biggest hits of 1987, and the music video was, for a period of months, seemingly on every television.
“We thought nothing would happen with it. But then, of course, it went to number one all over the world, and I couldn’t escape it. Anywhere I went in the world, it would be on TV. It haunted me for about a year. I said to some friends, ‘Oh my God, it’s the one video I wouldn’t want to be seen everywhere.’”
Pop singles are by their nature intended to be ephemeral, and after 1987, the Never Gonna Give You Up video quietly faded from view. West turned from rock promos to TV commercials, including high-profile ads for the likes of Pepsi and Budweiser. It was this work, rather than his Astley video, that caught the attention of Hollywood super producer Jerry Bruckheimer. West was invited to Bruckheimer’s office for a meeting, and it was here that he was given the chance to make his debut as a feature director.
“It was a classic big Hollywood producer meeting, where he was sitting in front of, literally, a wall of scripts,” West recalled. “I’ve never seen so many scripts – there must have been 5,000 of them. Just a wall behind him. And he reached around and pulled out three, and threw them across the desk, and said, ‘I’d really like to make a movie with you. Read these three and pick which one you want to do over the weekend, and on Monday, tell me which one you want.’”
West read the scripts, picked out Con Air – then a small, off-beat indie thriller written by Scott Rosenberg (Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead).
“I thought, well, I can do something with this. But I had to make it into a big summer action movie, whereas at the moment it’s a small character piece. So then I set about blowing it up out of all proportion, really.”
A decade after Con Air became West’s breakthrough Hollywood hit, the first Rickroll quietly emerged on the internet. By this point, the filmmaker had directed such films as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and the mid-budget thriller, When A Stranger Calls. He was decidedly bemused to see a relic from his early career suddenly bubble back to the surface.
“I thought I’d escaped it again,” West marvelled in 2013. “Who knew that, 20 years later, it would come back and re-haunt me.”
Since that interview, the original Rickroll version of Never Gonna Give You Up has vanished from the web, replaced by a shinier high-definition version on Astley’s own YouTube account. The singer himself is still going strong, having embraced his earlier pop phase and touring his music around the UK and beyond.
Rickrolling isn’t the viral prank it once was, but the fame of its namesake’s music video has only grown; back in 2013, when I spoke to West, it seemed impressive that the video had amassed over 66 million views. Now it’s in the billions.
As West predicted at the time, it seems inevitable that there’ll be a “third cycle of Rick Astley” someday soon.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m sure there’ll be a third cycle of Rick Astley in another 20 years, where something else happens. It’ll be one of those things where aliens have heard it, and they’ve invaded Earth because this song they’ve heard brought them here.”
