With over 40 million records sold, countless Top 10 hits over a period of three decades, and an audience-voted 'Best Act Ever' award at the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards, Rick Astley is one of the most successful British solo artists of all time. To this day - and probably forever - his record of having his first eight released singles all chart in the UK Top 10 holds up. But Rick Astley's unbridled success is not only based on the glories of days gone by, it has been immediately renewed in the wake of his comeback album "50", his first release in more than a decade: "50" also climbed back to the top of the UK charts immediately after its release in June 2016 and has since been certified platinum. Now the next album, "Beautiful Life", will be released on 20 July and Rick Astley will then embark on a major European tour. Between 13 and 18 September, Rick Astley will also come to Germany for five concerts, with stops in Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin.
Born in 1966 in Merseyside, England, Richard Paul Astley found his great destiny in singing as a child, which he initially lived out in the local church choir, before he founded his first bands as a teenager. With the formation FBI, the born performer and frontman achieved his first local fame, which gradually led to numerous offers from producers and record companies. His own bandmates motivated Astley to leave the band and pursue a solo career. In the course of a temporary job in a London recording studio, he then came across hit producer Pete Waterman from the then world-leading producer team Stock Aitken Waterman, which also helped Kylie Minogue to her unique world career. Waterman discovered the vocal talent of the studio assistant and recorded the debut single "Never Gonna Give You Up" with him in 1987.
Nearly released, the song developed into one of the most successful singles of the entire decade and the aesthetic blueprint for pop music of the following decade. "Never Gonna Give You Up" topped the charts in a total of 16 nations, and stayed there for many weeks in some countries. In the wake of this first hit, which has a significant place in the annals of pop history, Rick Astley, in collaboration with his team of producers, advanced to superstardom, becoming a permanent fixture in the international Top 10 with each new release.
The singer and his producers' collaboration lasted just over two years, producing two of the most successful pop albums of the late Eighties, "Whenever You Need Somebody" and "Hold Me In Your Arms," as well as ten singles that were released, most of which are still part of the compelling canon of timeless radio hits. After his split from Stock Aitken Waterman, Astley released "Free" in 1991, a programmatic album about his newfound artistic freedom that followed up on his great successes worldwide.
Following the 1993 album "Body & Soul," Rick Astley took it easy with his career. Since then there were only three more longplayers from him, each with a large time gap, which turned more and more to soul - always with immediate success, as also the album "50" released in 2016 proved. With the upcoming work "Beautiful Life" he has now fulfilled a long-cherished dream: It is his first album on which he composed every single song himself, played every instrument himself and sang every note himself. "It's been a very nice life up to this point," Rick says. "Today, there's so much I'm deeply grateful for. How many people get the chance to live their dreams? And not just once, but twice? If I hadn't allowed myself to live my dreams, I wouldn't be where I am today. It really does have something of a modern fairy tale about it."
Text source and more information about this event: https://batschkapp.tickets.de/de/tour/1000297-rick_astley
