Eighties pop phenomenon Rick Astley has sold around 40 million records worldwide and today is in demand live as he’s ever been. But when he plays Kingston’s Rose Theatre on December 18, the audience will be getting something delightfully different.

Three-piece band Rick Astley and the Luddites play infrequent charity gigs and started out a few years ago when Rick jumped on the drums at his producer friend Graham’s studio.

Rick told us: “I was at his studios and I jumped on the drumkit and he said ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could play drums’. One thing led to another and we said let’s form a mid-life crisis rock band. So we did.”


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With another friend, Simon, making up the trio they started jamming and have played around a dozen gigs, mostly close to home at Molesey Cricket Club and the Rose, and all for charity.

Rick said: “Making records all the time there is a lot of pleasure but there is also a lot of pressure and it is just nice to turn it up to 11 and knock the s**t out of something. And that’s what we do.”

The Luddites repertoire includes the kind of 70s punk they listened to as kids – The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Undertones – and more recent stuff they have heard and liked on the radio such as Blink 182, Foo Fighters and the Killers.

“We’re called the Luddites because it’s just three-piece rock so if we can’t play it with just the three of us and make a reasonable noise out of it then we just don’t do it.”

He added: “The one thing we do struggle with is we learn the tune but the two guys are too lazy to actually learn it in a different key so I have to try and sing all of the songs in the original key, which with certain tracks is virtually impossible.”

Not taking themselves too seriously, they inject fun into the shows with costumes and covers such Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl but with the lyrics switched to I Kissed a Boy and the reference to ‘cherry chapstick’ altered to ‘salty fish and chips’.

Rick said: “It’s a midlife crisis but it raises some money and that’s what we care about - and I get to swear at an audience.

“We play to everybody who comes. We don’t mind how old they are or where they’re from or anything.”

For Rick – who saw his popularity soar again in the middle of the last decade, partly due to the craze of Rick-rolling – it is a welcome change of pace.

He said: “I do more gigs now that I ever have done in my life. It’s crazy. I play in places now that I never even played in when I was having my hits.

“I’m grateful for it and I love it. I really enjoy it because I retired for a good 15 years or so. I have been really, really lucky in that respect.

“Yet having said all that, it is quite nice to just get in a room and have no idea what we’re going to do and just thrash through stuff.”

Luckily the Luddites gives Rick that opportunity, which will no doubt please lots of fans, who can catch his classic hits at his regular tour dates.

“At the end of the day, when I do my own gigs I want my audience to have their memories just as I have mine. I do like to play new stuff and I am making a new record right now but people want to hear Never Gonna Give You Up and some of the others.”

Rick Astley and the Luddites play The Rose Theatre, Kingston, in aid of Prostate Cancer UK on Friday, December 18. Tickets cost £12. Go to rosetheatrekingston.org

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