![]() ![]() It's a case of mistaken identity a geographic Rickroll.Īll images by the author, except for the ones we've half-inched from Google Maps and YouTube. This is surely the source of the online confusion, with people assuming the Harrow Club must be in Harrow itself. Rick continued to paint the town beige well into the daylight hours, moving his gentle boogie indoors to what is now the Harrow Club. Note the tracery in that huge window, and then compare to this still from Never Gonna Give You Up. This former church building is the Harrow Club, one of six youth clubs spread throughout west London with origins in Harrow School. The answer is but a few paces north of the bridge, further along Freston Road. Why do so many websites (including Wikipedia) place the video in "the London Borough of Harrow". The tally must be much, much higher when you consider that this version was uploaded in 2010, replacing the video from peak Rickrolling days. That's the equivalent of one in six people on the planet. The official video has (as of May 2023) been watched 1.3 billion times. It's a kind of inverse Rickroll - you visit the arches expecting to learn something more about the man and his talent, and instead you find a Ford C-Max and an angry lady shouting into a phone. Not a plaque, not a statue, not even a bit of graffiti. There is no marker in the physical world to the site's enormous importance to human culture. This track is on the 10 following albums: Rick Astley. We paid a visit to the viaduct, handily labelled as "Rickroll Bridge" on Google Maps. Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc. Like that time we accidentally hyperlinked MyLondon in a list of credible news sources. Rickrolling is the practice of linking up the video to Never Gonna Give You Up when the reader is expecting something completely different. That's partly thanks, of course, to the Noughties' phenomenon of 'Rickrolling', arguably the greatest internet meme of all time. As Family Guy put it in their Back to the Future parody: "You know that mediocre, generic sound you've been looking for?." The arches today.įor all its blandness, the song lives on in collective consciousness, more than a third of century after it topped so many charts. And yet it is as emotionally stirring as the Runcorn phone directory. Likewise, the song itself is catchy - the ultimate Stock Aitken Waterman ear-worm. ![]() He shuffles along in a quantum supposition of cool and naff, cloaked in Schrodinger's Mac. Rick clearly has rhythm, but also verges on the awkward. It was helped along by a paradoxical video: the singer does nothing remarkable, yet he does it remarkably. His debut single topped the charts of 25 countries and was the best-selling single of the year. It was here, beneath an anonymous west London rail bridge, that Astley first stepped into the violaceous limelight. Just turn left out of Latimer Road tube, then it's a 2 minute walk along Lockton Street, following the viaduct. His April tour has been postponed.The hallowed arches are easy enough to find. Because he looked so young, people thought it wasn’t actually him singing – Radio 1 rang him up in a hotel in Scotland and made him sing it in the bathroom. ![]() It went to No 1 in every country, including America. Then one day someone played it in a meeting and everyone went: “What is this?” And the rest is history. We pulled out Rick’s track and did a new version but forgot about that as well. On Boxing Day that year, I was bored at home so I went into the studio. We changed the key so Rick had to sing higher, and it worked. I went into the studio and said: “I’ve got a title and a song idea for Rick.” Matt and Mike did a lot of work on Never Gonna Give You Up. The hi-hat pattern clicked in my head and suddenly I knew exactly what we were going to do. Shortly afterwards, we were in my Jaguar going to work and Tony Blackburn played a record by Sybil. One morning, I came off the phone after a long call to her and Rick quipped: “You’re never going to give her up.” It stuck in my mind. I’d been going out with a woman called Gaynor for ages. Then we promptly forgot all about it’ … Pete Waterman.
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