Rick Astley is writing a musical and he has told The Times all about it as well as what he thinks of the whole Rick-rolling phenomenon. Including the whole V for Vendetta thing at the Church of Scientology HQ.“My wife’s now a movie producer so I read a lot of scripts and I’m really passionate about films,” he says. “One day I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I write one?’ And it turned into a musical — but not for the stage. It’s dominated by the songs I’ve written — they tell the stories — so I hooked up with a guy in California and we wrote the script together. We’re at the point of speaking to a few different agents and getting people to read. I’m not fooling myself — nothing may come of it and I totally understand that, but as a process I have loved it. When you’re writing frothy pop songs the lyrics can be a bit ‘whatever’, they are hooky and you just sing them because they work. But writing these songs . . .” He falters. “Do they call that a libretto?”
The synth sounds of the Gary Numan world will figure highly, because it’s set, “would you believe, in the 1980s! The working title is New York Cowboy because it’s about a young guy who sets off from a small town — not Newton-le-Willows [Astley’s home town], ha-ha — to go to New York.”
