Reproduced from Guardian 13 December, 1996

WE remember their names, if we remember them at all, with a shudder. Lonnie Gordon, Big Fun, Sonia - all famous for 15 seconds in the late eighties, their careers masterminded by the hugely successful production team Stock, Aitken & Waterman. Though it now feels like a bad dream induced by a surfeit of yuppies and British Gas flotations, these faceless disco singers epitomised popular taste in the decade that everyone would rather forget.

But the jewel in the SAW crown, the conduit of seven top 10 singles in one 18-month period that put SAW on the map, was Rick Astley. It's all coming back... Lancashire boy, big-shouldered suits, unformed face that regarded the world with benign incomprehension. Ridiculously deep voice that couldn't possibly have emanated from that milk-fed frame. Adored by small girls and Americans, who unwittingly playlisted him on black radio stations; loathed by rock critics.

`Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down...' His very first single was number one for weeks in the summer of 1987, its brassy soulfulness befitting that ostentatious time. Hit followed hit, each written by SAW while their charge hung around outside the studio, waiting to be summoned to add his vocals.

His chart career ended at around the same time that techno and Madchester took music further than SAW could ever have envisaged. His last hit, Never Knew Love, reached number 70 in 1991. By then he had split with his producers after years of fighting for a say in production and songwriting. Free at last, he changed his image, but even long hair and a starker, balladic sound couldn't revive what was by then a dead duck. Astley's baritone voice was as striking as ever - he was one of the few SAW marionettes who could actually sing - but he was a reminder of a time too unpleasant to dwell upon. A 1993 album, Body And Soul, stiffed, and Astley disappeared, presumably to a day job in Newton-le-Willows, the small town whence he came.

But that wasn't what happened. His last entry in the Guardian cuttings file is dated October 16, 1993. `Pop star Rick Astley has dropped the price of his Cotswold mansion by £75,000 after failing to find a buyer. The 27-year-old singer now wants £575,000 for the six-bed home in Rencomb, near Cirencester, Glos. He is anxious to move to London.' This was a surprise. So he hadn't become a minicab driver after all. He'd apparently been living sumptuously on the proceeds of several million record sales and the publishing royalties from the handful of songs he'd been allowed to write. But where had he been for the past three years? He wasn't easy to trace. His former record company, RCA, hadn't heard from him since his contract expired two years ago. It was the same with his former manager. Eventually your investigator obtained the number of a Berkshire-based manager who's looking after Astley on a part-time basis.

`He's not doing interviews,' she said. `He's doing demos in his studio, and he doesn't want to talk until he's got a new record deal. A lot of people have been asking to interview him.' Oh? Has the zeitgeist finally swung back toward Astley, or is it just that, as will inevitably happen, some ironist has decided the eighties are ready to be revived? At any rate, she called back half an hour later, unable to conceal her surprise. `He's said yes,' she said, divulging complicated directions to Astley's Fulham studio.

It's in a quiet back street about 20 minutes from his Richmond home (seems he did finally sell that very big house in the country). A motorcycle that turns out to be his is parked outside; inside the place has the big-windows-blond-wood look of a successful design consultancy. The joint is all his, built to his specifications in the last year for a small fortune. If Astley made this kind of money, god knows what SAW, who got the lion's share of the songwriting royalties, must have raked in. What if I don't recognise him, I'm thinking. In his heyday, the extraordinary thing about Astley was his ordinariness. He had the looks of the teaboy he once was - pleasant but so unremarkable that his pin-up status was infuriating. (RCA's whole marketing strategy was based on the contrast between his boy-next-door face and burnished voice.) At 30 he's bound to look even less distinctive, I tell myself.

A tallish, skinnyish figure glides out of a softly lit inner room and bustles around with a box of teabags. This, evidently, is he, and you could have fooled me. The straggly brunette floppy-do and bosom-hugging green shirt don't jibe with the clean-cut android on the cover of 1988's Hold Me In Your Arms, the only album still in stock at the Virgin Megastore. Time has been gentle, too, instilling character while preserving his youthfulness. Essentially, you could present him to your parents without being embarrassed by his uncoolness.

The studio is dominated by a sprawling mixing desk containing tapes of songs Astley has been working on for six months. He refuses to play them, even evading questions about what they're like. I'm hoping he'll confess that he's developed a love of ambient trance techno which has necessitated a change of name to DJ Rikki A. Sadly, he does not. `I wouldn't slot what I'm doing into either dance or Britpop,' he says, keeping a watchful eye on his tapes. `It's less souly than before, but my voice had always steered toward soulfulness.' But enough pleasantries. Where the heck have you been? `Everything in my career happened so fast,' he begins, settling into a squashy chair under a portrait of his five-year-old daughter. `Stock, Aitken and Waterman were more famous than I was, and everyone who worked with them became one of their puppets. All the media attention made me clam up, and I was perceived as not having a brain, and fair play to anyone who thought that, because that was how I was portrayed. The whole thing of `Rick's a nice fellow, the boy next door' made me go within myself a bit. I wore the suits and ties because I went to soul clubs and clothes were more important than drink.' His gaze is very steady in his Newton-le-Willowsian way. This isn't what I was expecting, which was a himbo of the Jason Donovan (another SAW alumnus) stripe. Courteous, interested and engaging, he's not even the same species as the blank adolescent on the cover of Hold Me In Your Eyes.

`I knew what I was letting myself in for. I actually co-wrote and - produced half the songs on the first album, but did anyone care? I did, obviously, but that's not what that kind of career was about. I think I'm good, but talent wasn't high on their agenda.' Weary as he was of SAW calling the shots, his career suffered without them - in Britain, anyway. In America, though, he was still successful as late as 1993, when Body And Soul came out. Astley still travelled constantly, as he had for the past six years, and he was miserable. Late that year came the crunch. `Now we're getting to the nitty gritty. I developed a fear of flying, and I just could not get on planes. I was absolutely terrified. I think it was my way of saying, `I don't want to do this any more.' My mind and body were telling me to quit. The album and single were doing well in America, but I... just didn't turn up. I was on my way to the airport one day and I just said, `I'm not getting on the plane.' ' He visited a hypnotherapist, unsuccessfully. `It didn't work because I didn't really want to fly. I'd already been pushing myself to get on planes for ages, and I realised my mind was saying `Enough'. I'd spent a fifth of my life under so much pressure, day after day of interviews and travelling.' The problem stopped his career in its tracks. The American record company was furious and severed ties when he refused to go over for promotional work. Astley retired to Gloucestershire and for the next two years did `bugger-all'. He spent large chunks of time with his girlfriend's family in Denmark, learning how to book his own hotels and get from A to B without the aid of a tour manager. And while he `didn't want anything to do with the music business for a long time', he wrote songs anyway during his time off and ended up with an album's worth. Inevitably, now that he's conquered his flying problem - it receded soon after he quit - he'd like to re-enter the business. Which brings us up to date.

Are we ready for Rick Astley: The Comeback?