Rick Astley rolls into new sound with comeback album ‘50’

Rick Astley wishes more of the old Las Vegas had survived to see his kind of comeback.

“It would be kind of nice to see some of those old places,” he says. “If they had kept any of the old hotels at all … the Sands, on the one end. They could have — ” But then he stops and redirects.

“But yeah, but what can you do? You can’t live in the past.” Then he catches himself again.

“Here’s a guy who had his hits in the ’80s saying you can’t live in the past,” he says. “But you have to make some kind of effort to move on a little bit.”

Astley’s done a bit of both.

Last year, he put out a comeback album that went to No. 1 on the British charts. But he named it “50,” both as a nod to his age and Adele’s age-linked album titles. And like Adele — or Sam Smith, or Estelle, or any of Britain’s neo-soulsters — it has a timeless R&B sound, and a decided lack of ’80s synthesizers.

The singer isn’t sure how much of his rekindled popularity back home will translate to the vast United States as he prepares to launch his U.S. tour Saturday at the Palms.

“Doing it in America is a totally different ballgame. We’ll see,” he says. “I’m just enjoying it right now.”

It hardly needs mentioning that the way most people have encountered Astley in recent years is through “Rickrolling,” the internet prank of tricking people into clicking on the video for Astley’s breakthrough single, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

The prank peaked in 2008, when Astley got in on the joke by bursting out of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float for a Cartoon Network show.

But man, that video. That 1987 hair. That trench coat.

“Music is kind of a fashion-related thing, isn’t it?” Astley notes. “Bands you think are always going to be hip and cool just somehow turn into something else.”

But then, of course, “Eventually, give it 20 years, it comes around again and then it’s cool again. It’s a bit like the (Las Vegas) hotel thing. The old Sands … you couldn’t sustain that for love or money. Whereas now, if you’d kept one of those buildings, it would work.

“It just comes around again, do you know what I mean?”

Astley sat out many of his own in-between years, doing no live performing and limited recording from 1993 to 2004. “I’d just had enough,” he says. “I knew that I didn’t have it in me to sustain, to keep having hits around the world.

“We’d just had a daughter and I’d made a bunch of money (and wondered) if I could have a different life. I was never in love with the fame side of it that much … it doesn’t help you in your real life, your everyday relationships and all that.

“If you look at the really big artists we’ve had in the past 30 or 40 years, they’ve had to give a lot to stay there,” he adds. “Look at someone like Madonna. I don’t think that woman sleeps a lot.”

But after so many years of being “quite focused on not making a record,” as he says with a laugh, he went into “50” with the attitude of “just being realistic about it and not expecting too much.”

But then it went to the top of the charts. “None of us expected that, most of all me,” he says. “Anyone’s got a chance. But I think you have to do the things that suit you. In other words, if I started trying to do things that are too young for me, it would look like I’m trying too hard.”

It’s hard not to see the video for “50’s” lead single, “Keep Singing,” as an intentional response to the “Never Gonna” trench coat. Astley and his sharp-dressed band sport vintage suits and white shirts. It’s filmed in black-and-white. And it’s so lacking in timely visuals that it’s hard to imagine what someone could snicker at in 20 years.

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“British people have definitely got a huge affection for black American music, there’s no doubt about it,” he says of the gospel-flavored tune, and how he now sits amid younger singers such as Smith. “We don’t have the history you’ve got in terms of Motown, the Philadelphia sound, just soul and R&B in general. It’s why the Stones loved America. You had the blues. And then again, we gave you David Bowie.”

Astley has caught up to the modern Las Vegas as a visitor. He has seen Elton John at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, because he and his wife, Lene, are friends of guitarist Davey Johnstone.

The singer has no delusions of working a room that big. But he does have a standards album (“Portrait”) and would love to sing them on the Strip. “I’d like to do it proper old school. I’d like to sing all the old Sinatra songs,” he says.

“Who knows if that may come around one day,” he adds. The past year was a reminder and an encouragement: “I think you’ve got to try and do what works for you in life.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.