Rick Astley discussed performing “Never Gonna Give You Up” with Foo Fighters in a new interview with Kyle Meredith, and how Dave Grohl told him it instrumentally would be Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Astley hung out backstage for 30 minutes before the show according to Consequence of Sound.
“It just all went nuts. Dave Grohl came over and said hello, gave me a hug, said hello, and then a half hour later he’s inviting me onto the stage,” he explains. “I never met them, I have no why idea why he’d invite me onstage. I didn’t know what it was all about. And then he just kind of whispered and said, ‘We’re doing your tune, but we’re gonna do it like Teen Spirit,’ and that was it. And off we went.”
He continues, “It wasn’t like they asked me first or our managers got in touch, there was none of that. It was just, ‘Hey, there’s that guy, I wonder if he wants to do that,’ and we did. All credit to them, because they didn’t know I wasn’t gonna go out there and fall apart and be drunk or whatever.”
“It’s been great to me,” he says of the RickRoll meme, “so I can’t really have any negative thoughts about it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gNs2zmh8DI
