He found his way into music as a release from the unhappiness of the household. In interviews he has described his motivation plainly: “I just wanted to be somewhere else with people my own age, and singing really helped me.” The church choir gave him somewhere to be. The local bands gave him something to do. He was not, by his own account, a prodigy or a natural showman — he was a kid from a difficult home who discovered that singing made the situation more bearable.
By his teens he was drumming in local bands. One of them was called Give Way; another became FBI. He was not, in the early years, primarily a singer — he came up as a drummer, the kid in the back keeping time, not the person at the front holding the microphone. That changed when FBI’s lead vocalist departed and the remaining members needed someone to step up. Astley stepped up.
He left school at sixteen and worked as a driver for his father’s market-gardening business while playing club gigs at night — the particular double life of a teenager who needs to pay for something while pursuing something else. The day job was the fields and the delivery routes. The night job was the clubs, the rehearsals, the increasingly serious engagement with a music career that might or might not happen.
It happened because of a specific night at a specific club in Warrington when Pete Waterman walked in.
## Pete Waterman and the Hit Factory