The face belongs to a person who did not design the joke and cannot control it, but who has, over the years of its long cultural life, arrived at a relationship with it that seems to be genuinely comfortable. He finds it funny. He finds the clever instances genuinely impressive. He has taken his daughter’s advice — it has nothing to do with him, in the sense that matters most — and let it be what it is, a life of its own that runs alongside the life he actually lives.
That life is in Surrey, with Lene, with Emilie who now lives in Denmark with her own adult life. There is a home studio. There is ongoing music-making. There is the hearing aid that he wears and has spoken about openly. There is the catalog he co-stewarded through a legal settlement in 2023. There is the album he made at fifty in his own space with his own instruments and that reached number one in the country where he was born and raised.
There is the voice. There was always the voice. In a Warrington nightclub in 1985, a man heard it and understood what it meant. In October 1986 it was captured on tape in a studio in South London. In the summer of 1987 it was released into the world. In 2007 it became a joke, and in that becoming it became something else too: the most widely heard thing Rick Astley ever made, heard by more people, in more places, in more contexts, than any other moment of his professional or personal life.