The fourth album, *Body and Soul*, released in 1993, failed to chart in the United Kingdom. It reached 185 on the US Billboard 200. The commercial trajectory that had peaked so dramatically in 1987 and 1988 had descended to something quite different. He was twenty-seven years old, and the machine that had made him famous was no longer making him successful in the same terms.
## 1993: The Decision on the M4
The decision to step away from pop music in 1993 was not, by the account Astley has given publicly, primarily a response to the declining chart performance of his later albums. It was a response to the specific reality of what a pop music career at that level required and what it cost.
He has described the moment with some precision: an emotional breakdown while driving toward Heathrow Airport on the M4 motorway, heading to a flight that would take him to New York for another promotional commitment. He was a new father — his daughter Emilie had been born in 1992, to him and his partner Lene Bausager, who had been a music promoter at RCA when they met in 1987. He was a person with a child who needed to be picked up from school, with a home in Surrey, with a life that was pulling in a direction entirely different from the international travel and promotional treadmill that sustained a pop career at the level he had operated.
He stopped. He turned around.
The specifics of what he has said publicly about this period are worth examining carefully, because the popular version of the story — that he simply burned out or was discarded by an industry that had no further use for him — is not the version he has given. He has been clear that the money he had earned gave him the freedom to make the choice. He has said that the money “bought me freedom.” This is a specific and important statement: he was not forced out, he was not bankrupt, he was not the victim of circumstances he didn’t control. He chose to leave because he could afford to choose.