Glastonbury 2023: Rick Astley on covering The Smiths with Blossoms, “I love doing this”
Rick Astley and Blossoms have announced that they will be returning with their Smiths cover band for a set at Glastonbury Festival 2023. In a new interview about the project, the pop star said: “I love doing this”.
Astley discussed teaming up with Blossoms to cover The Smiths in discussion with the NME. Notably, at first, the project was not well-received by Johnny Marr, the guitarist of the pioneering indie band, who wrote on Twitter at the time: “This is both funny and horrible at the same time. Well, I met The Blossoms a few weeks ago and they elected to not mention it. Nice”.
The parties have since made up, and tonight Astley and Blossoms will take to the Woodies stage and play the songs of The Smiths. “I can’t tell you how much I love doing this,” Astley told the NME of the covers band.
He continued: “I know it’s sacrilege and they should hang the lot of us on the line for doing it, but I also just don’t care. I’m 57. I’ve talked it over with the guys from Blossoms many times and said, ‘If at any moment any of you decide that you don’t want to do this, just holler’. They’re in the middle of their career, four albums in. I’ve got nothing to lose. You can hang me, you can do whatever you want. It doesn’t matter.”
Adding: “I’ve had an unbelievable time in music and I’m ever so grateful for it. I’m aware of how fickle it is, how you can be totally out in the desert and no one will pick up the phone or let you in the building. It’s a delicate thing playing those songs because they mean so much to people. They mean so much to me and the guys too. We bonded over that fact.”
The vocalist then said that he’s “always” wanted to form a Smiths covers act. “Even when I was in bands as a kid we never played The Smiths’ songs because they were a bit too intricate for us,” he explained. “I never saw The Smiths but I’ve seen covers bands of them, and I just fall in love with them every time.”
Astley concluded: “I built a shed in my back garden a couple of years ago when you couldn’t go anywhere or do anything [during lockdown], and did this thing where you go back to the start of an artist’s career and play every single record they ever made. When it came to do it for The Smiths, I was like ‘What the hell, man’.”
Watch Rick Astley and Blossoms play The Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’ below.
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