Pop legend Rick Astley has been making headlines in recent weeks for taking centre stage at the UK music festival Camp Bestival, but Torontonians are still reminiscing over the time the ‘80s legend sang with a massive choir in Toronto.
“Rick Astley got invited to sing with a choir in Toronto and actually showed up,” one Redditor wrote in a now-viral Reddit post over the weekend (as of publication, the post has over 23,000 likes and hundreds of comments).
The video is actually a few years old, but every few months it makes its rounds on social media — Astley sang with the choir back in the spring of 2018 after the Toronto-based singing duo Choir! Choir! Choir! made a video asking the singer to join them!
Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman started Choir! Choir! Choir! in Toronto in 2011 as a weekly drop-in singing event, covering famous pop and rock songs. It has since evolved into equal parts singing, comedy, and community-building — the duo now travels the globe to bring strangers together as part of giant choirs to sing the greatest songs of all time (all people have to do is show up and they teach them their parts)!
So, in April 2018, about two weeks before a choral event in Toronto, the duo made a video asking Astley to come and join them at an upcoming gathering.
I saw a video of @ChoirChoirChoir asking me to come perform Never Gonna Give You Up with them while I was in Toronto, so I took them up on the offer! Had a great time with these very talented people. Rick x https://t.co/WIztWcBl5W pic.twitter.com/99la6WRqOz
— Rick Astley (@rickastley) April 18, 2018
“Hey Rick Astley, we want you to come and sing with us. We will sing with you,” Goldman said at the start of the video. “We love your music, we celebrate music, and you have some wicked songs, man. So come and sing with us.”
To the duo’s shock, he showed up two weeks later amid his North American tour.
“It was even more incredible than we could have expected. Rick looks and sounds better than ever,” the Choir! Choir! Choir! duo wrote alongside the YouTube video of the event (to date, the YouTube video has more than 3.3 million views). “He’s back in a BIG way writing and performing all new material, Slaying it all over again. He is the real deal, and always has been.”
Astley sang his popular “Never Gonna Give You Up” alongside a crowd of 200 singers. Before he departed, the duo asked him to challenge another famous singer to join Choir! Choir! Choir! on stage at an upcoming event.
“I’m gonna say Dave Grohl,” Astley said to a cheering crowd. “Come on, Foo Fighters, Mr. Grohl, get yourself down here.”
Grohl hasn’t made an appearance as yet (although the duo and their choirs have covered more than a few songs by the Foo Fighters). Still, the duo has sung with other renowned artists, including Patti Smith, David Byrne, Tegan and Sara, and Rufus Wainwright.
Upcoming shows will include epic ’80s sing-alongs, anthem sing-alongs, and even ABBA sing-alongs in New York, NY, Vancouver, BC, and Boston, MA, but Torontonians will be happy to know that the pair is returning to Toronto this Dec. 21 at Massey Hall for an epic holiday sing-along!
