In the summer of 1987, a twenty-one-year-old baritone from Lancashire stepped into a London studio and recorded a song that would sleep for two decades before waking up as the most famous bait-and-switch on the internet. Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up was the debut single from his album Whenever You Need Somebody, produced by the Stock Aitken Waterman factory that defined late-eighties pop. Simon West directed the video: Astley in a long coat, snapping his fingers in an empty industrial hall, then gliding through a chain-link tunnel and a sunlit courtyard — earnest, unironic, and impossibly committed.

The lyrics are a vow dressed as a dance track. We’re no strangers to love / You know the rules and so do I opens with the confidence of someone who has read the manual on devotion. The chorus — Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you — repeats like an incantation, each line stacking another layer of loyalty onto the last. There is no plot twist, no betrayal, no third-act reversal. Just a man promising, with every baritone note, that he will stay.