STEVE HARNELL
Rick Astley is having his ‘Bob Dylan moment’. Alongside their studio incarnations, his new greatest hits compilation The Best Of Me includes striking reinterpretations of his biggest tracks. Fancy hearing Never Gonna Give You Up recast as a heart-wrenching piano ballad? Together Forever as a late-night smoky jazz standard? Step right this way…
While we’re not in the realms of Tangled Up In Blue performed as a polka here, the 10 freshly recorded, ‘reimagined’ songs that feature on the comp’s second disc are intriguing reboots some distance away from the originals. “Dylan has that thing where he just goes off on one on stage and even the musicians in his band don’t know what he’s up to until they get to a certain lyric or moment,” Rick explains of His Bobness’ liking for on-the-fly transformations of his own back catalogue. “The one thing I’ve done with my new versions is that I sing the same melody, it’s just that everything else is different. The key, the tone of the whole thing, the structure is changed here and there.”