Rick Astley quit music after suffering an emotional breakdown in 1993.
One year after welcoming his daughter Emilie with wife Lene, Rick was on his way to Heathrow to fly to New York, when he had a breakdown on the M4.
He told the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine: "Having Emilie in 1992 changed what I wanted in life. The music business is littered with people losing the plot.
"I was already taking trains and driving in Europe, I didn’t want to fly any more. I had control over nothing. I’d made enough money to say, ‘I don’t need to do this.’"
Rick admitted that working with Stock Aitken Waterman took its toll and he was unhappy with the direction his career was going.
He said: "Stock Aitken Waterman started making it about themselves, not their artists. They felt, ‘It’s our productions that are doing it’. Besides me, not many of their artists wrote their own songs.
"I guess I was naive to think that as a pop star I should have some say in what I was doing. But it was all getting monotonous."
However, Rick changed his mind about the music industry when he was invited to join the 80s tribute tour ‘Here And Now’ in Japan in 2007.
He said: "I’d always said I was over it, but I got an offer to go to Japan, and Lene and Emilie wanted to go.
"It was with other groups of my era, heritage acts, has-beens, whatever you call us. I loved it."
Rick Astley quit music after emotional breakdown
