You have to give the guy credit. Rick Astley insists that he won’t be making a comeback, despite rumors the Eighties crooner would be appearing at Wembley Arena next month. “There’s not going to be a comeback,” he said, a statement which would be pretty difficult to spin.

He’ll certainly never have a better opportunity. The BBC estimates that at least 13 million people have been rickrolled into watching “Never Gonna Give You Up” when they thought they were following a link to charts on global soybean production or something. Rick himself has no idea why a song more than twenty years old was singled out for this treatment:

“I think it’s just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it,” Astley told the Los Angeles Times last week. “That’s what’s brilliant about the internet.”

(“Brilliant,” incidentally, has a different meaning in the UK than in the US. Quite possibly the opposite meaning.) Rick’s stubborn fans aren’t taking no for an answer, and insist they won’t give up in their efforts to convince Rick to return to the limelight. Never underestimate the power of the internet.